Last year's Lakes trip, just before this year's Lakes trip

Saturday 28 September to Saturday 5 October 2024

Ruth and I are about to set off for the Lake District, on Saturday morning. Ray and I went at around this time last year, and the weather was mainly good, but I can’t help noticing that Storm Amy is on the way. This image from the BBC distinctly includes Cumbria.

Also, the BBC weather forecast for next week doesn’t look fantastic, but I suppose Sunday onwards clears to one drop of rain rather than two.

Here’s a collation of notes from last year’s Lakes trip, as I yet again failed to blog about it at the time.

Where we stayed

Acorns, a duplex apartment that’s part of a complex on The Falls, a road off the Kirkstone Road on the eastern side of Ambleside. There were various mills in this area in the past. Further up The Falls there are some converted mill buildings.

View of the development that includes 'Acorns'

The living area at Acorns

I loved Acorns and submitted a relatively gushing (for me) review of it after our stay, and have booked it again for this year’s trip (it’s now being let via Lakeland Retreats, who did seem to have a significant presence in the area judging by a number of properties we walked past). The flat was lovely and very comfortable accommodation. It included a Bluetooth speaker (very useful) and an Alexa, which I probably wouldn’t have used but Ray was a bit more up for messing about with it. It did give us quite a pleasant jazz selection one evening. I feel no particular urge to get one though.

Acorns has a little balcony and although you can’t see Stock Ghyll from it as it’s down in a dip, you can hear the water, which I found relaxing.

Day 1: Hayes Garden World, Stock Ghyll Force and walk along country lanes

We started our first day with a suitably massive breakfast. Ray cracked into a pack of black pudding that he’d brought. I don’t care for it but had brought some Richmond skinless sausages, which I was equally keen to get started on.

Ray's black pudding

My skinless sausages

We went to Hayes Garden World, as I had an idea to get a pair of Crocs or similar for use on Acorns’ balcony and Ray decided he wanted new walking boots. Neither of us actually found what we were after, but we were distracted by the OTT Christmas display that was up. I was childishly amused by the genuine fake bits on this faux stag.

We went for a bit of a walk, initially taking a steep path up behind the Salutation Hotel and walked along Lower Gale, then turned up into the exclusive-looking Gale How Park. We followed a footpath that brought us out onto Stock Ghyll Lane. We walked into the woods and had a look at the falls.

Gale How Park

Stock Ghyll Force

Then onto Stock Ghyll Lane again further up, past the Victorian turnstile, and carried on up the lane. At Low Grove House we turned in and crossed a field, passing Roundhill Farm and eventually coming out onto the Kirkstone Road. We walked a short way down here and then returned to The Falls via a footpath through Thistly Wood, and Sweden Bridge Lane.

View from Stockghyll Lane

Looking careworn by a field

Some cute small sheep with horns

The part of this from the falls onward was following the ‘Stock Ghyll Force’ walk from Walks Around Ambleside.

Route of our walk; about three and a half miles

Day 2: Bowness and boat trip

The only rainy day of our stay, and even then it was more drizzle than lashing rain. We took the bus to Windermere and walked down to Bowness Pier, a walk of about a mile. I hadn’t been to either Windermere or Bowness in quite some time and had forgotten that it is actually a bit of a walk between the two, though the walk enabled us to call in at Stuart Sports, where Ray bought a new flask and I bought a pair of socks. I also spotted this adorable portable sandwich toaster – if I ever did that camping thing (it’s still a no) I might even have bought it.

Bowness is pretty tacky - it seems to be the Lakes' one tacky place. Which I guess is fair enough. The forecast had been for much heavier rain than it actually was; I think we’d have done more of a walk if we’d known it was only going to be light rain. However, the fun part was that we decided to take a boat back to Ambleside. I do love a boat trip. Here I am looking absurdly excited, even though it was raining.

Tiny island

Arriving at Waterhead

We had an OK-but-not-memorable lunch at the Waterhead Hotel, before walking back into Ambleside.

Ray back at Acorns, perusing Wainwright

What's this then? The John Lewis Partnership? Is this like a weekend place for staff?

