HERE'S a question: where in the North-East is Holmedale? We'd not heard of it either, then stumbled across references twice in an hour - in a brochure for a farm shop and tea room and in an advert for the Shoulder of Mutton at Kirby Hill.

"Magnificent views over Holmedale," it said, and the claim was clearly inarguable.

Kirby Hill is a hamlet between the A66 and Richmond. There is a Norman church dedicated to St Peter and St Felix and said with justification to be "quite exceptional", a former Grammar School founded by a 16th century Rector and the Shoulder, itself over 200 years old.

We'd last been there about 20 years ago in George Reynolds's Rolls, a champagne celebration to mark one of his periodic and ever-joyous not guilty verdicts and to toast the health and acquittal rate of Bishop Auckland CID.

It's a comfortable pub with three or four real ales and an imaginative looking weekday menu. As is so often the case, alas, imagination takes Sunday off and tradition works a reluctant half day. Two course Sunday lunch was £7.50, beef or lamb, three courses £9.50.

The soup of the day may more accurately have been termed gloop of the day, the sort of thing (broccoli and Stilton, it was said) in which Royal Marines practise swamp warfare. The Boss thought her pate was fine.

The roasts were OK in a lukewarm sort of a way, not helped by the poor young waitress who had to consult a colleague before discerning which was which.

Next table along, a little lad called Frankie chose the occasion to utter his first proper sentence: "Daddy gone to toilet."

Home from Holmedale, we considered it the most memorable part of the afternoon.

THE Mainsgill Farmshop and Tea Room is closer to the A66, five miles west of Scotch Corner and said also to overlook "picturesque Holmdale".

The Holme, it transpires, is a bit of a beck out the back. "Everyone has to have a dale," said Maria Henshaw, co-owner with her husband Andrew.

They opened the farm shop in 2001, had to close almost immediately because of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, won the Yorkshire Agricultural Society's enterprise award last summer.

Their farm animals are naturally reared, happy as pigs in clarts, joined by unexpected additions like llamas, wallabies and rheas. The Boss was a bit apprehensive and had to be reassured: no cause for a llama.

Everything is rustic, barnyard flavoured, room to relax. Even the place mats carried pictures of farm animals, identified as "cow" and "pig" and "rooster" for the sake of townies who might otherwise become confused.

We looked in for a 9.30am all-day breakfast, £4 with a vast help-yourself choice of chutneys like mango and ginger, real ale (heaven) and hellfire plum. The same firm, said The Boss, make Hellish Relish, too.

The breakfast was very good, particularly the bacon and the bucolic black pudding. Excellent coffee, too, readily refilled. Someone rang on his mobile while passing Scotch Corner: two bacon butties to go.

The irresistible temptation, of course, is that while spending under £10 on breakfast, you spend another £20 on more bacon, home-made pies, bread from that lovely little place in Middleton-in-Teesdale and, inevitably, jam on it.

Maria was dashing off to Richmond to seek an off-licence but seemed rather more worried about the column than the court.

"You're noted for being very honest," she said.

"Oh aye," we replied, "Holme truths."

MUCH merriment at the ever-admirable Ramside Hall Hotel, near Durham, last Thursday evening at a pizza making competition for the group's chefs. From 17 entries, the winner was banoffi pie pizza, the only sweet entry - made by Sarah Brennan, 34, who works in the Ramside's accounts department and knows more about computers. "She's thinking about changing hats," says Ramside manager Robin Smith.

MATERNAL instinct, Old Mother Riley's unlikely appearance in last week's column produced an e-mail from Harry Watson in Darlington who for years has searched unsuccessfully for an Old Mother Riley film on video.

"They were very popular in their day," he insists.

Old Mother Riley was Arthur Lucan, born in Lincolnshire in 1885, remembered in Boston where he first trod the boards at the Shodfriars Theatre, changed his name from Arthur Towle after seeing a milk float for Lucan's Dairies and not to be confused with an elusive peer of the same name.

Whether his lordship was named after a milk lorry we have been wholly unable to discover.

Lucan met his wife and co-star Kitty McShane when she was a 13-year-old playing Robin Hood in a Dublin pantomime and was playing South Shields with her in 1941 when German bombers raided the town just hours after the curtain fell.

Shields lost the Queens Theatre; Old Mother Riley and her Daughter (as they were billed) lost almost all their props.

None of this helps Harry Watson much. Enterprising readers may be able to do better.

A MYSTERY solved: how The Strawberry got its name. The Strawberry, as football fans of all hues will know, is a pub behind the Gallowgate End at Newcastle United, quenching thirsts before the Magpies ever kicked a ball.

The interior is a black and white shrine, the menu extensive but standard, the real ales includes Mordue's No. 9, named after Newcastle centre forwards in general and Jackie Milburn in particular.

We looked in last Wednesday before the Reserves match with Whitley Bay, the place rather quieter than for other matches of the day.

It became a beer house in 1859, as a condition of the will of James Brunton. A century earlier, the nuns of St Bartholomew's in Newgate Street had had extensive strawberry patches on the land round about and sold strawberry wines to the locals.

Perhaps on the biblical grounds that by their fruits ye shall know them, the Bishop of Durham threatened them with excommunication.

Nun sequitur, their health is toasted to this day.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you call an overweight pumpkin.

A plumpkin, of course.