If you walk north along Narrowgate in Alnwick, you will come to a white building just before a bend in the road. You might stop at the door and look at the A frame or the menu on the wall and a strange collection of dirty, dusty bottles in the window might catch your eye.
Don’t take the presence of these bottles as a sign that the staff are slack at their job because they’re not. These bottles have been sitting there for about two hundred years and will remain there for some time to come sealed off from the rest of the pub in between two ancient window panes.
This is the Curse of the Dirty Bottles.
Originally named Ye Old Cross Inn, the building has been a pub for at least two hundred years. Legend tells that in the early years of its life as a pub, the then innkeeper was clearing the dirty bottles from the window. According to his widow, he dropped dead right there and then on the spot and she warned that if anyone who tried to move or touch the bottles in the future would suffer the same fate.
The tale is so firmly embedded in local folklore that the pub became known everywhere as The Dirty Bottles.
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