The Bull Hotel - Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes, UK - Pubs and Inns on Waymarking.com

With a warm welcoming and informal atmosphere all rooms are tastefully decorated with good facilities. The pub is a best-known specialist in real ale available in 'The Vaults Bar'. It has 2 excellent restaurants offering English, Mexican and Spanish cuisine.

The Bull Hotel is a unique and fascinating traditional coaching inn. All 14 rooms have en-suite facilities and feature every modern comfort and convenience. The cosy hotel restaurant offers excellent value through a good range of freshly prepared traditional and foreign dishes. In Stables Wine Bar there are a wide range of wines on sale, together with traditional and continental beers. Great food is served, with Spanish and Mexican dishes being the popular specialities. The Stables is also a popular venue for private gatherings, parties and business meetings. The Vault`s Bar is as popular with visitors as it is with the many colourful characters that frequent its hallowed portals.

In the mid seventies, The Bull Hotel, then under the command of Howard Willis - one of Stony's most influential families - opened a long disused bar and called it the Vaults. One Sunday lunchtime, soon after the opening, three musicians, John Brooks, USAF Captain Ted Witsie and Matt Armour, got their guitars out and sat in the corner, swapping songs. From this virtual accident grew the Vaults Bar Folk Workshop, where innumerable local, and not so local, musicians have cut their performing teeth and gone on to greater things. Again many now-local performers cite their experiences here as the reason they moved to Stony.

The ancient north Buckinghamshire town of Stony Stratford, now part of the new city of Milton Keynes, is famous as the place of origin of the term 'Cock & Bull Story', recognised throughout the English-speaking world.

This dates back to the late 18th/early 19th centuries, at the height of the great coaching era, when Stony Stratford (which is located on the old Roman Road of Watling Street, latterly the A5) was an important stopping-off point for mail and passenger coaches travelling between London and the North.

Travellers on these coaches were regarded as a great source of current news from remote parts of the country - news which would be imparted in the town's two main inns, The Cock and The Bull. The two establishments rapidly developed a rivalry as to which could furnish the most outlandish and scurrilous travellers' tales. Hence Cock & Bull Story.

It was here that the great fire started in 1742 when a chambermaid, afraid of being reprimanded for burning a sheet whilst ironing it, stuffed the sheet up a chimney. When the resulting fire reached the thatch, it spread rapidly down the street, and even across the river as blazing thatch was swept along by the wind. By the time the fire was over, most of the lower part of the town including St Mary's Church had been destroyed.