Inns and outings

Lee Atkinson sticks to the back roads on an eight-day pub crawl through the West Country.

John "Eyebrows" Thomas was a pirate from Penzance. But unlike his much-loved cousins, who sang and danced across Victorian stages in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operetta The Pirates of Penzance, Ol' Eyebrows wasn't quite so revered by his neighbours. When the smuggler and buccaneer died in 1753, he was refused a burial in his parish church at Marazion, five kilometres up the coast from Penzance in Cornwall, and in desperation his family had to pay the neighbouring parish of Gulval to do the job. His gravestone, jet black and engraved with a skull and crossbones, is still there, half hidden by ferns behind the 12th-century church, watched over by the mediaeval carvings of monks on the 15th-century bell tower.

There's not much to Gulval apart from the church, with its pirate's grave and rather tropical garden graveyard. The village, about a mile from Penzance overlooking Mounts Bay, encircles the church, an ornate drinking fountain and horse trough in the centre of what would once have been the village square but now serving as a roundabout. Opposite is the real heart of the village, the Coldstreamer pub.

We're on a West Country pub crawl, doing our best to escape the summer tourist hordes that descend on the coastal seaside resorts of Devon, Cornwall and Somerset every August. Our plan is to keep to back roads and stay in country pubs in villages off the beaten track, and it seems to be working. We're only 2.4 kilometres from Penzance, where crowds of English holidaymakers are making the most of the fickle summer sunshine by filling up almost every available towel space on the beach, devouring overpriced fish and chips in cafes and endlessly driving up and down the waterfront looking for a place to park. However, here in Gulval, there's not another tourist in sight, parking's not an issue, our rooms are half the price and twice the size of most of the hotels and guesthouses in town, and the food is both superb and good value.

Our first pub, Ring of Bells in North Bovey, a tiny postcard-perfect village of thatched-roof houses enclosing a village green in the middle of Dartmoor National Park in Devon, was the quintessential "Ye Olde Inn", a rambling warren of rooms built in the 12th century with foot-thick whitewashed stone walls, ancient oak beams, diabolically low ceilings, four-poster beds and a thatched roof. To get to North Bovey you need to wind your way down narrow country lanes, so the only people in the bar are locals and a handful of those in the know who have heard how good the food is.

The Coldstreamer is much more modern, built in 1895 in black-and-white faux-Tudor style, when it was called, simply, the New Inn. In 1946 it was renamed the Coldstreamer in memory of the landlord's 25-year-old son, Captain Michael Lempriere Bolitho of the Coldstream Guards, who was killed in action in North Africa in 1942. The bar is a meeting spot for locals, who perch with their dogs at their feet while families play Monopoly and Scrabble in the window seats. And with only three rooms, there's no chance that the visitors will ever outnumber the natives. Here, too, the food is excellent (think locally smoked mackerel for breakfast and scallops, crab fritters and lots of fresh fish for dinner) and, just like at Ring of Bells in Dartmoor, where the kitchen dished out whatever had been caught, shot or dug up that day, the menu changes daily depending on whatever it is the fishermen in nearby Newlyn bring in.

We spend long, sunny days exploring the coastline.

Our third pub, the Rock Inn at Waterrow, is an old coaching inn squeezed between a river and a rock halfway between Bampton and Wiveliscombe on the Somerset side of the border with Devon. If we'd thought North Bovey and Gulval were tiny, at least they were villages; the only thing at Waterrow is the pub. There's no guessing how the pub got its name - it's quite literally built into the side of a cliff and one wall of the bar area is bare rock. It too is made to look Elizabethan with a black-and-white timber front, although there has been an inn here for centuries, so parts of it are very old. However, no one seems to be able to put a precise date on it. And just like Ring of Bells in Dartmoor, people travel out of the way to get here for the food, particularly the West Country meat and cheeses.