WE’D gone to The Foxglove at Kirkburton to catch-up with pals after a weekend away in southern French medieval city of Carcassonne.

So you might have expected the talk to be all about the cassoulet (a famed duck leg, sausage and beans stew in an earthenware dish) and amazing menus du jour we’d had during a weekend city break. And that was how it started off.

We’d heard good things about The Foxglove.

It is part of the Vintage Inn chain which might put some more dedicated foodies off, but we knew it was run by Terry Rose who had the Black Bull in Lindley for many years. And knowing Terry, we knew it would be run properly.

The Foxglove has an interesting history too. It was originally known as the Railway Junction Inn, due to the anticipation of a proposal in 1864 to construct a railway extension from Barnsley to a junction with the London and North West Railway.

During the 1930s the inn was known as The Three Owls. In 2000 it became The Foxglove.

Kirkburton’s a fair hike for us four Lindley-ites but it proved worth the effort.

The very attractive website had showed up an attractive menu with all our favourites and reasonably priced too. About £6 for a starter and £12 upwards for a main. There was also a very tasty “sharing” section of nibbles and dips.

So off we went for a good night out and it turned out to be a superb night out with the food in this pub exceeding all expectations by a long, long way.

And how often does that happen?

Indeed, if we had been eating “fine dining” as opposed to “posh pub grub” we all agreed you couldn’t have spotted the difference.

We were shown to a lovely round table in the cutesy stained glass window bay by young attentive staff who were happy to keep coming back for our order as our French escapades (mainly drinking as the weather was more Rawthorpe than Riviera) took precedence over menu-pondering at the start.