Day 3: two walks from Grasmere village

Quite a strenuous day, this.

We took the bus to Grasmere and set off to walk up Helm Crag, a pleasingly-shaped pointy mini-mountain. This was a lovely walk with fantastic views at pretty much all points.

Looking ahead to Helm Crag

View from the path up

View from summit plateau

Technically speaking, the summit of Helm Crag is a craggy bit of rock called the Howitzer. I was not going to shimmy up that and was happy to count the grassy plateau as the summit. I think one of Ray's Wainwright books noted that Wainwright himself never scrambled up to the actual summit. This page gives instructions for how to scramble up it, if you're so inclined. There is apparently a pretty steep drop off the far side. Ray had a brief go but gave it up fairly rapidly.

Helm Crag elevation

Helm Crag route from Grasmere

We lunched in a café in Grasmere and then Ray persuaded me (at least, I'm blaming him at this stage) to tackle a second walk, to Easedale Tarn. This was a slightly longer walk than the first one, albeit not as steep. We left Grasmere in a north-westerly direction once again and then followed a path uphill alongside Sour Milk Ghyll to reach the tarn.

Easedale Tarn

Easedale Tarn is a "corrie" tarn, which I think means that it's in a bowl-shaped glacial hollow. It's a scenic spot. It's on this list of Lakeland wild swimming spots (not that I'll be doing any of that). My book Exploring Lakeland Tarns tells me that it's 69 feet deep and that in the 1930s, teas were served up there from a hut. That's long gone. Ray and I have been there twice and it's been a pretty quiet spot both times.

The route back

Getting to the tarn was fine; getting back proved a bit more of a schlep as it was over some waterlogged and uneven ground. The walk book describes the path as "vague and damp in places", which was about right though as I recall "damp" seemed a bit of an understatement.

Footbridge over Far Easedale Gill

Route of our Easedale Tarn walk

Both these were walks out of the above book. Both were between 4 and 5 miles, the Easedale one slightly longer.

Day 4: walk to Troutbeck via Skelghyll Woods

We started off along Old Lake Road and then took the steep and narrow Skelghyll Lane.

Rusting sign at the bottom of Skelghyll Lane

My fascination with the houses high up in Skelghyll Woods continues. Once again, we passed the clearly no-longer-used gates to a house called Skelgarth, and I photographed them again, a bit more overgrown this time. I don’t know why I wrote on the previous trip’s blog entry that I couldn’t find any existing house called Skelgarth, as one such came up readily on the Royal Mail address finder.

There are now only two driveway accesses that look current. We did some rootling around on the invaluable National Library of Scotland map resources, and found a 1970 map (snip below) that clearly shows a winding drive up to a house. It must have been quite steep, hence the bends I suppose, so maybe it was left to grow over for safety reasons.

Gates to Skelgarth, 2020

Gates to Skelgarth, 2024

Map showing old drive to Skelgarth

A bit of internet nosing suggested that Skelgarth and the two large houses either side of it are all in the ownership of Skelghyll Estates – or at least, were at the time we looked. The two bigger houses, Broad Ings and Skelghyll Woods (the top and bottom houses on the Google Maps snip; I assume Skelgarth must be the one in the middle) seem to have been let as holiday rentals in the past, and Broad Ings seems to be currently listed on AirBnB.

Path through Skelghyll Woods

We followed the path through Skelghyll Woods and then across farmland and down a lane to Troutbeck. I don’t think we walked into Troutbeck village, mainly because we’d already ascertained that the tea room was closed. We followed a bridleway, Wain Lane, down to the A591, passing Middlerigg Tarn. Exploring Lakeland Tarns told me that this tarn is artificial, and describes it as follows:

It is a fine, broad ornamental pond with swans a-swimming and fish a-leaping

We didn’t see any fish a-leaping, but did see a couple of swans.

Middlerigg Tarn from Wain Lane

The Lake District Visitor Centre at Brockhole was just across the road from where Wain Lane comes out, and we popped in thinking we’d get a cup of tea there, but popped back out again on encountering vast numbers of infant-school-aged children with their minders. We caught a bus back into Ambleside and had tea in the town instead.

