"It was a comfortable-looking place. There was a strong cheerful light in the bar-window," begins Dickens's description of this handsome stone and thatch 16th-century inn on the Marlborough Downs. Its heyday was as a coaching inn between London and Bath, (hence the name), when waggoners would stop to freshen up and horses would get re-shoed at the inn's smithy. Dickens travelled this way in 1835 and featured it in The Bagman's Story in The Pickwick Papers. The open-plan bar retains great charm and character, with stone walls, old settles on flagstones, and a blazing log fire on winter days.
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