I have driven past the Ostrich Inn for more than thirty years without stopping. It was just an old building on the High Street, and I never gave it much thought. It was not until I started walking around Colnbrook properly, rediscovering the village I thought I already knew, that I realised what I had been driving past all that time. A pub founded in 1106. Over nine hundred years old, and still standing.
My first visit was not planned as anything more than a quick look. I had been writing about Colnbrook’s history and wanted to see the inside of the building I had described. I asked permission to film and take photographs, and spent the visit recording what I could. It was useful, but it was rushed. I saw the beams, the pictures on the walls, the information boards, but I did not sit down. I did not stop long enough to feel anything.
So I went back.
The second time, I went with no camera and no plan. I bought a non-alcoholic Guinness and sat by the window. The pub was not busy. My side of the room was separated from the other guests by a low wooden partition, and for a while I had the space almost to myself.
Sitting With Nine Hundred Years
That was when the building started to open up.
The first thing I noticed properly was the silence. Not complete silence — there were voices from the other side of the partition, the odd creak from above — but a quietness that felt older than the noise around it. The beams overhead were dark and heavy, more than nine hundred years old. A large fireplace sat in one corner, unlit but still warm-looking, the kind of hearth that must have drawn people to it for centuries. The walls in places looked slightly crooked, as though the building had settled into its own shape over the years and decided that straight lines were not worth the trouble.
I sat there and tried to imagine the people who had sat where I was sitting. Not the tourists or the Sunday lunch crowd, but the travellers from centuries ago — the ones who had ridden seventeen miles from London and stopped here because Colnbrook was as far as a day’s journey would take them. Coaching inn guests, merchants, highwaymen. I thought about how the village must have looked then, how small it must have been compared to this huge inn. There may have been very few buildings at all. The Ostrich would have dominated everything around it.
The Darkest Story in the Building
And then there was the other history. The one that makes the Ostrich unlike any other pub in the country.
In the seventeenth century, a landlord named Jarman built a mechanical trapdoor in the Blue Room upstairs. Wealthy guests would be placed in a bed rigged above the kitchen. In the night, the bed would tip, dropping the guest into a boiling cauldron below. Jarman would take their money and dispose of the body. His final victim, a man named Thomas Cole, is said to still haunt the building. I was not allowed into any of the guest rooms on my visit, which was disappointing, but perhaps understandable. The Blue Room is part of the inn’s story that most visitors come to hear about, and standing in the corridor outside it, with the old floorboards creaking under my feet and the walls leaning slightly inward, it was not difficult to believe that something of that story still lingers.
I walked along the corridor and up a set of rickety wooden stairs that felt as though they might give way at any moment. The rooms stood on either side, including the main suite, known as the King Suite. Some of the old character had been softened by modernisation and safety requirements, but the bones of the building were still visible. The wooden beams, the uneven floors, the low ceilings — all of it reminded me that this was not a building pretending to be old. It simply was.
Being daytime, I did not feel anything that I could call a ghost. But I kept returning to the same thought: nine hundred years. Nine hundred years of feet on these stairs, voices against these walls, lives passing through these rooms. I have always been drawn to old buildings, and the Ostrich is the oldest I have ever been inside. If I could spend a night here, I would. Whether or not the ghosts are real, the atmosphere earns the reputation.
What I Nearly Missed
Back downstairs, I finished my drink by the window and watched people walk past on the High Street. I wondered how many of them knew what they were walking past. I had driven past it myself for thirty years without stopping. It took slowing down, sitting still, and actually looking to understand what was there.
The Ostrich did not change anything for me. But it reminded me of something I keep learning on these walks: the places you think you know are often the ones hiding the most. You just have to stop long enough to notice.
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