GAVIN AITCHISON is smitten by a rural pub with unusual opening hours and a limited beer menu.

DEEP in the depths of the forest lies a remarkable hidden treasure.

It is the type of pub that England once boasted of in abundance, in every corner of every county, in the days when roads were unlit and night-time travel consequently onerous.

It is a pub that has very little space, no bar, a negligible beer selection and volatile opening hours – but which is all the more special for those quirks.

Welcome to The Moorcock Inn at Langdale End in Dalby Forest. This is an enchanting relic of a pub but it’s one that demands perseverance, local knowledge or a dose of good fortune. So much so that it took me three attempts before I found it open.

I first tried on a Wednesday night, and after driving 42 miles from York, despaired when I found it shut. I feared it had perhaps closed for good and was now simply a house that had preserved the pub signs, in a display of quaint nostalgia. But wait...

Peering closer, I saw that the tables in the front room were set for diners, and so, duly buoyed, I returned the following Saturday lunchtime with my wife. And promptly found it closed again.

This time I wasn’t for quitting. We made inquiries at a nearby hotel and were assured that yes, it was a still pub and a lovely one at that, and that it would be open at around seven o’clock. Or thereabouts.

So we tootled round the forest, killing time, stopping sporadically for coffee, buying fresh eggs from a farm, listening to the football on the radio, reading the paper, and incessantly checking our watches.

And a few minutes after seven, we were there, my insistence and my wife’s waning patience rewarded. I pushed open the door and instantly felt like we had just walked into a villager’s cottage. We headed through a low doorway, turned left and found ourselves in a timeless, simple room.

There is no bar. There is simply a hatch on a latch, behind which stands a small fridge with some bottles, and one beer on cask, a seasonal ale from Wold Top when we visited. Space is limited, the sloping ceiling is low and bits and bobs are scattered wherever there is space – a box of crisps here, an old picture there, a charity tin balanced precariously atop the fridge.

We toyed with catching the evening sunshine in the large garden but opted instead for the inimitable atmosphere inside, in a room that can scarcely have changed since the year dot. There’s a bar billiards table too and a decent menu, albeit not as satisfying for vegetarians as for the rest of us.

Returning to the York office and checking our library files, I found I was not alone in having laboured to find this treasure. Back in 1993, in the then Yorkshire Evening Press, one of my predecessors had also set off in search of it for the paper’s Pub Focus column, as it was then called.

He headed off after work one day, dragging a colleague up the A64 and through the backroads - only to find the Moorcock closed. He too returned a day or two later, found himself suitably rewarded, and was taken in by the Moorcock’s charm just like me.

When he visited, licensees Derek and Sue Mathewson had been there for only two years. They’re still there now, closing in on their quarter-century.

Derek and Sue took over in 1991, when the pub had been closed for two years. Before that, it had been in the Martindale family for 91 years, and all told it is believed to have been a pub since the mid-17th century.

Further inquiries reveal it is open these days from 7pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, and also from noon to 2pm on Saturdays and Sundays.

If it sounds bizarre when I say I am smitten by a pub that is closed for half the week and sells only one ale, then what can I say? It sounds odd to me too but there you have it; this is a truly captivating place. The Moorcock may well be hard to catch without local knowledge – but it is harder still to resist.