We don’t go to the Lake District enough. Less than two hours from home, it’s a viable day trip and easy weekend break, but we seem to have barely noticed that fact. So it was on the must-do list for this year, yet it has still taken until T to manage it. A prior engagement means we can’t camp over as we’d have liked, so bright and early on Saturday morning we are proceeding purposefully up the M6 in search of breakfast. We had planned to stop at the famously not-as-crap-as-you’d-expect Tebay services, but a quick look at the map reveals that it is further North than we need go, so instead we find ourselves at the badly renamed Lancaster Services (Forton) at 8:30am. You would recognise Forton. It’s one of the earliest motorway services and has an iconic tower like a spaceship squatting next to the Northbound carriageway. It’s an icon of optimistic sixties Britain – young upwardly mobile couples would climb in their Ford Zephyrs and drive out there for a steak dinner overlooking the motorway. These days though listed it’s unused – defeated by modern fire regulations – so you get a dingy Costa coffee downstairs instead. Baulking at spending the monthly food budget on coffee and bacon rolls, we move on feeling slightly let down by the jet age.
We eat in Kendal and fill rucksacks with lunch provisions before driving into the hills. Dave is parked up at our destination, Troutbeck just outside Windermere. For we are going to try and get children to willingly climb a fell. OK, they’ve been up an Alp this summer, but there are no chairlifts here, so we are reduced to chocolate bribery instead. It takes some time to gather all the gear together. It is a beautiful day, and we are simply walking up a hill and back down again, so most of what we’re packing is ridiculously redundant. But basically I’m scared of twisting an ankle and then being embarrassed when mountain rescue come for me. I want to able to point at my OS map, compass and waterproofs so that they don’t think I’m one of the fools you read about in the news who go up Helvellyn in February in their pants.
I’m not sure the kids would agree, but the climb quickly proves worthwhile as we emerge from the pretty valley and are greeted by spectacular views across Windermere to the rolling fields beyond, and even a sliver of sparkling silver sea in the far distance. The sun and clouds are doing that thing that usually only happens in Victorian landscape paintings, and shafts of sunlight are picking out fields and the extremely free-range livestock dotted around the hills. Though looking up and outwards is rewarding, it also rapidly proves unwise as there is a lot of bog up here. Footwear that was supposed to be waterproof turns out to mainly be good at keeping water inside, and children become fairly miserable. I do remember how they feel. I don’t really understand how trudging around the countryside seems such a great use of time now that I’m pushing forty, yet seemed such a shocking waste of a weekend when I was little. The kids do brighten though when we get to the summit and break out the lunch. Alex also cheers up when I point out that his feet can’t actually get any wetter now, so it won’t get worse. After lunch, a short walk along the ridge and through more bogs brings us to Wansfell Pike and the best view of the lot. Then it’s a more cheerful descent on a better path back down into Troutbeck and a welcome beer at the Mortal Man. Despite rather overselling itself as the best beer garden in England, it is a nice place for a pint and to enjoy the sensation of dry socks. Meanwhile, the wet footwear festers in Dave, which we will come to regret very shortly.
Refreshed, we drive a mile or so down the valley (with all the windows open) to Townend where there is a small National Trust property. In contrast to the usual stately pile, Townend is a modest farmhouse, though not quite as modest as it first seems. Owned by the Browne family for more than 400 years, it is anything but rustic. Whitewashed outside, on the inside it’s all intricately carved dark oak. One of the family was obsessed with it and went through the house whittling everything. Then there are the paintings – mainly of sheep. And best of all a fabulously well stocked library. Then, as now, culture did permeate out to the sticks whatever the London urbanites might have thought. The place is fascinating, candlelit and fire warmed for added atmosphere and the volunteers are lovely.
After the day spent in the peaceful backwaters of Troutbeck, our tea stop in Bowness comes as a shock. Wall-to-wall tourists milling aimlessly around the steamer quays and doing the sort of ill-advised things tourists do, such as feeding swans out of their hands. We stop to watch this for a while, but sadly no one gets eaten, so we find a quiet corner for coffee and very good cake. Claire stocks up on mint cake and Alex sees the exact Lego set he wanted to spend his birthday money on. To obtain this requires the assistant to crawl into the window of the shop and retrieve the last box from the highest and furthermost corner of the display. They dither around for a bit, clearly hoping I’d go away, but I don’t as I reckon it’s surely not too much to ask in exchange for sixty quid, and the set has Lego sharks in it. To their credit, once the box is out of the window they are friendlier, perhaps flushed with a sense of victory at having hardly stepped on anything.
As we are more exhausted than we have any right to be, given that it wasn’t that long a walk, and we are also full of cake, we set off South. Knowing that we can’t quite get back in time for dinner, and that Forton can no longer supply us with a steak dinner in the sky, the final T of the day is fated to be the Trafford Centre, which no one should have to go to ever. Over disappointing but very earnest burritos, we agree that the Lakes are lovely and we need to go back, maybe even next weekend.
SoupyDave 