Falling Back: An Extra Hour, A Bit of History, and Firelit Sundays

There’s always a funny sort of feeling in the air on the last Sunday of October. You wake up, look at the alarm, double-check your phone, and realise you’ve been gifted that rarest of modern luxuries: a whole extra hour. The clocks have officially gone back, British Summer Time is packed away for another year, and Greenwich Mean Time has reclaimed its rightful place.

It’s easy to treat the whole thing as a mild inconvenience involving oven clocks and car dashboards you never quite figure out how to reset. But have you ever wondered why on earth we started messing about with time in the first place?

The story usually takes us back to a chap called William Willett who, interestingly enough, was the great-great-grandfather of Coldplay’s Chris Martin. Back in 1907, Willett was out riding his horse early one summer morning in Kent. He looked around and noticed that while the sun was blazing high in the sky, all the house blinds were still drawn tight. It struck him as a terrible waste that people were fast asleep while daylight was being squandered, only to spend their evenings burning expensive coal gas and candles.

Willett spent years campaigning to shift the clocks, publishing a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight. He didn't live to see it happen, but when the First World War broke out, fuel shortages forced governments to rethink things. Germany adopted Daylight Saving Time first in 1916 to save coal for the war effort, and Britain quickly followed suit just weeks later with the Summer Time Act.

Over the years, people have debated whether we should just leave the clocks alone and stick to one time all year round. So, what would actually happen if we didn't turn them back every autumn? Well, if we stayed on permanent summer time through the depths of winter, our evenings would certainly have a sliver more light. But the trade-off would be brutal in the mornings. Up here in t'North, and especially further up in Scotland, children would be trudging to school and folk would be travelling to work in pitch-black, icy darkness well past nine o’clock in the morning. Road accidents would rise, building sites and farms wouldn't be able to start safely, and that bleak, mid-winter gloom would hang over the start of every single working day. Turning the clocks back steals our afternoon light, but it gives us a fighting chance of seeing the sun come up over the valley when the day begins.

And truth be told, once you make peace with the dark evenings drawing in, there is something wonderfully comforting about this shift. It marks the turning of the year. The long, frantic summer days are behind us, and nature itself is telling us to slow down, batten down the hatches, and spend a bit of proper time resetting. It tells us: "Get down to the Old Bridge Inn and by those beautiful fires!"

That’s why Sunday afternoon is the absolute best time to lean into it. With that extra hour tucked safely in your pocket, there is nowhere finer to be than tucked up by a roaring, crackling fire in an old stone pub. Take off your boots after a brisk wander down the lanes, settle into a comfortable corner, and let the outside world rush on without you. Get the family together around the table for a proper Sunday roast, share a bottle or a couple of pints, tell a few tall tales, and just breathe. Use the quiet of the afternoon to switch your head off, leave the mental to-do lists for tomorrow, and recharge the batteries ready for whatever the new week throws at you. The nights might be getting darker, but in here, the lamps are low, the hearth is blazing, and the welcome is as warm as it’s been for seven hundred years.

Enjoy your extra hour today, you've deserved it, and if you’re looking for a spot by the fire to reset, you know where to find us. We've all been gifted an extra hour in the pub yippee (I hear my husband sing)... a gift that keeps on giving haha xx