Today it is an annual five-day festival at Eastnor Deer Park for 20,000 people, a beloved Herefordshire fixture that has seen the likes of Tom Jones and Manic Street Preachers grace the main stage. Year on year, our audience comes to enjoy over 200 bands, down 50,000 pints of cold beer, eat 30,000 tonnes of food and flatten 50 acres of grass.
20k people eat 30k tonnes of food over 5 days?
Wha?
1.5 tonnes of food per head over 5 days, that’s 300 kg of food a day.
It’s a joyous weekend and a major cultural date for the West Country.
And since when in buggery has Herefordshire been part of the West Country? It’s the fields bit of the West Mindlands.
I suspect ‘food consumed’ and ‘food wasted’ is being added together here.
Absolutely pathetic beer consumption. Or are they not counting the warm beer?
Ah, Eastnor Castle, once home to the sadly-deceased Big Chill festival.
Guess it’s difficult to fit more than a couple of pints in if you have eaten 3 times your bodyweight over five days!
In other words ‘My event is being overlooked in favour of more popular ones, wah wah wah!’
The definition of ‘West Country’ seems very elastic
To us yokels West Country is Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset
Herefordshire is West Midlands surely
That goes a long way to explaining the state of the toilets at festivals. (As reported, anyway. I don’t go – to festivals, I mean.)
It’s all west of Zone 6, all the same thing innit.
Theres no login in either of the numbers.
But its the times so logic not necessarily a critical editorial condition.
FWIW I’d estimate 40k gallons of beer and 150 tonne of food
FWIW I’d estimate 40k gallons of beer and 150 tonne of food
From what I remember from going to these gigs, eating didn’t feature very highly. The food’s usually frigging expensive & pretty dreadful, so one prioritises booze. There’s no such thing as organic, vegan, Peruvian booze.
No journalist is numerate. That’s why they went into journalism.
@ M
Surely BBC Verify is not included in that statement!
Herefordshire produces Cider, including some decent stuff. In fact it houses the largest cidermaker in Britain, Bulmer’s, another in the top six, Weston’s and several smaller ones.
So it is possible that the local guys are drinking cider instead of beer
@john77
Yeah, but you guarantee the bars at the gig will be selling Spanish. Like our pisswater beer.
(Actually cidra asturiana’s quite good. Similar to Breton or Normande. Personally, I don’t go much on Brit cider. Strongbow’s vile. But back in the 70’s I met the manager of I suppose it was the Showerings factory in a pub in Burton Bradstock & next day he gave me a tour. I believe they bottled Babycham but he filled the boot of the car up with cans of an Export. That was excellent stuff. Tragedy when it ran out. Our local cider’s Ladron de Manzanas – translates to Thief of Apples. Same derivation as scrumpy? There’s a theory I heard, if you make snakebite with scrumpy, there’s an enzyme in the stomach makes the combination gel & impossible to throw up. Anyone downed enough to falsify? )
Yes
No
There is no such enzyme. However, scrumpy itself is such a shock to those unused to it that near any bodily reaction is possible. Even up near Bath (The Packhorse in South Stoke for example) they’d only sell it in halves to those they didn’t know were used to it.
Showerings in Shepton Mallet did indeed bottle the Babycham. Nothing wrong with a perry at all – tho B’cham was a v sweet version. There are some dries (always a relative term with perry) that are very much worth drinking. In pints.
Local knowledge is always a lovely thing. Just a bit further on, just on the edges of the plains, is Pilton (yes, where the Glasto thing happens but not involved with that) where there are several farms making proper scrumpy. Try a glass of sweet, dry, med, plump for a couple of gallons of dry then wobble the bike (later, the moped hidden ’round the back of the school auto hobby club. The sort of thing that the authorities knew of, obvs, I didn’t know they knew and thought I was being v clever, etc etc) back up to Stratton on the delivery run….
Finally, how do you know you’re in a cider pub? Good Somerset lore this is. The tankards hanging up are all china, not pewter. Scrumpy is acidic enough that it will leach the lead out of pewter…..not a problem for a drink or two but over a lifetime?
Pilton? Levels? Tsk Tsk Tim….. too near civilization. The levels proper be Burtle, Mark and Tealham Moor old chum.
When I were a lad growing up on the Somerset coast we used to cycle to Rich’s in Watchfield and buy a gallon of dry in a plastic container between four of us and would drink it accompanied by a pack of 10 No6…… unsurprisingly I’ve hated the smell of cider and cigarette smoke ever since.
@BiS
Showerings…. used to be in Shepton. The Brothers still make cider https://brotherscider.co.uk/pages/meet-the-brothers in Shepton – met a couple of them once when we had a project on the go that needed bottling expertise. Nice chaps and all very tall (well, to me as I’m a short-arse)
I very, very, carefully said “edge of the plains” not “levels”…..
@tim
Of course. Location is everything in Somerset.
Oh, and there’ll be wassailing in the orchard at the end of our village come twelfth night…. very strange, even for a local lad like me.
@ bis
Long time since you drank it? Strongbow is watery now, not enough taste to justify “vile” even if you dislike it: Heineken decided to make it “a long drink”. Heineken also launched a drink called “Bulmer’s Original” which is not at all like the original Bulmer’s and too sweet. I thought Scotties taking over Bulmer’s wasn’t too bad – certainly far preferable to Allied taking over Coates, Gatmers, Whiteways and ruining them – but Heineken has decided to prove me wrong.
This most definitely was Dorset, Tim. I just looked on Google Maps & Streetview & found the Anchor pub where I caroused with the manager & the campsite I tottered back to afterwards supported by the totty I was travelling with. Don’t suppose I was much good for her. In find it remarkable I recall it all so clearly, much of the 70s seeming now mostly mythical. It can’t have been far to the factory because he was drinking in his local.
Do people actually drink scrumpy for pleasure? I’d always thought it was what was reluctantly necessary to get the alcohol content down.
Pewter. I have quite a collection of tankards in my home bar. I used to scour obscure second hand shops for them & brought them with me.. But my personal one I actually found. It’s stamped VR54. It was inside a wall, perched up on a course of bricks, in the building above Green Park tube station. It was being refurbished at the time & we had a job exposing steel structural members & measuring their dimensions for the supervising architect. I broke through a wall into a void & there it was. As if it had just been left there. I have this vision of the brickie bringing it back from the pub, the foreman comes skulking round, so he lodges it out of sight & under watchful eyes continuing laying bricks until it’s unreachable. I can’t think of another explanation. The Ritz opposite was built in 1906 so presumably this one was contemporary. There used to be an entrance to Green Park Station from the Ritz ran under the Piccadilly.
We uncovered another hidden treasure in that building. A toilet with pan full of shit. The door to the toilet had been filled in with breeze block recently, but we came in from the side. When that hole,opened up, the smell fell out & landed on the floor with an almost audible squelch. Jeeze! I smashed away the pan connector & the pedestal base & we very, very carefully carried the pan to a window overlooking Stratton Street & dropped into a skip below. I suppose it went 20 ft so there was quite a splash. It was right opposite Langan’s Brasserie on a hot July afternoon. Builders are evil cvnts, aren’t we?
@Joe Smith:
I assume there wasn’t an implicit /sarc in there, but I’m not sure. If there was, I apologize for beating this into the ground.
Is BBC Verify composed of journalists? It sure sounds like it, though I was unable to find anything about its composition.
Why would you think being appointed to a board means they’re competent in what the board’s supposed to do? I mean, they’re drawing from the same pool of people that got the story wrong in the first place…