Inn at the Top

The delightful tale of a young couple who in the late 1970s, on impulse, became the new landlords of the most remote, bleak and lonely pub - The Tan Hill Inn - located in the desolate landscape of the Yorkshire Dales.
Having seen an article in the newspaper about the pub's search for a new manager, they arrived just three weeks later as the new landlords of the The Tan Hill Inn. It is a wild, wind-swept place, set alone in a sea of peat bog and heather moorland that stretches unbroken as far as the eye can see. With only sheep and grouse for company, their closest neighbour was four miles away and the nearest town twelve. They had no experience of licensed trade or running a pub, no knowledge of farming and a complete inability to understand the dialect of the sheep farmers who were their local customers. Eager, well-meaning, but in over their heads, our two heroes embarked on a disaster-strewn career that somehow also turned into a lifelong love affair with the Dales.
The Inn at the Top is an entertaining ramble around the Inn, the breath-taking Dales countryside and a remarkable array of local characters, giving an insight into life in a very different different time and place.

Neil Hanson has crammed an awful lot of living into just one life. Since graduating from Oxford University, he has travelled around the world twice; been a plasterer's mate, an ice cream salesman and a holiday camp redcoat. He worked in a number of art and photography galleries; was simultaneously an art critic and a rugby league commentator; the editor of the Good Beer Guide; the owner of the highest pub in England; a book reviewer, travel writer and critic; and a radio broadcaster for the BBC and for independent radio networks in Australia and New Zealand. He has written for every British national newspaper and for media around the world, made guest appearances on everything from BBC Television's flagship news program to Australia's top-rated radio show and NBC's Today Show. He is also a highly successful lecturer and after-dinner speaker and has written forty published novels and non-fiction books under a variety of noms de plume, plus a couple of screenplays, a playscript for a musical and a series of short stories. He was appointed to a Fellowship of the Royal Literary Fund in 2007.
Neil is also the author of an acclaimed series of popular histories: The Custom of the Sea; The Dreadful Judgement; The Confident Hope of a Miracle; The Unknown Soldier; First Blitz; Monk Eastman; and Escape From Germany. Critics around the world have hailed them as "brilliant", "compelling", and "a triumph".
He lives in the Yorkshire Dales with his wife and family.