Club of the Year + blog birthday

The Farmers Club, Ormskirk

In my recent post about Pubs of the Year, I forgot to mention the local Club of the Year (COTY). The choice is the award-winning Farmers Club in Burscough Street, Ormskirk.  This club won the Branch COTY award last year and went on to win West Pennines Region Club of the Year for 2011.

It's an unusual colonnaded building and the front doors open into a foyer that houses a full-size snooker table and has a raised glass ceiling.  It was built in 1830 as a dispensary, and operated as such until the opening of the local cottage hospital.  It became the Farmers Club in 1898, so it has quite a history.  Because of the awards it's received, the club is the the cover story on the latest issue of Ale & Hearty.  Worth a visit - I think you can get served there if you show a CAMRA card or copy of the Good Beer Guide.

I see that today is the third anniversary of my first post on this blog, which was about a singers night at the Bothy Folk Club.  My first beer-related post was a day later, a tirade against Gordon Brown for the increases in beer duty, a topic I covered yet again a couple of weeks ago - perhaps I need to change the record.  This is my 619th post and at the time of writing I've had 30,316 unique hits, although I didn't instal the counter until five and a half months after starting the blog.

The blog originally only had information of about half a dozen music events per week in real ale pubs; now it has dozens of events per week, plus pages about local beer festivals, pub crawls, town pub maps, my discography [!] and numerous links.  I hope the information continues to be of use.  I remember wondering whether I could keep it going for more than a few months.