Wheel & Compass, Weston by Welland

This is the Wheel & Compass at Weston by Welland, which was one of the pubs taking party in the Welland Valley Beer Festival last week.

If you think the building looks a little top-heavy, there is a reason. As Unmitigated England once explained:

As you can see, it has a slightly odd upper storey that is obviously an addition. Originally this was a two storey ironstone pub with a thatched roof. But the arrival of surveyors in the adjoining fields in the mid-nineteenth century meant that life was to be as upturned as the Welland Valley pastures that surround it. An extra storey was added to the pub as a long dormitory for navvies working on the line.

And you will see from the photograph below, the lower two storeys were built in ironstone and the later one in brick.

Those navvies, incidentally, were building the Great Northern Railway and London & North Western Railway Joint Line for the contractors Logan & Hemingway.

That is Logan as in this blog's hero J.W. "Paddy" Logan, Liberal MP for Harborough. It was building the GNR & LNWR Joint that brought him to this part of the world in the first place.