When Anne and I started our travels to the British Isles it was the pubs that attracted most of our attention. We’d stop after golf for a dram or a pint at the local pub. A light lunch on a touring day would be in an interesting pub. Dinner was usually pub grub in the most recommended place we could find. Especially in Ireland our evenings were spent in pubs listening to traditional session music and having a pint, usually of Guiness, like the session at Matt Molloy’s in Westport.
Now, after twenty trips to Europe in the past eleven years, we still enjoy a pub visit during our travel days, but we are gravitating more and more to local tearooms and specialty coffee shops. Perhaps it’s because we drink less and less alcohol--a half of Guiness is enough to fill me up, after all, Guiness is food. I think it is more likely that we have become imbued with the Starbucks’ culture. At home I spend at least an hour a day writing in my office, my Canby Starbucks store. All three of our golf/pub travel guides were written and edited in Starbucks, and I’m currently proofing my latest book, Ten Years of Travel in Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales, in my Starbucks office one latte at a time. So, it’s easy to blame our Starbucks experience for the affinity we have for tearooms and specialty coffee shops as we travel. That’s not a bad thing. We are having fun discovering interesting tearooms and enjoying some delicious sweet and savory treats.
Besides the lattes to which I’m addicted (vente, vanilla, nonfat, no foam) and the sweets we treat ourselves to (Anne particularly likes one called Millionaire’s Shortbread) we find much to like in tearooms. For instance, in Bachory along the River Dee west of Aberdeen the Falls of Feugh Tearoom is a place we return to whenever we’re in the area.
The tearoom is a lovely, flowerful, dainty place sited along the Water of Feugh (small river) famous for its raspberry jam and scones. Before or after our tearoom visit we always stop by for photos of the rapids off the Bridge of Feugh. Another tearoom that could be described as dainty is The Sampler Coffee Shop in St David’s City in southwestern Wales.
This small shop fills its walls with a fine collection of Victorian needlework samplers. They will also fill your glass with the best homemade lemonade I’ve ever had--so good that I had two glasses with my sandwich. Interesting decor and quality fare. In Ireland we discovered quality sweets and fascinating decor near the Burren in County Clare. In Ballyvaughan is An Fear Gorta, a tearoom and garden in a 1790 built stone house across from the harbour. Along with a great location comes wonderful homemade cakes and scones.
It was a delight to eat our treats with passion flowers hanging above us and still be inside. The day we stopped was sunny but quite cool, but it was warm and inviting inside. Warm and inviting also works for the Acorn Bank Gardens Tearoom outside of Penrith, England. Cold and wet outside when we stopped in May, the gardens’ tearoom in the main manor house was a pleasant refuge from the weather.
In an earlier entry I described the “Hotbed Soup” (fresh lettuce soup) we enjoyed that day, but I would certainly go back to sample some sweets from the tray near the register. Sometimes, though, there is something other than the location or ambience that attracts to a tearoom. For example, although the location of the Old Bakery Coffee Shop in Carrbridge across the street from the old Packhorse Bridge is attractive, it is the local feel to the place we found so enticing. The sweets had all been made locally and one wall was decorated with a quilted wall hanging of the history of the village.
It was here, too, that we learned about and bought tickets to a young person’s traditional music concert. While the Old Bakery may be quaint, it’s the funk that attracted us to Mountain Coffee and Hillbilly Books in Gairloch on Scotland’s west coast. The half shop that was books was filled with an eclectic collection of tomes which was fun to browse.
In the coffee shop half we enjoyed a huge, scrumptious cheese scone; in fact, it was good enough that we stopped back the next day for scones to go. A spot where location has made all the difference for us is the Rannoch Station Tearoom at the small train depot on the edge of Rannoch Moor in central Scotland. At the very end of the road west from Pitlochry, the rustic tearoom serves nice homemade soups, simple toasties, and a small variety of sweets. Nothing fancy, but after a long drive on narrow roads it’s a welcome respite.
For us another welcome respite is a local spot in Crieff which has become our Scotland Starbucks, now known to our Scottish family as the Office. The Red Squirrel opened last year is only a ten minute walk from Merlindale B&B, our Scottish home.
We’ve been there enough that the owners, Paul and Jackie, know what we like and greet us with, “The usual today, Bob?” The Red Squirrel has become a comfortable office away from the office. Not all the coffee shops or tearooms we’ve been to are so comfortable. There have been a couple of times where we’ve missed the mark. On a rainy day in Wales we looked for a place to stop for a cup of coffee and some writing time since the weather wasn’t much good for anything else. We spotted a cafe sign as we drove through the village of Penclawdd and since Anne is a good sport she agreed to try what we’d call a greasy spoon. JJs Cafe was quite an experience. We had our coffee, but wouldn’t have ordered anything else--”clean” was not a word JJ had ever heard of. We dusted off the plastic table cloth so we could write, but it was hard to concentrate with the several locals laughing at the rerun of a 70s American sitcom.
Then there was the time last fall when we were desperate for coffee and a sandwich late in the afternoon of a busy day of touring on the Isle of Skye. The Orasay Tea Room in Uig was our hope since it was the only place open.
We should have been warned by the “For Sale” sign in front of the place, but hunger won out. Too bad. The coffee was instant and the cheese toastie we shared was a slice of processed cheese between two pieces of white bread that had thrown into a fry pan for a few seconds. In this case we would have been better off at the pub across the street.
