George

It's worth visiting this exceptional building to take in the fine surroundings of a place that has been offering hospitality to travellers for 700 years. The central Norton Room, which was the original bar, has really heavy beams, an oak-panelled settle and solid dining chairs on the narrow strip wooden floor, a variety of 18th-c pictures, an open fire in the handsome stone fireplace and a low wooden bar counter. Wadworths IPA, Bishops Tipple, 6X and Swordfish on handpump and 25 wines by the glass. As you enter the building, there's a room on the right with high dark beams, squared dark half-panelling, a broad carved stone fireplace with an old iron fireback and pewter plates on the mantelpiece, a big mullioned window with leaded lights and a round oak 17th-c table reputed to have been used by the Duke of Monmouth who stayed here before the Battle of Sedgemoor; after their defeat, his men were imprisoned in what is now the Monmouth Bar. The Charterhouse Bar is mostly used by those enjoying a drink before a meal: a wonderful pitched ceiling with trusses and timbering, heraldic shields and standards, jousting lances and swords on the walls, a fine old stone fireplace, high-backed cushioned heraldic-fabric dining chairs on the big rug over the wood plank floor and an oak dresser with some pewter. The dining room (a restored barn with original oak ceiling beams, a pleasant if haphazard mix of early 19th-c portraits and hunting prints and the same mix of vaguely old-looking furnishings) has a good relaxing, chatty atmosphere; piped music. The bedrooms are very atmospheric and comfortable - some reached by an external Norman stone stair-turret and some across the cobbled and flagstoned courtyard and up into a fine half-timbered upper gallery (where there's a lovely 18th-c carved oak settle); note there's a £10 charge for dogs. A stroll over the meadow behind the pub (past the picnic-sets on the narrow grass pub garden) leads you to an attractive churchyard around the medieval church whose bells struck Pepys (here on 12 June 1668) as 'mighty tuneable'.