A Gallon Walk pub manager has hit back after a landlady called the pub crawl ‘abusive, rowdy and inconsiderate.’
Glenys Crampton, publican of The Birch Hall Inn, in Beck Hole, took drastic measures to avoid the crawl due to its ‘anti-social’ nature. The 72-year-old decided to close on a Saturday, when big groups tend to take the crawl between Egton and Goathland in the North Yorkshire Moors.
The Gallon Walk has been taking place since 1976. Along the way, there were eight pubs, and a pint in each pub adds up to a gallon of beer, hence the name. An additional pub has been added to the lineup since its inception, however.
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Bus loads of big groups descend upon the idyllic valley villages along the five-mile crawl with more than a hundred people in some cohorts. A pub manager who runs a Facebook group has come out in the defence of the crawl, stating that Glenys’ complaints aren’t wholly accurate.
Glenys decided to stop opening on Saturdays in 2019 due to the Gallon Walk. Explaining her decision, she said: “It just wasn’t working for us, so we stopped doing it.
“The only way to stop it is to just not open as you can’t selectively serve six people but not those 60 people. It was a mixture, works does, people out for a birthday. They were abusive, rowdy, inconsiderate. Not all of them, by any means, but the majority.”
(Image: Samuel Port)
The manager, who didn’t wish to be named, has been running a pub along the route and Facebook page ‘The Gallon Walk, Egton To Goathland’ for six years. He described himself as a spokesperson for the famous walk.
As part of his duties in running the social media page, he helps the network of pubs along the walk deal with the large groups, warning them of when to expect particularly big ones – like a group of 110 expected for a Saturday in July, for example.
He said: “It’s been going on for years and it’s welcomed by all the pubs. It’s just one doesn’t open on a Saturday. It’s not anti-social. If it was anti-social or problematic or anything like that, we would shut it down ourselves.
“Occasionally, you can have problems, but you deal with it. None of the pubs do shots. The anti-social behaviour bit of it all is minimalistic. We do have occasional problems, where they might bring a rucksack and stuff that might have alcohol in it but that’s their choice and we can’t stop that.
(Image: Samuel Port)
“We’ve never had any police called to any Gallon Walks in any of the six years that I know of. It doesn’t happen, it’s not anti-social, it’s a very good walk done in the right attitude…but occasionally you get them.”
He went on to say that the Birch Hall Inn “can’t take the volume,” stating the sheer numbers were overwhelming for the little pub where different groups would often converge. He’s advised those going on the walk should start in Egton and to finish in Goathland, as then the smaller pubs aren’t hit as hard by the numbers later-on. He also told of how proactive one particularly large regular group of 130 people are in collecting the glasses, hitting back at comments from a local that gallon-walkers take the pubs’ glasses and dump them along the route.
The pub manager also spoke about all the good the walk has done for charities over the years. There have been groups raising thousands on sponsored walks for cancer charities, dementia care, poorly children, children’s football teams and various hospices.
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