Yet there at the top of the menu at the Travellers Rest in Skeeby is a starter for £3.95 – Cajun-spiced potato skins and mustard mayo. Most restaurant menus now don’t bother with the pennies, they just slap the pounds down: £6 straight is the bottom end for a starter nowadays.
The Travellers has a nostalgic feel to it, with its brushed stone walls and super-bouncy carpet. It has been a pub since time immemorial. There’s a picture on the wall from 1880 when the landlady was Grandma Young.
She stands in the pub doorway, smart as a carrot in her layered skirts, white apron and white bonnet on her head. Her young son is playing with a toy horse on wheels in what is now the pub car park – there’s plenty of room for him, but today an unnecessarily large Discovery estate takes up all the space so there is no room to squeeze in a Qashqai. Skeeby is a sign of the changing times: the pub is next door to the Old Post Office, now residential, and over the road from an old chapel, also now residential, as, bit-by-bit, the common spaces of the community have broken down and we’ve found ourselves living alongside our neighbours rather than with them.
The Travellers was destined to become the old pub, but the villagers fought a valiant 14-year battle to save the heart of their community, and it reopened in 2023. The current tenants have been in since March, and the pub is working hard to be a village hub. A leaflet on the bar tells of its family days and leek shows, and the bar.
