Sheep, very short men with pug noses and great bellies, beer, sheep, extremely narrow roads, sheep, beer, ruined castles, sheep, beer, sheep, wild ponies, sheep, moors, beer, sheep, pubs with very low ceilings, sheep, hedges, beer, dry stone walls, sheep, golf courses, sheep, lamb chops, sheep, monasteries, beer, and sheep.

Some of the sheep will be dead, of course. I mentioned to Trevor, my driver through the Dartmoor, where the wild ponies roam, that there seemed to be an awful lot of sheep just standing in the middle of the road, looking curiously at the passing cars. “Do they always stand in the road like that,” I asked. “Oh, no. At night, when the tarmac holds the heat better than the moor, they lay down in the road to sleep.” There’s some who hold the theory that the origin of “pub crawl” dates to the early days of the automobile in these parts, when the return from the pub meant a long, slow crawl around the sleeping sheep in the road. The wild ponies on the same moor are generally smarter, just, than the sheep. They wait alongside the road for the traveling Americans to come up to them and pet them. “Then, likely as not, they bite their fingers off,” Trevor said. Which made me feel better about the autumn round-up, when that year’s crop of ponies are gathered and sold—some to become pets/cart pullers to the children of country gentlefolk and the rest, according to Trevor, “bought and sent to France.” “To pull carts through picturesque Normandy villages?” I asked. “Well, no,” he said. Oh. Poor ponies. On the other hand, if they’re going to bite off vacationers’ fingers ...

So stay in the car on the moors, at least until you get to a pub, and you will get to a pub, because there are slightly more pubs than sheep. You will, of course, be taller than the pub, an alarming number of which were built in 1680, or 1722, or some other year when the average Englishman’s height was 4’6”. The average Welshman’s height at the time was 3’4”, but they’ve shot up over the centuries so that now many of them are tall enough to get into most of the rides at Six Flags. Still short enough to fit in the pubs, though, which isn’t true of you or me. Me anyway. In the Ring of Bells, not to be confused with the Ring ‘o’ Bells in the next town over, I discovered that it is quite possible to have a good time when you can’t stand upright in any part of the saloon. This gets easier after the third pint, although going to the gents then causes some distress, because it’s in a room that will just barely allow you to kneel upright. For many of you this will be a familiar feeling, kneeling in the gents, but I’m still scraping the scabs off the top of my head two weeks later.

Worth the trip, though. For the beer. Never saw a bottle of light beer in fourteen days. Equally absent were malt beverages, Ready to Drink. (As if all malt beverages weren’t ready to drink.) Never, in fact, saw a bottle of beer in a pub at all. These are sensible, if short, folks out there in the English and Welsh countryside. They believe in real ale, and are supporters of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, a religious organizations of some years standing which is dedicated to stamping out anything that tastes good and is less filling. They’re interested in stuff that taste really, really good and is filling as all hell. Great pints of creamy, malty ales, bitters that you could cut with a knife, beer the color of butterscotch pudding instead of panther by-products. Beer that’s made down the road, or in the very basement below where the little man is pulling the pint out of a barrel, pumping it by hand, unaided by CO2 tanks and hoses passing through crushed ice.

And no, it’s not warm. It’s the temperature of that cellar, which is just cool enough to let you taste the beer. This is important, because there’s something to taste in the first place. Granted, there are lot of places in the states, microbreweries and brewpubs, also doing the Lord’s work, but there’s something about country pubs with real ale that’s more appealing. Could be that they don’t have any “flights” of beer to taste, or menus listing the special Hallowe’en pumpkin porter, or different glasses to hold every unique beer in the 45-tap selection. Could be that the company along the bar is just a bunch of guys with bellies whose conversation is more or less limited to “another, the same, please” instead of hop varieties and whether the Lemongrass Weissbier would stand up to the Nachos Marinara.

Or it could be that beer is the perfect analgesic for a throbbing pain caused by cracking your head onto another 17th century beam. Either way, I recommend the trip. Fly to London and take a left.