Down your local: The Canalhouse, Canal Street

ANY list of Nottingham heroes is incomplete if it doesn't include Doug Scott, the Nottingham-born mountaineer most famous for being the first, along with Dougal Haston, to climb the southwest face of Mount Everest.

I thought of Doug recently while making my way to the gents in the Canalhouse. Said gents is located in what seems to be the attic.

To get there you hit a corner stairwell and climb to somewhere beyond the tree-line. Halfway up, I realised I'd neglected to pack an oxygen tank. Near the top, I'm pretty sure I bumped into a sherpa.

Okay, perhaps I'm being a tad melodramatic. But the men's bogs are way the heck up there (in a shocking display of reverse sexism, ladies' comfort breaks may be taken at a significantly lower altitude).

But if the worst complaint you have about a pub is a touch of the Himalayan when nature calls, you've stumbled onto someplace good.

The Canalhouse offers one of the finest pub experiences in the mixed bag that is the canalside. One of the best refurbished of the old industrial buildings in the neighbourhood, it usually has at least one canalboat parked in the small canal offshoot that gives it its name.

Patrons enter into a small bar on the far side of the private canal, then make their way over a small footbridge to the main pub. As pub conversation points go, it's better than some faux-Victorian tat on the walls.

The main bar takes advantage of its former industrial purpose with a large, uncluttered open area. Plenty of tables in the middle and traditional pub benches against the walls make clear that this is a proper boozer, not a vertical-drinking barn.

Following its takeover by Castle Rock, the local brewer and pub company seems to have worked its magic in the usual way, filling the bar with its own excellent ales as well as other finds from the national real ale circuit. The menu's stalwart-and-true pub grub – quality, straightforward and well-priced.

And yes, men in need of the loo face a sobering journey up the back stairs. Of course, Doug Scott once made his descent from a 24,000-foot mountain in Pakistan with two broken ankles. I'll stop complaining now.