Herefordshire's oldest pub is at the heart of its community

The Pandy Inn, located in the village of Dorstone in the Golden Valley, was built in 1140 and keeps many of its traditional features to this day.

The Pandy Inn in the 19th century

The front of the pub is still the original, while the majority of the rest of the building dates back to the 16th century.

Landlady Lisa Aubrey-Cosslett, who was a teacher in Portsmouth prior to moving to the area in 2016, decided she wanted to buy a pub with her chef husband James and looked around the country for one.

She said they had a long list of about 60 options before finding the hidden gem in the Golden Valley.

"We looked in all sorts of places: Cornwall, Devon, west Wales, the Shetland Islands, the Lake District. Then we came through Shropshire and into Herefordshire, happened upon this beautiful place and stopped looking."

"We drove into the village and just thought this is absolutely beautiful, then set foot in the pub and that was it. We just felt that this was home."

The Pandy Inn benefits from passing trade in the summer through the area's great walking routes and rolling countryside.

Mrs Aubrey-Cosslett said: "We get a lot of people who come back every year for their walking holidays who fall in the love with the place just like I did.

"We get people from cities like Bristol, Birmingham and London coming back here every year and it's great seeing familiar faces."

As with every hospitality venue, the pub was hut hard by the Covid pandemic, but found a way to diversify to navigate through the crisis.

Mrs Aubrey-Cosslett, who is also on the parish council, took it upon herself to start a delivery service to help people around the village who couldn't get out. They also started to make home made pizzas for people to takeaway.

She said: "Luckily, we had just invested in a pizza oven before lockdown hit.

"The pizzas proved really popular; they went down a storm.

The pub also contacted artisan baker Alex Gooch to help deliver his home-made bread

She said: "Obviously, he had lost a lot of his custom with the restaurants being shut aswell.

"We got Alex to deliver bread to us and we often ended up delivering 70-80 loaves a week to the local community."

The pub, that won the Hereford Times' Community Pub of the Year award in 2018, makes it a priority to turn itself into a community hub for the area.

Mrs Aubrey-Cosslett believes this is vital to the survival of any small village pub.

She said: "Since we took over the pub in 2015, that has definitely been our main focus, to make everyone feel a part of it, to stand out from the much bigger competition in surrounding towns and cities.

"We try to make the pub not only a nice place to come and have a drink, but a hub for the whole community."