Pint to pint: The Bell Inn, Somerset Stand outside The Bell Inn on the third Wednesday of each month and, if you shut your eyes, you could be back in the 18th century. The salty tang of the sea air, the gentle lapping of the water against the hulls of moored ships, and from inside the tavern, the sound of ancient sea shanties accompanied by fiddle and mandolin. All that's needed is the stomp of a peg-legged pirate, and you could imagine you were a character in the opening chapter of a swashbuckling Treasure Island adventure. Or at least an episode of Captain Pugwash. Even the resident ales have nautical, pieces-of-eight names: there's doubloon-coloured Tribute (4.2%) from the St Austell Brewery in South Cornwall, first brewed to honour an eclipse of the sun; or there's Sharp's darker-hued Doom Bar, from Rock in North Cornwall, (4.0%), named after an infamous sandbank at the mouth of the Camel Estuary. It was in this waterside tavern that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is said to have begun his epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, while walking in the Quantocks with William Wordsworth. These days, beer-drinking bards aren't perhaps as plentiful as they once were, but the inn's bookcases are positively awash with stories of old Watchet. There are picture books showing the town as it used to be: Swain Street, the Cosy Cinema, the Esplanade, the old railway station (closed by Dr Beeching). Not to mention The Illustrated Book of Fishes and a set of Reed's Nautical Almanacs dating back to the Seventies. There's even a poem paying tribute to the large number of pubs which once lay scattered hereabouts: "A movement very soon begins/Towards the ever-open inns./ The Greyhound, Ship, the Star as well;/ The Archer, London and The Bell." Not that more recent cultural events are overlooked: alongside the historic monochrome photographs on the wall, there's a framed copy of Something Is Happening by Herman's Hermits. 3 Market Street, Watchet, Somerset (01984 631279)