A HISTORIC pub in Okehampton that has been shut for nearly ten years is set to open its doors once again in the New Year after a deal was sealed this week.

Business partners Steve Ticknell and Geoff Cawse of The Cask House Pub Company exchanged contracts on The Plume of Feathers with sellers the Wellington Pub Company late on Tuesday afternoon (November 21).

This is the first joint pub venture for Mr Ticknell and Mr Cawse, who live locally to Okehampton. They are sinking their pensions to restore the building, which needs replastering and rewiring, new floors and a new kitchen.

They hope to complete the sale on December 12 and say they will start work on that day to get enough work done to have the pub on Fore Street open on January 27. Food will be provided from the end of February.

The news, which they announced on Facebook, has been greeted with jubilation in the town, where the boarded up pub has become an eyesore in recent years.

‘We are very excited and very pleased and the community seems to be coming around and backing us enormously,’ said Mr Cawse. ‘We’ve had builders, plasterers and electricians come forward and offer their services, a lot of them for free, which is quite amazing. It has been such an eyesore for so long people just want to see it resurrected.

‘Steve and I first looked at buying it seven years ago and it has been up and down with various people involved because the state of the building dictated that we would have to gather finances to buy it.’

He said the purchase had been a long process, but they were determined not to give up.

‘Every time we drove past and saw how bad it was looking and how it was deteriorating, we’d think something had to be done because it used to be a great pub. When we posted the news on Facebook at 5pm on Tuesday it was shared by 6,000 people, which is brilliant for a little town like Okehampton.

‘We’ve told the town council that the first thing we will do when we complete on December 12 is take the shutters down and get the front looking a bit less like a hovel in time for Christmas.’

The pub, parts of which date back to Medieval times, is currently without electricity so the purchasers have only ever seen it by torchlight.

They plan to do the building project in two stages, as the front of the building is more structurally sound than the back.

Mr Cawse, who has an architectural background and extensive experience in pub fitting, said: ‘The pub suffered badly from burst pipes about six years ago which went unnoticed for months and flooded the building throughout so that has created a lot of problems for us to resolve.’

They are planning to convert the public bar into a pizzeria, with a pizza oven, to be open by the end of February, and will stock an extensive range of local beers, all from the barrel.