Many years ago my wife Ann & I carried out an 18 month tour to visit all 137 pubs in the Forest of Dean area. With a list of all these pubs, kindly supplied by Gloucestershire Constabulary, we visited many pubs in remote rural areas that we would be unlikely to find by chance, as well as the busy and well-known pubs in the Forest’s towns and large villages.

Repeating this long expedition would now be a considerably shorter expedition. My latest count shows that at least 62 of those 137 are no more, demolished, converted to domestic or different commercial use, or left to decay.

Licenced pubs in the Forest were already disappearing. The famous sign for West Country Ales, an iconic castle motif with the proud boast ‘The Best in the West’ on many a now perfectly respectable private homes, indicates that the building was once a pub. I live in the former New Inn, Newnham, which was until the demise of Newnham Railway Station a sort of waiting room for thirsty travellers on their way to Gloucester. On the A48 between Gloucester and Chepstow there are several former pubs which we visited on our epic pub crawl.

There used to be Swans at Lydney and Alvington on the A48 (Swans have permanently migrated from other parts of the Forest, including Brierley, Cinderford, Staunton Corse and Yorkley). The A48 has also lost the Apple Tree, Victoria and Feathers. On the abandoned rail track through Northwood Green to Ross-on-Wye there were the Junction and the Silent Whistle. Towards the river there were the Red Hart at Awre, the Old Severn Bridge at Purton, and the Old Ferry at Beachley. The Greyhound at Popes Hill was another place to stop for a drink on our way home from Gloucester., now survived only by a dinosaur in the garden.

When I first moved to the Forest, my home was happily located half way between two wonderful pubs. As a London boy, I was captivated by the rural charm of St Briavels and its pub life, after years of exposure to anonymous London pubs. The George is still a wonderful village pub, but the Crown, which was the cricketers’ pub and was the place for darts, pool and Sunday evening music, has not survived.

There were Cross Keys at Bream and Tutshill, and you could get a drink at Parkend House or the Feathers at Lydney, which have now evolved into housing or supermarket.

In the Forest there is a sadly declining number of pubs to ‘Help Me through the World’ (the name of a sadly de-licenced pub in the middle of Coleford).