April - December 2025

It’s been such a busy year at the Sir Walter Raleigh with so much going on it has been impossible to keep up! As well as our popular regular events – the Community Supper, the charity Quiz nights, ukulele Tuesdays, live music nights and more – we’ve had a stream of other exciting and well attended events scheduled into the calendar. Most of them involving great live music, fabulous food and usually both!
To summarise some of the pub’s recent efforts and successes

• We are very proud to have won GOLD in ‘Taste of the West – South West England’ which recognises “outstanding quality, flavour and authenticity in food and drink products or hospitality businesses”. 
• We then won GOLD in the ‘Food Drink Devon Awards’ in their ‘Hospitality Pub’ category – two great achievements in recognition of all we do!
• Our beautiful, renovated, sunny courtyard proved very popular in the wonderful weather we enjoyed this summer!
• A great Cider Festival in July with 10 wonderful local ciders. With live music from Peter Buxton and then blues trio - Ian Briggs, Adam Sweet & Ian Jennings it proved a huge success.
• Our October Beer Festival! What can we say? This has become quite an event for the pub with people supporting it from far and wide enjoying the beer, the atmosphere, food and live music from Pete Burns and Jake Yarwood.  Many Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) members turned up and seemed to enjoy the whole festival hugely. With 20 fabulous local Westcountry beers for sale and lots of great festival food served up by Dan and Amber it has been one of the great highlights of our year;
• Happy Hour in our quietest months continues to bring in lots of appreciative visitors as well as locals;
• It is widely reported that the number of pubs closing their doors permanently has hit more than one a day. In the first half of 2025, 209 pubs in England and Wales called time forever – that’s eight a week! In all, 2,283 pubs have vanished from communities across Britain since the start of 2020 – either demolished or converted to other uses. But we are still here!  Our recent AGM summarised that our wonderful pub is holding its own and, thanks to hard working staff, volunteers and the steering and hard graft of its committee members is bucking the worrying national trend. A few fun facts from the meeting - since the start of our financial year (April 2025) we’ve sold 4152 pints of Gun Dog, 2186 pints of Korev, 760 pints of IPA, 865 glasses of Pinot Grigio, 1632 bags of crisps, 801 portions of fish and chips and 731 roast dinners. Lots of happy customers!

Now Christmas is around the corner, Dan and Amber have created a great value but creative, festive menu with a good mix of pub classics and specials and we’re pleased to announce our opening hours over the festive season supported by an army of wonderful volunteers! Thank you to everyone who is stepping in and making these opening hours possible – your hard work and support for our wonderful pub is appreciated. Happy Christmas to everyone from the Sir Walter Raleigh!