Daily Mail moves Glandore to the UK!

The Daily Mail has mistakenly featured West Cork’s Glandore Inn as an example of an English country pub.

A photograph of the West Cork pub was used this week to illustrate an article featuring the final extract from Bill Bryson’s book The Road to Little Dribbling, in which the American writer makes a list of all the things about Britain that please him.

‘I pulled out a notebook in the food court and began to list all the pleasing Britannic things I could think of, randomly, as they occurred to me,’ he wrote. And after ‘Boxing Day’ Bill Bryson listed ‘country pubs’ as one of his favourite things about Blighty. 

Cream teas, the shipping forecast, and villages with ridiculous names, such as Shellow Bowells and Nether Wallop also feature in the reasons he ‘fell in love with this rainy little island, adrift in the cold, grey sea’.

The article features a classically waspish piece about his visit to Cape Wrath, the most north-westerly place in Great Britain, and, afterwards, a visit to Glenelg, which he describes as being ‘on a little bay enjoying fine views across to the Isle of Skye.’ West Cork’s Glandore is, of course, also located on a little bay and enjoys fine – indeed exceptional – views, but that is where the association is at an end.

The Southern Star contacted The Glandore Inn for a comment and, in typical good humour, Sheila McCarthy, the owner, said: ‘There is probably a sub-editor somewhere who is about to get it in the neck. But let’s face it, any publicity is good publicity.’

Meanwhile, in the closing paragraphs of Bill Bryson’s article, he mentions being in ‘a hotel coffee shop in Baltimore,’ where he was reading the local paper, the Sun. So that’s Baltimore in the US then – lest there be any confusion.