Cam Valley now practise at the Hunter's Lodge, Priddy.
This was also visited by The Telegraph in its guide to the best of British pubs, June 2004.
Hunter’s Lodge Inn sits in no-man’s-land on the crossroads of two unmarked lanes in the flatlands below the Mendip Hills known locally as the Somerset Levels. The grey pebbledash building, with its peeling sign, Marmite-brown windows and low porch running along its length, is reminiscent of a redneck bar in an American film.
It was a late spring lunchtime when I pushed open the cheap mahogany-veneer door and stepped into the dimly lit saloon bar, with its bare boards and mean open fire. On a settle in the far corner, I could make out a pair of shadowy workmen. Nearer to me was the bar’s only other customer, an ill-dressed, chain-smoking fidget struggling with a newspaper crossword.
My footsteps echoed loudly as I walked up to the plain bar. “A pint of Butcombe’s,” I said to the woman behind it. She heaved herself out of her chair and silently pulled me my pint of cask ale from one of a row of seven steel barrels racked up against the wall. I asked her if she served food and she turned towards the blackboard and soundlessly pointed at the words “Bread and cheese £2.50”. I ordered it.
A large slice of 2in-thick, fresh white bread, with a 1in-thick slab of local Cheddar and a home-made pickled onion, was delivered to my table on a pretty, but chipped porcelain plate. I had, I thought, stumbled upon the perfect ploughman’s lunch in the perfect unspoiled West Country pub.
Then my mobile phone rang. It cut through the quiet of the bar like a Eurovision song at a John Cage concert. The builders, the fidget and the old crone looked up and stared at me unblinkingly. I turned off the phone and made a general apology.
“We’re the ones that are sorry,” said a menacing voice from the gloom.
I took that remark as my invitation to leave.
Later in the day, I met up with my old drinking chum, the author Martin O’Brien. He is a former travel editor of Vogue who is well versed with the wild west. I recounted the hillbilly tale of my trip and he tapped his forefinger knowingly on the side of his nose and said: “Banjo country.” He didn’t mean the Wurzels.