Shropshire Star article

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If you fancy a pint, but don’t know what to try, there’s a pub which has become a must visit for beer and cider lovers.

The Bailey Head in Oswestry has become a place where people can enjoy a range of beers and ciders, as well as a warm welcome in a pub which has become a perennial award winner.

The pub has been named as one of the UK’s top pubs as part of the Campaign for Real Ale’s (CAMRA) Pub of the Year competition and is in the running for the national award as one of the top 17 pubs in the whole country.

Previously brewery owned as The Eagles and The Castle Tavern for more than 200 years, it was opened in March 2016 under the ownership of husband and wife team Duncan Borrowman and Grace Goodlad.

The pair had lived and worked in London and, as Mr Borrowman puts it, had decided to take on the running of a pub and had decided against staying in the London and Kent area due to cost.

He said: “We hadn’t run pubs before as we had other jobs, but we were running a private members club in our spare time on the borders of London with Kent, but we both wanted to do something different and thought of having a pub, plus I’d inherited a little bit of money.

“We wanted a pub that we could buy outright and actually own it and do what we wanted with it, not run a pub for someone else, so we looked all over the country as we couldn’t afford anything where we lived.

“We found that Shropshire cost us a lot less and we’ve ended up with an excellent building for our money in a really nice area.”

Mr Borrowman said they had come with an idea of not what the pub had done, but what it could do in the future and found that it ticked all the boxes for what they wanted to do with it.

He also spoke about the name change, which he said paid tribute to the history of the area, and what sold it to the couple when they saw it.

He said: “The square outside the pub is the Bailey Head, which is the bailey to the castle, hence why the pub was called the Castle Tavern.

“The name was actually the idea of my wife because, quite often, pubs are called the King’s Head or Queen’s Head, but with the square being Bailey Square, we called the pub the Bailey Head as we didn’t just want to give it a useless throwaway name.

“When we were looking at it, we looked at the cellar and what the building was like and there was decent accommodation for us on site, so it ticked all the boxes, although the funny thing is now that with all the awards we’ve won, the cellar is starting to feel very cramped because of what we have down there.”

The awards include a large number of CAMRA awards, as well as the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) naming the pub the UK’s Best Rural Independent Craft Beer Pub or Bar in 2020 and also being voted Most Dog Friendly Pub in the West Midlands in 2017 by DogBuddy.

Mr Borrowman said the couple had worked to create a pub that they would want to drink in and while the awards were an honour, their main focus was on putting together the best selection of beers and ciders that people could enjoy, as well as make the place inclusive, clean and friendly.

He said: “We want to have a pub where a woman can feel comfortable coming in, ordering a drink and sit in the corner with a book and just feel comfortable and at ease in a friendly environment.

“We have always said that if we can’t find ways to improve this place, then we should just pack it up, but we’ve always got something we can do here and the pub is a place where you can enjoy banter, a chat, quiet background music and a large choice of drinks.

“It also has quirky furniture, lots of music pictures on the wall, monkey wallpaper, posters from gigs I went to decades ago and much more.”

Mr Borrowman said that as a freehold, the pub was not beheld to any brewery and, at the last count, had sold more than 3,500 different draft beers in the time they had been there, with beers coming from across the local area.

He said: “We like to give people choice and we have beers like Stone House, an imported German Pils and a lager from Norfolk which is also gluten free, but everything else changes all the time, including ciders as we’ve 27 draft lines and 23 of them are constantly changing.

“We generally know what customers like and we’ve got a widespread variety, from a 4% pale ale to 11% imperial stouts and I get something like 100 emails from people trying to sell me their beer.

“We don’t do food here, but we’ve got a beer that is a 4% pale ale that has kaffir lime leaves in it and that goes well with any food that people bring in as we are happy to allow people to bring their takeaways in and we’ll provide paper plates and cutlery for them.”

Mr Borrowman said the pub was a lot of hard work, but something he and his wife truly loved.

He said: “It means a lot of hard work and long hours, but I think it also means a lot of satisfaction in knowing that we’ve succeeded with what we wanted to do in terms of creating a place that is nice, relaxing and somewhere that people can go and enjoy a drink.”