Sunday Roast near Bishop's Stortford and Saffron Walden

It's a 15-minute drive from Bishop's Stortford, 20 from Saffron Walden. The Brewery Tap sits at the edge of Furneux Pelham in a Grade II listed building that has been serving beer since Rayment & Co's Pelham Brewery used it as their tap house in the 1860s. The brewery closed in 1987. The pub carried on, and on Sundays it fills in the way good pubs fill — with regulars, with families, with people who've found it and don't need much reason to come back.

The Sunday roast changes with the season. The full Sunday menu carries what the kitchen is serving each week. The offering is focused rather than sprawling, which is the right call for a pub of this size. What the menu can't convey is the room itself: low ceilings, flagstone floors, cask ales behind the bar. The building is part of what makes a Sunday here different from eating in a chain restaurant or a converted barn with mood lighting and brand photography on the walls.

This is a free house — independently owned, answerable to no group policy. That shows in the small things: the ales on cask, the unfussy service, a kitchen doing what a pub kitchen should.

The pub is rated 4.6 on TripAdvisor from 167 reviews. Food comes up in most of them, and so does the atmosphere. Reviewers reach for words like "proper" and "genuine" — which are the right words, and harder to earn than they look.

Regulars make the drive from Bishop's Stortford, Stansted Mountfitchet, Ware, Saffron Walden, and Harlow. The pub sits in north Hertfordshire close to the Essex border, so the catchment runs across both counties. It's the kind of place people find once and then put in the diary.

Tables fill up, particularly from October through to Easter and around bank holidays. Booking is strongly recommended for groups or if you're travelling from further out.