Tap & Spile - the pride of Morpeth

I went for a bike ride at the weekend because the weather was far too good not to!

It was a decent ride of some 350 miles or so, from Glasgow across to Edinburgh, to Dalkeith and down the A68 through the Scottish Borders to Coldstream where I crossed into England, down further through Wooler and then a stop of about an hour in Morpeth in Northumberland, where I lived for a few years about 15 years ago.

After lunch (drinking soft drinks of course) I then went down to Newcastle upon Tyne, across the Tyne Bridge into Gateshead, a quick toilet stop at the Metro Centre, back onto the A1 north, and then over the A69 to Carlisle where I joined the M74 north back to Glasgow.

Morpeth is a lovely wee market town, and one of the best bits about it is the Tap & Spile pub in Manchester Street, where I went on Saturday.

The Tap & Spile is without doubt my favourite pub of all time, and is 99.9% responsible for getting me into Real Ale. Well, I think that's a good thing anyway!

So, if you're ever in the area of Morpeth, you could do much worse than to pay a visit to Margo in the Tap & Spile.

Great Real Ale, great home cooked food at weekends, and a real homely, friendly atmosphere. It's the only pub I've ever considered as my pub, the only place I've ever thought of as my local, and I've never found anywhere like it since moving away from the north east of England back to the west of Scotland.

update: apologies for the crap layout of this post, but for some reason the line breaks aren't working and despite editing it 5 times now it still isn't working properly. This is perhaps related to me having to finish composing it using Internet Explorer because for some reason I haven't been able to work out, despite all the FAQ's and help files on Blogger, the "upload image" button has stopped working in Firefox. Grrrrrrr!