The Bridge Inn

crawled on the specials board, one dish in particular caught my eye: “Boss-shot pheasant, stuffed with Stornoway black pudding and wrapped with Ayrshire bacon, served with a kale cake, green beans and jus.” The aforementioned pub boss, Graham Bucknall, killed the pheasant at a local shoot, head chef Ben informed me. There was also venison on the menu but, up in my room, I’d been reading about the pub’s pigs, so it had to be the signature pork plate: wrapped loin, rillettes, belly, crackling and baked beans (£19). “It’s the last of our home-reared Saddleback,” Ben added, “although it’s not strictly Saddleback. The Saddlebacks got friendly with the Gloucester Old Spots ...” The Bridge Inn ticks all the right boxes in terms of provenance. You can’t get more local than herbs and vegetables grown in the walled kitchen garden of Graham and wife Rachel’s home, nearby Ratho Hall, or the pigs reared in their fields. The inn sits happily on the historic Union canal in the little village of Ratho, 20 minutes by car from the centre of Edinburgh – and a handy 10 minutes from the airport – although it feels a million miles away from both. Dating from the mid-18th century, it was originally a farm building, converted into a pub to service the navvies building the canal between 1818 and 1822. The Union is a linear, or contour, canal, all on one level so there are no locks, and it stretches for 31½ miles from Edinburgh to the Falkirk Wheel, a rotating boat lift that connects it to the Forth and Clyde canal – and is a tourist attraction in its own right. The Bridge also has a less salubrious claim to fame: in 1864, George Bryce, the son of the then landlord, murdered a nursery maid here and was hanged on the Royal Mile. It was one of the last public executions in Scotland.