5c Light Drizzle
Camping Gear 
Prints of North Wales Scenes 
Road Maps 
Tents 
London Rd, Corwen, Clwyd LL21 0DR
Tel: 01490 412372
IT'S not often these days you find a pub juke box that boasts singles by the likes of Ray Charles, Roy Orbison and The Eagles. Fewer still are the ones that offer you the opportunity to hear them played on the original 45 rpm vinyl discs.
I'm unable to resist the temptation to plonk my 20p into the bowels of the vintage music- maker winking at me in the bar. The memories flood back as the metal arm lifts the disc from its storage space and the stylus places itself on the edge of the wobbling vinyl.
Suddenly I'm transported back to the Eldon House milk bar of my youth, and can almost make out the espresso coffee machine hissing in the distance like a locomotive pulling into a station.
The strains of Hotel California gently fill the place, drifting sedately from the machine's own in-built speakers rather than some thumping monstrosities on the wall, to be quickly followed by Queen's Radio Ga Ga.
The memories are sweet, and all for just 20p. But then again, it's only fitting that such a living museum of a drinkers' pub should also delve back into the mists of time to provide some music.
We're told the discs can be difficult to procure these days, with the landlord spending hours scouring Ebay to add to his collection. The search must be fascinating.
The rest of the artefacts adorning the place, for all the world looking like Auntie Wainwright's welcoming bric-a-brac shop in Last of the Summer Wine, are no less interesting.
They include all manner of agricultural implements, tankards, stirrups, brassware and items whose use we could only begin to guess at. Brasso, we conclude, must be in great demand in here.
The pub is virtually a single room, partly beamed, with a pool table at one end and a partly partitioned off snug at the other.
It's dead quiet this Sunday evening, like so many pubs these days, although mine host doesn't help much by resisting the temptation for idle chit-chat with his customers.
He prefers to keep his nose glued to the latest soap offering trickling from his own private portable TV set stuffed somewhere beneath the bar. However he assures us it will soon be comfortably full in here when the pub quiz aficionados finally arrive for their weekly fix.
Standing on the outskirts of Corwen in the shadow of the hill called Pen y Pigyn, from where medieval warlord Owain Glyndr is reputed to have thrown his dagger at the townspeople in a fit of pique, the casual visitor might well overlook the Royal Oak.
That would be a shame. In an age where pubs are increasingly plastic copies of each other, this is a true original to be savoured.
