Friday 10 August
It’s been another
great couple of days exploring Cumbria. Yesterday we took a drive up the
western side of Lake Conniston. It’s so pretty exploring the lakeside between
the trees. It was also extremely interesting as we held our breath while we
negotiated a host more 6’6” wide roads.
We stopped at a number of places,
discovered the joys of parking meters in the middle of nowhere, and hunted our
wallets and pockets for the correct change.
Brian and Kirsty
advised us to take a walk around Tarn Hows which we did and really
enjoyed. On our walk around we discovered that it wasn’t fungus growing on old
stumps, but coins. There’s an odd habit of sticking old coins in dead trees
around these parts.
We had lunch at an
excellent pub called The Drunken Duck,
recommended by Kirsty and Brian as well. The interesting name comes from a
story of the original owner one winter’s morning finding two ducks by her
doorstep. She plucked them and hung them ready to eat, when she noticed that
they were actually still alive. The story goes that after helping themselves to
some barrelled beer, they’d fallen asleep and had been temporarily frozen
alive. She promptly let them down and knitted them coats so that they would be
warm until their feathers grew again.
After a filling pub
lunch and a pint of beer each, we accidently drove past Beatrix Potter’s farmhouse
and headed down to the car ferry which would take us to Windermere. It’s an
easy and very cheap way to get across the lake without needing to drive right
around it. Still disappointed we’d
missed Beatrix’s house, we settled for the World of Beatrix Potter Attraction
with a nice English cup of tea to follow. We drove beyond Windermere to a park
and walked for a bit before heading back to Brian and Kirsty’s for another
delicious Brian-cooked dinner.
Saturday 11 August
We decided today that rather
than drive too far, we would rely on public transport. What better way to spend
a day than riding on a train and having a walk to see an old flour mill and the
remains of a Roman bath house. The nearest station to where we are staying in
Hallthwaites is Green Road, and it’s incredibly important that when you see a
train coming you wave very obviously, indicating that you want to be picked up.
We did this, and thankfully the driver was looking and it all unfolded
according to plan. We caught the standard wide-gauge train to Ravenglass and
then the narrow gauge train to Eskdale.
More about our train trip can be found here.
From Eskdale we walked a further ¾ of a mile to the
town of Boot and met Dave King, the town’s resident miller at the local flour mill.
We stopped at one of the local pubs for lunch and
sat in the garden. We met a couple with a Rottweiler named Pluto who was
holidaying with them for the weekend. We have discovered, on our travels around
the UK and Europe, that mostly, without question, you can bring your pet dog
into a pub, take it for a ride on a bus, and (I discovered today) bring it to
sleep with you at whatever hotel you decide to stay in. Dog kennels can’t make
very much money over here…
We called into at the Boot gallery, and wandered our way
back via the ruins of a 1st century Roman bath house next to some
abandoned paddocks which once served as
a barracks for thousands of Roman soldiers- at least 1900 years ago (difficult
to get one’s head around this…)
We hopped on the train back to Green Road and soon
after 6 we were back on the road and headed to a lovey county pub which served
the most exquisite menu. We rang my father who back in New Zealand is about to
celebrate his 85th birthday. He received from us, a very clear and
tuneful harmonised version of the Happy Birthday song. A lovely way to spend our final evening with
our good friends and gracious hosts Brian and Kirsty.
No comments:
Post a Comment