The plan was to cram in all the parts of
the UK that we hadn’t seen before, in the way that only Australians can. And by
that I mean, casually intending to spend seven days driving 1252km and
explaining to English colleagues who look at you like you’re fucking mad that
hello, it’s only 876km from Sydney to Melbourne. 1252km is but a scenic spin.
For LB that scenic spin meant detours
through the Lakes District and the Peak District, for me it meant the Yorkshire
Dales, Chatsworth House (see also: Peak District and latent Pemberley
fantasies) and Snowdonia in Wales.
I would love to have careened along some of
the picturesque roads we took but as it was, LB sat behind the wheel throughout
our entire English odyssey. Why? Well because my stupid Australian drivers
licence has expired and I’ve already renewed it once and they don’t let you do
it twice while overseas and I never bothered to get a UK licence and now,
because my Australian licence has expired if I want to get a British licence
I’d have to sit my learners. So, fuck that and no thanks very much #tedious.
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| Heading in to Keswick |
Anyway, that left me with the very
important job of holding the satnav and pre-emptively reading out all the
directions in order to be Helpful. And pointing out all available places along
the way to stop and wee and/or buy diet coke (the two may be related?)
Our first destination was the Lakes
District. Opting not to waste a day driving north, we caught the train to
Newcastle where we picked up our little Fiat 500 before scooting over to Keswick
through ambivalent clouds of hail and snow. Two weeks earlier this part of the
country suffered huge snowstorms and we weren’t honestly sure what would greet
us but thankfully it was just a lot of latent, frozen, already fallen snow.
Which made driving into Keswick quite enchanting.
 |
| Keswick |
Keswick, well Keswick is delightful –
unfairly marginalised, I think, by the postcard prettiness of Ambleside,
Grasmere and Windemere. I mean, hello, Keswick has a pencil museum! Booyah.
Our B&B, run by the delightful Pam and
Arthur, was a short walk from the centre of town, past the old picture theatre,
and a short walk again to the shores of Derwentwater, the third largest lake in
the eponymous district.
After an uninspiring dinner at the local
pub and a quiet night, our first and only full day in Cumbria was dedicated to
the nine miles of walking track that loop their way through lamb-strewn fields
and boggy marshes and rocky shorelines all the way around Derwentwater. It took
us four hours in total and I probably only whimpered (half-heartedly, I was tired…) for the last hour of it. The
bag of Percy Pigs I’d stashed in LB’s backpack helped with flagging energy at
several points along the way.
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| Heading off. 10 minutes down, 3 hours 50 minutes to go |
It was a pretty special way to pass the
morning and the views throughout – up towards the snow scattered mountains and
out across the lake – were really quite breathtaking. And there’s something
reassuringly human about the obligatory exchange of pleasantries with every
other walker you encounter. A little nod, a casual “good morning” – a ritual of
civilised exchange that says “aren’t we wonderful, out in nature, connecting
with nature, not out being my normal prattish self behind the wheel of my expensive
Range Rover.”
But the best bit about all that walking? The
guilt-free gorging of the chocolate covered peanut brittle we found in
Keswick’s Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe on the weary way back to our B&B. Win and
win again.
We spent the rest of the afternoon poking
about Ambleside, Grasmere and Windemere. All very pretty, all very geared
towards the hikers, bikers, sailors and general outdoorsy types who come to
Cumbria not for the chocolate covered peanut brittle. What I really wanted to
do was the find the churchyard where the memorial to Kurt Schwitters lay but a
frustrated google search with zero 3G made the task near-impossible.
 |
| Derwentwater. We walked all the way around that. |
In truth I’m not sure how well I would have
gone anyway trying to explain the historical significance of Dada and
Schwitters’ Merz collages to a Lovely Boy who only wanted to go searching for
hot chips.
Another quiet night and then it was Good Friday, and you know what, it really was. We spent the day driving through the very pretty Yorkshire Dales, detouring to Aysgarth to see the falls made famous in Kevin Costner’s execrable Robin Hood. You know the scene I’m talking about – the one where we meet Christian Slater for the first time…
 |
| Achingly pretty Yorkshire Dales |
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| Aysgarth Falls, Yorkshire |
Continuing to wind our way through the
Dales, we had a late lunch in the very sweet market town of Grassington before
pushing on to Skipton, another lovely market town, this one with a castle. We
didn’t go to the castle – we went to the pub and sculled G&Ts while
admiring the authentically quirky décor (ok, I admired the décor, Lovely Boy
read the BBC sports page in a rare spot of 3G reception.) But still, it was
lovely. The hotel we stayed at was not
so lovely, being nauseatingly over-deodorised to compensate for the lingering
smoke inhalation suffered by the upholstery and carpet of guests past. It wasn’t
our greatest night.
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| Spotted in the pub. I really, really wanted to steal it... |
But Saturday, Saturday was another lovely
drive, another physical exertion, I mean, excursion, and a stay in the charming
Old Hall Hotel in the spa town of Buxton. Before we got to our digs in Buxton
though (where Mary Queen of Scots also stayed apparently) we went to explore
the Monsal Trail. What used to be 13 miles of active railway line is now a busy
bike and walking path that weaves its way through some of the prettiest parts
of the Peak District and through a few old tunnels too.
 |
| Heading through the Yorkshire Dales en route to the Peak District |
I’d read about the trail in my research
leading up to the trip, being particularly enamoured with the famous, quite
beautiful, Monsal Viaduct. The plan was to rent bikes for a couple of hours,
pootle along, see what we see and then turn around, pootle back and head to
Buxton.
I hadn’t figured on the snow. When the guys
in the bike rental shop at Hassop Station, masters of the understatement,
mentioned that we might encounter some further along the track we took that to
mean, “oh, won’t that be pretty!” Had they explained that by “further” they
meant, “50m give or take” and that by “snow” they meant unending frozen drifts
and ponds of sludge, well, we might have skipped the bikes and just walked.
 |
| The Monsal Trail |
Trying to a bike ride through slushy snow and
ice and mud while dodging people and perilous drops down into the woodlands is
something I could have just pretended to have done. I really didn’t need to actually
do it. The why not is reasonably obvious…
Because I ended up pushing/dragging the bloody
bike most of the way and when I wasn’t pushing/dragging I was peddling
furiously to a not-so-internal soundtrack of “fuck. FUCK. fuckfuckFUCK. Fuck
this. Oh for fuck’s sake. Fucking hell. fuckfuckfuckfuckFUCK.” It was pretty
fucking ridiculous to be honest.
And in the end, biking over the Monsal Viaduct
is well and good, but if you can’t see the viaduct for standing on it, what’s
another snowy valley at this point?
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