Our route (about five miles)

Day 5: Red Screes via Scandale Pass

This was our 'big' walk of the week. We had, in fact, planned to do the Fairfield Horseshoe, but both wimped out of that one. Ray has done it before, but I hadn't and probably should have done but felt a bit lazy - though, in my defence, not too lazy to tramp up Red Screes. This was another walk out of the book with the orange cover.

We followed Nook Lane north to Low Sweden Bridge and then footpaths to the beautiful High Sweden Bridge.

High Sweden Bridge, behind trees

The path up through Scandale

The path through Scandale was lovely. After we turned right at the end of the valley to go uphill towards the summit of Red Screes, things got a little more gnarly as the ground was very wet and it was difficult to follow the path. We did, eventually, get to the top of the ridge, probably via a more circuitous route than we'd have taken in dry weather. There were a few people at the summit. This was a lovely day weather-wise; great views from the top.

Me at the summit of Red Screes

Red Screes Tarn

We followed the path back down suggested in the book, with Kirkstone Pass down to our left.

The route of our Red Screes walk. About eight miles.

Day 6: walk to Grasmere

Despite declaring the previous evening that we weren’t going to walk at all on the Friday, we did end up walking along Rydal Water and Grasmere into Grasmere village, a walk of about five miles. We left Ambleside via Rothay Park and the little road Under Loughrigg. Ray crossed these stepping stones over the Rothay that had been under water at the time of our previous visit in March 2023.

Rydal Water

Our route

We had tea and cake at Freda & Ray's in Grasmere village. In the evening, we went to Zeffirelli's, where we had dinner and saw the Sam Braysher Trio perform.

Dinner at Zeffirelli's

The Sam Braysher Trio

More books I have read

'Tokyo Ueno Station' by Yu Miri

On life: “There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.”

Tokyo Ueno Station is anchored in Ueno Park in Tokyo. The narrator appears to be dead, lingering in the park where he previously lived in an encampment of homeless people. It is strongly implied, though not actually made explicit, that he ended his own life in front of a train.

The narrator, Kazu, was the eldest of eight children from Fukushima prefecture. He got no education beyond elementary school as he had to go to work to help provide for his younger siblings. He came to Tokyo in 1963, aged 30, to work on the construction of the stadium for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, leaving his wife and two small children back in their home village, and subsequently spent long periods away from his family, only going home twice a year. Kazu’s son Kōichi dies aged 21 in his flat in Tokyo, of unspecified causes. Aged 60, Kazu retires from work and returns home, but his wife dies a few years later. In due course Kazu’s granddaughter moves in with him to take care of him but one day, aged 67, he leaves her a note and returns to Tokyo, where he starts living in Ueno Park, one of several hundred homeless people there.

The novel paints a vivid and sympathetic picture of homelessness. The homeless community in Ueno Park suffer repeated short-notice evictions – e.g. when the Emperor is due to drive past to visit one of the museums nearby – and have to dismantle their huts and leave the park, before returning to the park once the ban is lifted and having to reassemble everything. Evictions from Ueno Park evidently became more common when the Tokyo city government was bidding for the 2020 Olympics.

Why does Kazu leave home and go back to Tokyo? The notion of him feeling a burden to his granddaughter didn’t seem quite sufficient to make someone voluntarily choose homelessness. It’s probably more that he only knows hard work, living in basic quarters, and he has never been used to living a settled life in an ordinary home. “I could adapt to any kind of work; it was life itself that I could not adjust to.”

Tokyo Ueno Station was published in 2019. The novel includes a longish Author’s Afterword that  provides some interesting context. Yu Miri is one of Japan’s “resident Koreans”, born and raised in Japan but with South Korean citizenship. This ethnic Korean community intermittently experiences hostility from the Japanese and she writes of a feeling of having outsider status in Japan, something that she says has given her empathy with those such as Kazu who, for other reasons, exist on the margins of Japanese society. She writes of the phenomenon of poor young men like Kazu leaving their villages to seek employment as labourers, doing back-breaking work only to end up, when they are too old for labouring work, homeless in Tokyo and wandering the streets.

