Cumbria miscellany

Let's take today chronologically.  The Bridge at Wetheral, in better weather than two days ago.

The house in Castle Carrock, where we lived for about three months when I was three (and where, to the best of my knowledge, I watched TV for the first time: Andy Pandy, The Flowerpot Men, and a much more fascinating Science-for-Schools program about atoms and molecules): that front porch is new, and it looks far better than I remembered.

Talkin Tarn, where my parents tried to teach me to swim.  It was VERY COLD.

Ditto.

Brampton: our local town, which - since it looks depressing now, must have gloomed my mother inordinately in the late 50s.  But I don't know that I ever knew that Dickens had been here.

The fabulous Burne-Jones windows in the Philip Webb church of St Martin's, Brampton.  Worth the visit.

And here, after a long and winding and beautiful (so far as I could see) drive past Ullswater and over a wriggly mountain pass, the view from our room, looking down onto Windermere;

and two views from the walk I took us on up the hill behind.  I promise - according to the Ordnance Survey map, there were paths.  It's just that they were a bit bracken-covered.  And: Alice learned the valuable lesson that dock leaves can calm down nettle stings.  Copious apologies were given by me: I was over-keen in reprising my youth as a mountain goat.