Wednesday, 1 May 2024

Off with his Head! #astoncantlow 7

There’s a few pubs out there that claim a royal connection. Perhaps they were popular places to go to toast a new leader when his predecessor had his head cut off. It might even have been on display at the pub for a while. It all sounds a bit gruesome! The trouble is that when pubs get taken over, artefacts and histories are often lost in a refurbishment, and you have to revert to local folklore. This one’s now a restaurant, and a lot of the focus is about the food rather than the atmosphere and what you can expect to find inside. Are the ghosts still celebrating their executioner? It doesn’t even tell you which King they have! But many often refer to the King after Henry VIII’s separation from Catholicism, and were previously called the Pope’s Head. This one is right next to a church, I wonder if that’s a common factor?


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