Two ghost signs for one story ............ out in Dove Holes with a bit of brewing history

Now here’s a ghost sign I once knew.

We are just past Buxton heading back towards the city and this is or rather was the Railway Inn at Dove Holes.

It was a place I passed regularly during the late 1980s and early ‘90s but never called in and now as Andy Robertson’s pictures show I will never be able to, well not for a pint anyway.

The painted roof sign always intrigued me but I have to admit I never noticed the advert for Kimberley Ales which also appears on the roof.

And that makes this a double ghost sign story, for Kimberley Ales has also vanished into history.

It was the oldest independent brewery in Nottinghamshire formed in 1930 from two much earlier breweries, the oldest of which was Samuel Robinson’s which was opened in 1832, in what is now called Hardy Street in Kimberley.

It competed with the Hanson brewery established fifteen years later and both breweries shared the same well.

In 2006 the Hardys and Hansons Kimberley Brewery and all it pubs were sold to Greene King who closed the Kimberley brewery.*

By which time I no longer took the route out from Manchester through Dove Holes to Buxton and so missed the closure of the Railway Inn, but I am sure someone will have memories of drinking there and will share them.

Pictures; the Railway Inn, Dove Holes, 2015 from the collection of Andy Robertson

* Kimberley Brewery, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_Brewery