Several friends outside the Goddard Arms
one Sunday evening in September 1999

The pub is tucked away in a small village about 7 miles SSW of Junction 16 of the M4 near Swindon. The landlord and landlady are very friendly and they offer up to four real ales including a guest beer which might be from the local Stonehenge brewery. There's a public bar and a comfortable lounge on two levels where we found some locals playing cards on a Sunday afternoon.

The pub offers goof value food at lunchtimes and during the evening. I had some very tasty reasonably-priced home-made carrot and coriander soup. Emphasis in the Goddard Arms is clearly on home-made with unusual Thai dishes on offer too.

The pub has the look of a traditional local on the outside though within the lounge bar contained many unusual sculptures and paintings as well as newspapers to flick through. A local band was also rehearsing behind the public bar during our visit.

We found it the ideal place to call at after a hard days walking and visiting the stones at Avebury. We saw an elderly gentleman at a dairy farm in Avebury just beyond Avebury climbing onto his bike with his pint of milk as we were walking back to the car. We drove straight to the Goddard Arms and to our astonishment there was a bike parked outside and that same man enjoying a beer within!