The booking rules.
All of them, in plain English, with the reasons attached. None of them are hidden and none of them are flexible.
Every rule, and why.
On the first of each month, for the whole of the following month. All at once. They frequently sell out within hours, and the Sunday roast within minutes.
Because a rolling window means a constant, exhausting scramble. One release date is brutal but it is at least predictable, and everybody gets the same shot at it.
Fifteen minutes. After that it goes to somebody who has been standing in the garden hoping.
Thirty-five pounds per head. The same applies if you cancel inside twenty-four hours. That table could have gone to any one of several hundred people.
There is no telephone. We do not take bookings via email, social media direct message, postcard, telegram or carrier pigeon either.
No. No weddings, no wakes, no corporate functions and no large parties. This is a pub, not a venue, and the moment it becomes a venue it stops being a pub.
No. The bar, the garden bars, the Tent, the Farmer’s Puppy and the Farmer’s Dough are all walk-in, always.
Yes — in the bar and outdoors, on a lead. Just a dog, though, not nine St Bernards.
No. Card only, everywhere on the site.
In the car park during opening hours, yes. Overnight camping, no.
The £35 fee
It is charged per head, for a no-show or a cancellation inside twenty-four hours. We would genuinely rather never charge it, which is why it is stated here, on the booking page, in the confirmation email and again in the reminder.
Why we are so blunt about all this.
A pub with eighty covers and a global television audience has a structural problem that no amount of charm fixes. There will always be more people who want a table than there are tables.
The only honest response is to make the rules simple, publish them everywhere, and apply them to everybody identically. The alternative — a discretionary system where the right phone call gets you in — would be worse for almost everyone, and we are not doing it.
Right. Try for a table.
Or come to the garden, which needs no booking and never has.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
Every ingredient on the menu is from these islands. It is the whole point of the place, and it is the reason there is no lemon in the gin and tonic.
The garden bars are walk-in and always have been. The restaurant is not, and pretending otherwise only creates a queue of disappointed people.
Elsewhere on the estate.
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