One reviewer quoted sums up Tokyo Ueno Station as "a harsh, uncompromising look at existential despair", which seems a reasonable description. It's very good though.

Footnote: Kazu’s family are practitioners of Pure Land Buddhism, something I had not heard of. There’s a remarkably tedious seven pages or so (in an otherwise non-tedious novel) devoted to the traditions of the sect and the names of temples and their founders.

'DallerGut Dream Department Store' by Miye Lee

The customers of the DallerGut Dream Department Store are asleep. Once people are asleep, they can go to the store to choose a dream, for which they “pay” in emotions afterwards. These emotions seem to be stored in the form of colourful bottled liquids, which are occasionally then drunk. No, I didn’t really get that bit either.

Penny’s hometown manufactures sleep products. Penny is a new employee at the DDDS – working there is coveted, so she is very pleased to have landed the job. Each floor of the department store sells a different type of dream. Given the choice of which floor of the store she wants to work on, Penny chooses the front desk, where she assists the experienced Weather. Behind the front desk is an Eyelid Scale, which predicts the visiting hours of regular customers. Once the eyelids stay closed, the store knows the customer will arrive soon.

There are a number of “dreammakers” who create the dreams sold in the store. Dreams from the ‘Big Five’ dreammakers are highly sought-after and expensive. Dreams are advertised before their release. Customers open the dreams to dream them. Dream payments are made with the customer’s post-dream emotion. The Dream Pay Systems software connects the customers’ dream payments to the safe.

I suppose it’s all meant as feel-good escapism. I don’t mind a bit of that, but I did think this was fairly mediocre. Discussing this book at Book Group, Claire admitted that she’d chosen it because she liked the colourful cover. Ali commented that the book read as though it had been written by AI, which was a tad harsh but I did see what she meant. Ruth kept drawing unfavourable comparisons with Roald Dahl, which I found a little odd but I think she had seen some loose similarities with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I hadn’t particularly, but I suppose maybe the sparkly multicoloured fantastical element. I don't get the sense that DDDS was written as a children’s book though.

I found the rendering into English of some of the dreammakers’ names irritatingly childish (Wawa Sleepland; Yasnoozz Otra; Babynap Rockabye) but maybe there are some cultural differences here – presumably the translator must have tried to create English equivalents in the same spirit as the Korean originals.

DallerGut Dream Department Store was first published in 2020, and in English in 2023, translated by Sandy Joosun Lee.

'Jennings and Darbishire' by Anthony Buckeridge

Mum’s friend Clemency recently offloaded a couple of tatty copies of books in the ‘Jennings’ series, and Mum passed on one each to Dave and me. This is a 1956 edition, with presumably the original cover, but mainly still intact.

The ‘Jennings’ series relates the doings of Jennings, his best friend Darbishire and their classmates in Form Three at Linbury Court Preparatory School, somewhere on the Sussex coast. Dave had a number of books in the series when we were kids, most of which I think I read as well as I always found them funny, and still do. Most of the ones Dave had were from the 1970s Collins reprint, with front cover photographs. The Wikipedia entry on the ‘Jennings’ series states that there were 24 novels in total.

The events of Jennings and Darbishire kick off on Jennings’ birthday, when he receives two presents that trigger the action of the rest of the book: a camera from his father and an Ideal Junior Printing Outfit from his Aunt Angela. Armed with these two things, Jennings decides to start a regular publication, the Form Three Times. Their attempts to generate material for the publication lead to various unfortunate events, or ‘bishes’ as the boys would say. A typical story arc: a misunderstanding with some French fishermen they are hoping to photograph leads to them having to smuggle raw fish back into school, which Jennings attempts to fry for breakfast in the school dark room, setting fire to a developing dish in the process. Caught by Mr Wilkins, Jennings attempts to hide the parcel of fish by stuffing it up the chimney in Mr Wilkins’ study, leading to convoluted attempts to get it out again before the master decides to light a fire.

Jennings and Darbishire was first published in 1954 and was - according to the Wikipedia entry - the fourth novel in the series.