Qualla: Ringlestone Inn

Ringlestone Inn: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Florence Gasking, known to everyone as Ma, ran the Ringlestone Inn with her daughter Dora from 1958. They are remembered, locally, for two things. The first was a shotgun, which they used to inspect arriving customers and dispatch any they did not like. The second was a series of secret knocks, speakeasy-style, that regulars needed to gain entry. Their behaviour, the histories politely note, may have originated in an incident when the inn was overwhelmed by around three hundred bikers. Some pub stories grow in the telling. This one, somehow, grew narrower.

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Ringlestone Inn: The Ring of Stones

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The hamlet of Ringlestone - originally Rongostone, meaning "ring of stones" - predates the Norman Conquest. It appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 and in the Kent Hundred Rolls of 1274. The name evolved through Rongoston, Renglestone (1822), and finally to Ringlestone in 1867. T...

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Ringlestone Inn: From Hospice to Cooperage

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The original building was a hospice belonging to the church - a place of rest for monks travelling between religious houses, who farmed the surrounding land. Around 1539, in the aftermath of Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries, the monks left. They were probably imprisone...

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Ringlestone Inn: Highwaymen and Smugglers

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For the next century and a half, travellers on the road between London and Kent stopped at the inn for refreshment. Samuel Cooper, the 17th-century portrait miniaturist whose painted likenesses of Oliver Cromwell and Charles II survive in the Royal Collection, is said to have vis...

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Ringlestone Inn: The First Shot of the Great War

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At least from 1901 until his death in 1905, the innkeeper was Henry Brooks Bates. In 1913, Charles Alfred Rayfield took over - and his son, Charles "Gunner" Rayfield, became part of British military folklore. Gunner Rayfield is said to have fired what may have been the first Brit...

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Ringlestone Inn: Closed, Sold, Reopened

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2005, the Kent brewers Shepherd Neame - whose Faversham brewery has been operating since 1698 - purchased the inn. By May 2018, it had been closed and was being prepared for auction, the latest casualty of unforgiving rural pub economics. The interior, an EastEnders film crew ...

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