Eating Owt: A perfect example of cafe culture

It is an ancient Mariner and he stoppeth one of three. By thy long grey beard and glittering eye. Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?' - Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

MR John Simpson is a bit like that, though it's possible that his strike rate may be rather higher than 33 per cent. He is not a happy chap.

John owns Lord Stones café, atop the North Yorkshire Moors at a point where the Coast to Coast and the Lyke Wake Walks fall upon one another in a muddy great heap.

Back in December 1992, that unpretentious little café cut into the rock won an Eating Owt column "Jammy", awarded to the ten best places we'd visited that year. It came very close, we added, to taking the overall title - and, no Stones unturned, it was foggy that day, too.

Still hazy after all these years.

Geographically it's near the summit of Carlton Bank, a couple of miles above Carlton-in-Cleveland. Administratively it's in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park. Like Coleridge's mariner, authority has been an albatross around poor Mr Simpson's neck. Though he and his wife Christine opened the café in 1991, the former gun shop owner claims that it has been "digitally removed" from Ordnance Survey maps. It sounded painful.

He has no post code, no reference on those new-fangled GPS gizmos, no nowt.

It took him four years to get planning permission for extensions. For that he blames the National Park, for much else he blames the Labour government.

"I'm sure it's because the minister responsible thought that Lord Stones was some toffee-nosed earl," he says. While he may well be right, Mr Simpson has more conspiracy theories than the film of the Da Vinci Code.

"When they turned me down for underground toilets I started doing some digging," he says, and not to provide subterranean netties, either. The result, he says, will make the front page of the Daily Mail. His choice of newspaper is not altogether surprising.

Customers appear randomly to be selected, as we were, for this snapshot of National Park life. There were an awful lot of customers.

Down in Carlton it was simply tossing down. Up at Lord Stones - named after a nearby Bronze Age settlement, not Stan Stones's ennobled uncle - it was impossible to see more than ten yards.

Among those already taking shelter was the North-East branch of the Mini Club, apparently on a treasure hunt. It took us three goes even to find the car park, so impenetrable the murk.

The café resembled the extras' dressing room for a re-make of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. "Half an hour ago you couldn't have stood a gnat up in here," said John, by way of introduction to the more contentious stuff.

Folk divested everywhere, seven veils more than Salome. The waiting staff were swift and brilliant, essaying an assault course of rucksacks, waterproofs and assorted other obstacles with practised professionalism.

A chap in look-at-me waterproofs waved around a portable GPS thingy and announced that it even computed average walking speed, particularly useful if there was a bus to catch at the other end.

"Prat," said the Boss, peevishly.

It remains very good, almost everything still home made. The corned beef pie (£4.50) was as fresh and as succulent as that confection can be, the cheese and leek pie every bit as good. People dripped on to their dinners, not a dry pie in the house.

There'd been a deep, hot, sustaining bowl of soup - broccoli, possibly - and a wonderfully fruity bread and butter pudding with which to conclude. If ever there were comfort food, it's served at Lord Stones on a day like that Saturday.

A perfect walkers' lunch was accompanied by a pint of hand pulled Theakston's Old Peculier for just £2 - last time we tried it, at the rooftop restaurant at the Baltic in Gateshead, it was £4.95.

The Boss had a glass of Lord Stones' own spring water, checked it for taddies if not for gnats, considered it delicious. Coffee came in mugs.

It's café culture the way it should always be. See your way there; stop and find out.

* Lord Stones Café, Chopgate (officially) near Stokesley. 01642 778227. Whatever the weather, open 363 days a year.

The overall Eating Owt award back in 1992 went to the Station Hotel at Easingwold - "a wholly unexpected survivor from the age of steam". Dead Jammy, it closed soon afterwards.

Others to gain a nicely framed certificate for the wall were the Beamish Mary at No Place, near Stanley ("Friendly, idiosyncratic pub; beware the pickled eggs with chilli"), Solberge Hall near Northallerton ("by far the year's best Sunday lunch"), Kristians on North Shields fish quay ("the year's best fish and chips") and the Red Lion at North Bitchburn, near Crook - "a splendid example of the survival, not strangulation, of the village pub".

There was the Eslington Villa Hotel in Low Fell, Walworth Castle, near Darlington, the Three Horse Shoes at Osmotherley and an Australian-themed place called Down Under, on Whitley Bay's lower promenade.

"In peril by the sea, this one's for valour," we supposed. The Canute act continues.

StiLl in the sticks, we were delighted - imitation being what it is - to receive a note from avid cyclist Tim Stahl describing his lunch at the Hamsterley Forest tea Rooms as "unequivocally superb".

Chiefly it comprised a bacon and egg sandwich. "The rolls betrayed their contents like the jaws of a contented crocodile and were about the same size," waxed Tim. "There was no hint of sogginess in the bread, its cut surfaces slightly singed for good measure.

"The bacon was ample and as lean as me, the egg had exactly the right degree of runniness without risking gravitational loss."

We followed him into the forest, paid the £2 road toll, had a deciduous dander and arrived at the tea rooms - attractive, chintzy, almost horizontally laid back - at 1.15pm two Sundays ago. Rain threatened, no one else was in.

There was a problem. They only did eggs with their bacon sandwiches in the morning - when they weren't busy - said a lady identified by her name tag as Mary, before looking around and being persuaded of the emptiness of her argument.

It was a perfectly good bacon and egg butty if not the jaw dropping, snap happy, croc 'n' roll rhapsody reprised by Mr Stahl.

There was, however, another problem. We'd ordered two bowls of tomato and red onion soup. They didn't come. Mary apologised, said she'd forgotten, brought it after the sandwiches. What's it like when they're busy?

Mr Stahl is probably right in every respect. We just can't see the wood for the trees.

Following last week's piece on The Otter, above West Auckland, several readers - including the Stokesley Stockbroker - correctly remembered the joke about a curry house customer announcing that he'd had a chicken tarka.

"Don't you mean a chicken tikka?" asks his mate.

"No," he says, "it's like a chicken tikka only a little otter."

Several others, same column, realised that as well as "fashion", "cushion" and "falchion" the other word in common use which ends is "hion" is stanchion. Tom Purvis in Sunderland and Don Wilson and Martin Wood, both in Durham, add malathion ("a boon to gardeners for many years," says Don) and parathion, both of which are insecticides. The gnathion, says Martin, is a point midway along the jaw.

The Durham duo also venture apocynthion - "familiar to all astronauts," says Don, but not to the Oxford English. Apocryphal, perhaps.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew why the farmer got so cross.

Because someone stood on his corn.