Graeme & Michael are The Crooked Spirits. They are a duo of local singer songwriters who will be performing an acoustic set of their original melodic songs on the 1st Saturday each month with electric guitars and keyboards but ohh so mellow, you can still have a conversation without shouting and enjoy some lovely music at the same time!

Next one after the summer!

Before meeting and forming The Crooked Spirits, Graeme and Michael had a long history of playing in various bands, session work, record deals, festivals, touring all over the UK and even a spot of TV. Their influences include The Divine Comedy, The Smiths and Eels. Check out their latest video here! Click on Read More to find out more about The Crooked Spirits.

All are welcome to enjoy the entertainment & our cask ales and real ciders. We hope you have fun & join in, even if you can only manage the choruses! Check out our Folk Links for more information.

I can't believe it, can you? To put up alcohol duty when year on year revenue into the exchequer from beer, wine & spirits has decreased to the treasury each time they put it up seems ludicrous!

We've had to put our prices up - the first time in over a year and we've done our best to minimise them too.

If that Darling man drops in, let him know he isn't welcome would you?

There is an Alastair Darling: Your Barred facebook group here if you fancy shouting at him too and if you feel like emailing him try his address here This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .

Don't forget to sign our petition to ask him to drop the duty tax hikes planned for the future.

STOP PRESS: The first & second of our new leaflets are ready to test! Check out Walk Two - Woods, Buffalo and Hill Forts and Walk Three - Limekilns and Quarries now!

As you know we produced our first walk leaflets with very welcome help from The Ramblers Association (Holywell Ramblers), , Walkabout Flintshire and other groups to help you take your own self-guided walks on Halkyn Mountain. The first leaflet is available now so press the image to the right to see our first route which is a circular walk of up to 5.75 miles in PDF format. This walk gained the prestigous title of one of the top ten walks in the UK with MyFavouritePubWalks.com !

Click to go to My Favourite Pub Walks

One of the interesting things about these walks is that they share the common feature of the Hill Fort of Moel-y-Gaer. This provides the option to string more than one walk together, for intance, Walk Two + Walk Three is about 12 miles as they share a part of the route in common. Each of the maps will be to scale and list as much inforation as we can of the flora, fauna, geology and anything else we can find of interest.

We have lots of ideas for other walks and the exciting prospect of providing postcards and prints of features, sights and views found on the walks.We've five prints for sale in the pub at the moment.

Watch this space! In the meantime, the maps are available by clicking he icons if you click READ MORE, we'll add the basic text and bird lists as soon as we can. We'll also try to include as much of interest as we can & make the leaflets available online & in hardcopy from the Blue Bell Inn.

We've supported the National Eisteddfod held here in Flintshire (the county we're in) in a number of ways.

Here's the latest...

The annual National Eisteddfod which took place here in Flintshire during August 2007 is perhaps the ultimate showcase for welsh culture and we are doing our bit to help spread the Welsh word hereabouts. We've been holding conversational welsh classes here at the Blue Bell Inn, Halkyn. Ness and I have been wanting to learn Welsh since we ariived in Wales but haven't yet found the time, well we needed a solution and here it is - we thought we would hold the classes at the pub and many thanks to Popeth Cymraeg who ran the course and the Eisteddfod and FLVC offices who are supporting us so much!

There seems to be quite a bit of discussion here about the various dialects of welsh, South Walian, North Walian and then there are even variations between Caernarfon and Clwydian welsh to name a few. We are going to concentrate on colloquial Clwydian welsh which is the local dialect, although we will discuss the variations between that and the others as the need arises.

Steve