6. Lakes, Cities and miscellany

The Bridge of Lune

So we finished our second long-distance path with virtually no rain, settled down in unusually warm (for England) beautiful evening sunshine with a bottle of wine

the end of the Dales Way

and some nibbles and enjoyed the views of the shadows lengthening across the landscape at the edge of the Lake District.   We were near Kendal and that night it poured down.

looking towards the Lake District from near the end of the walk

Near us was a young woman called Pearl who had a further day’s walking to

finish The Dales Way but was nursing two feet of blisters and lots of aches.  She’d been covering twenty miles a day carrying everything including a tent.  Now that really doesn’t sound like fun to me.  Heather gave her a lift back to the path in the morning, saving her a mile or so of road walking but leaving her with ten miles or so of lovely countryside to walk through, assuming she could see it. 

the perfect lunch spot

In our last few days on this trail we’d passed a church/post office combination which was a first for us and overall had seen a huge variety of stiles.  Now many of you will doubtless be saying to yourselves so what, but to us walkers they’re interesting even though they break the very helpful rhythm of a long walk.  Ladder stiles which cross a dry stone wall are very unusual in the south of England and can easily be 



eight feet high, while at the other extreme, squeeze

Squeeze Stile 

stiles, where two upright stones line a gap in a wall can be hardly wider than a leg.  Sometimes these have a tiny gate perhaps two feet wide and high included.  These are very awkward for someone carrying a large pack.  There are also stepping stone stiles which run up and over a wall where a number of long flat stones have been placed right through from one side of the wall to the other.  Fields are often small so there are sometimes annoyingly frequent breaks as a stile or kissing gate is navigated but it all adds to the beauty of this landscape.

This far north in England we’re in what was at one time land ruled by the Vikings and there are still a number of place names which have Norse origins.  One is Thwaite, which is Norse for ‘cleared land’ and I just cannot help visualising lisping Vikings.  “I thay, this lookth like a niyth thpot for a thettlement” is probably exactly what a Viking thounded, sorry, sounded like.  Makes them seem less terrifying but then the fact that they had words for cleared land is a bit of a clue that they were not solely the rampaging destroyers that popular mythology would have us believe.  Check it, their artwork is very impressive.  Later they colonised part of Western France, became the Normans and we had them back permanently in 1066.  I say them but actually it’s probably more accurate to say us considering how much effect the Norman Conquest had on the Great Britain of the time and how much genetic mixing ensued. 

Kendal

Back in the Lake District, which we knew would be heaving with tourists we looked eastwards to a range of hills called the Howgills which rise to 2000 feet.  Smoothly rounded and with few footpaths this isn’t a well known area and we decided we wanted to do some walking on them, booked several more nights on the campsite and then had several days of rain and mist.  Described by some writers as like a basket of Labrador puppies or sleeping elephants, my suggestion is bread dough rising.  We went walking anyway on a very wet day when I discovered that my new lightweight waterproof coat was not so much waterproof as porous.  I said once before that us walkers pass each other with a nod and greeting but there are exceptions and one is in heavy rain, when a stop and chat about the weather is acceptable if not de rigueur, while dog walkers always seem to stop and discuss dogs.

The Howgills in the distance

Piez Castle from the Isle of Walney

Our time in the north west ended with a visit to Barrow-in-Furness, definitely not a tourist destination but a place I wanted to see because I expected this old ship building town to be awful.  It turned out to be not so bad but then my expectations were low to begin with.  It has lots of Victorian brick housing plus a few of those grandly over the top buildings that Victorians were so fond of. Further west though was an area called the Isle of Walney which was joined by a spit of land to the mainland.   Walney was perhaps 15 miles long and it was unspoilt flat coastal land with a nature reserve at north and south ends.  We could see Blackpool Tower across the sea away in the distance to the south, close enough I thought.  On the way to and from Barrow we passed Ulverston, now in Cumbria but once in Lancashire, not due to some cataclysmic tectonic plate movement that nobody noticed but someone in an office redrawing the County boundaries in the 1970s.  Ulverston, birthplace of a very famous Hollywood Star.  Guess who ?   The answer is at the end of this blog and the prize is a self-administered warm glow.

By dint of a bit of time and location travel, we’re now back in Derbyshire on a

campsite next to a railway station an hour’s ride from Manchester and twenty minutes from Sheffield.   It’s a Sunday and we’re off to Manchester, not somewhere we know at all.   It’s a baking hot day with lots of people in the city centre and Manchester has a free bus service.  There’s a current collection of street art in the City which is a distributed collection of decorated large bee sculptures.  Colourful but odd. 

There’s a great Victorian Town Hall being restored which is one of those statements in stone of pride and belief that the Victorians were so keen on.  Not far away was an amazing place, the John Rylands Library, another Victorian statement but with a modern extension blended/melded with it extremely cleverly to make a beautiful multi-century building.    We enjoyed what we saw of Manchester but didn’t feel a great desire to return as we would have done with London.  Our way back to Piccadilly Station was along the Rochdale Canal, which could justifiably be called the back side of the city.

Film Star Clue :  Comedy

The following day was Sheffield which I thought was definitely underwhelming despite the location on a hilly site which should have helped it scenically.  This is supposedly one of the UK’s great cities, world famous for steel production.  Well, historically anyway, but it doesn’t even have a Tourist Information Office.  It is marked on the street maps but doesn’t exist any more.  How’s that for civic pride ?   Sheffield does at least have a very nice Botanical Garden with a smashing Glasshouse/Orangery along the north wall.   For all the history of Steel making, all we saw was a  small museum of finished steelware, not even all of it from Sheffield.  However, one horrifying thing we did find out was that in the mid-1850s adult life expectancy here was 27.  It wasn’t explained how this was calculated so I don’t know if it included death at or near birth and I would hazard a guess that this was mostly due to the pollution and dangers of the industrial revolution to the workers.  Now people complain about Health and Safety Regulations.

I want to finish this blog with a little something about what by now may be a

unique stile and it’s therefore unsurprisingly one I’ve never seen before.  It’s called a Clapper or Tumble Stile.  It looks like a section of barred fence with left,

centre and right vertical supports but the centre one is a pivot for the bars, which when pushed from above go lower allowing the operator (?) to step across.  At the other end a heavy counterweight on each bar returns each one to a horizontal position.   Gentlemen should definitely not let go of the bars when halfway across.  It seems to be called a Tumble Stile because an unwary walker, thinking it to be a mere fence will come a definite

tumble if he just steps on a bar to climb over.  This may seem a bit longwinded but we sought this stile out deliberately.  It’s at Charlecote, a National Trust property in Warwickshire and the woman on reception had never heard of it so we feared it no longer existed.   A NT volunteer showed it to us and even she was unsure exactly where it was, especially as it was pretty overgrown.   I’ve added two photos of Heather operating what I think is a fascinating piece of historic ingenuity.  The real reason we came to see it though was that the other attached photo taken from a book of Curious England shows Heather’s Grandfather Ernie Marsh climbing exactly the same stile sometime in the 1970s.

It was Stan Laurel