The Inn at Whitewell, in Lancashire, is on the UK’s best beer garden list by Visit Britain and we were going to include it our ‘Best Accessible Beer Garden Guide’ (coming later today). But it turns out that it isn’t really a beer garden. The garden is more of a wooden terrace area than a classic beer garden and the venue is an inn and restaurant above anything so basic as a beer garden. It’s also rather remote – a long way to go for a couple of pints in the sun.
Unfortunately, it also turned out that it’s not really accessible as an inn either. But, despite all of this, we’re including it because it is an exceptional restaurant. The Inn at Whitewell was one of the restaurants that featured in The Trip – the 2010 TV programme with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. If you’re unfamiliar with The Trip, it was a culinary tour of Northern England’s finest restaurants and the Inn at Whitewell was the centre piece of episode one!
It is also an incredibly picturesque place to go, deep in the Lancashire countryside. A review of the inn in The Daily Telegraph described it as “a riverside haven with its roots back to the 14th century set in a natural amphitheatre of meadows and hills, the outlook is one of utter peace.”
The access for the garden and restaurant sounds very good. They have a disabled toilet on the ground floor and there’s a ramped entrance to the bar. They also have a metal ramp to cover the cobbled surfaces at the front of the building.
So it turned out not to be quite what we were expecting – we went looking for a beer garden and ended up with rather a lot more. We’re giving them a provisional 2.5 BBS Ticks for the bar and restaurant.
