Our story

The Poachers is a community pub, and we mean that in the plainest sense: it belongs to the people who come through the door. Some have been drinking here for years. Some arrived for the first time last Tuesday. Both get the same welcome, and the same offer of a taster before they commit to a pint.

You will find us at 95 Ingersley Road in Bollington. It is a proper local — the sort of place where the conversation at the bar does most of the work, and where nobody minds if your boots are muddy.

There are five cask hand pumps on the bar, and what is on them changes every week. We do not settle on one house ale and leave it there for a decade. Part of the pleasure, for us as much as for the people drinking it, is that this week might bring something nobody at the bar has tried before. Ask what is on. Ask for a taste. That is what the small glasses are for.

The food is home-cooked — actually cooked here, by people who are in the building. The kitchen takes Mondays off.

And then there is the garden, which on a warm afternoon is comfortably the best room in the pub. Dogs are welcome throughout, and are frankly some of our most loyal regulars.