The Royal Oak, Kings Bromley

Woe woe and woe again what place did that feral person beneath visit? The last review was balderdash and piffle. Read further for the mirthless moribund torture that is Yee Royal Oak...
Like the fettered stench that emits from a recently munged carcass the oaks death hangs eerily on the corner of manor road. Dark forces swirl within as even the beer has left town...Inside bent creatures doubled over with the sad wreckage of a once fine pub squabble and pick over the its corpse. As the church bell tolls mournfully in the distance a wretched hag glooms over the till, dabbing the putrid bar surface with a darkened rag...That be three groats fifty says the filthy wench as a swill sodden tankard of froth is thrust discourteously under ones nose. The drink, fowl in odour, blackened by the barrels of unkempt pipes, stews in its own fetid juices...A fly buzzes around like an insectoid vulture waiting to land on scrags of rotten meat and discarded souls...An old man blinks in the corner, watching the wall as the visual box scatters images of Nazism, ethnic cleansing and Louis Spense. A tear gently rolls down his craggy face and splashes amongst the filth and offal. �I once was chained but now I�m free, the Royal Oak is the one for me' a lament falls off his wizened lips and he cries. A man scuttles across the rotten boards and thrusts another flagon of spew on his table; he grins and returns to the wall...The kitchen doors fly open and a hobbling waif oozing scab juices from pocked pores presents a slab of rotting timber upon which lies the corpse of an animal unbeknownst to medical science a fruit so withered and shrunken even the worm has left it, and two condiments filled with the tears of drinkers past. I eat only because hunger has crippled my abdomen with searing pain, or was it the drink?...This experience has left me haggard, my soul skewed and twisted and a bitter taste rings in the mouth, but that could be the drink...As I leave the buzzing fly drops dead, a death unnoticed but by I, a death that epitomizes the rank wretchedness that this church of the damned spits forth.

Car parking was adequate.

11 Jul 2011 08:09