16.5.11

We had hoped for better weather, but  our pleas were unanswered. Freezing rain and gloom, both within and out of the campervan. 

We headed north through Windermere, Ambleside, stopped for gingerbread in Grasmere,

Gingerbread Shop in Grasmere

and continued on to Keswick (don’t pronounce the “w”).  We spent a bit of time looking at winter woollies on sale, bought some warm socks for adults, and some nylon over-trousers for Hilary. Then we went to the puzzle world. Very similar to the one in Wanaka (as I remember it 20+ years ago) with illusions,

Me defying gravity

 

One of those cool, "it is two different things", pictures



A hidden picture within a picture. The metal cylinder distorts the reflection.In this case the large picture is reduced and reshaped to reflect a man's face



One ofmany holograms

puzzles, holograms, distorting mirrors, anti-gravity rooms etc.  Fun, but a long way to travel for the experience. I stocked up on groceries while the others finished up in the puzzle area/shop.

We went back to the camper, all very grumpy, and short tempered.

We drove on to Cockermouth next, a further 8 miles or so, heavy drizzle and low cloud, very cold but beautiful, greens, browns, waterfalls… rocks, sheep of all different shapes and shades, dry stone walls, ….

Hilary and I went to Wordsworth’s house and gardens,

Hilary writing with a quill.

Interesting spices, and sugars etc. in the pantry

The garden and back of the house

Hilary with muslin butterfly net

The front of the house

Pretty irises at the front of the house

while Di stayed in the van and did some computer work.( We are having trouble connecting to the internet, our dongle doesn’t seem to find the appropriate waves in the sky, I would have thought UK was compact and populated enough to have coverage anywhere, but not at the campsites we seem to choose, and not here, in a car-park in the Grizedale Forest near Hawkeshead (Beatrix Potter country)).

Anyway Hilary and I spent an hour or so looking at the house, with a very quick skirt into the gardens to see the chickens and plantings. In 2009 there were huge floods in the area, there were signs up showing the water levels in the property at the peak of flood, very hard to fathom where it came from, metres above the normal flow of the river. There were also videos and eyewitness accounts of the floods. The house wasn’t damaged thankfully, there was enough warning to enable the workers to carry all the treasures higher, and the waters only filled the basement. I think it affected the garden, but gardens bounce back pretty quickly within a few seasons usually.

We wound our way back to the campsite made delicious soup for dinner, and hopped into our beds.

The Hawkeshead Ferry

Today as I said we went to Beatrix Potter territory. The weather forecast had implied it would be OK in the morning, with showers coming in later in the day, maybe a high of 15. It would have made a good Tui advert. It was vaguely OK, it did stop drizzling at times, but still very gloomy (this time only outside the van), so we tried to get an early start hoping to enjoy the best of the day, out doing things. We drove to Windermere and caught the barge ferry across the Lake £4.30 for the 10 minute ride. I think it should have been £7.60 and I gave that to the bloke but he returned the excess. He may have been embarrassed when he leaned in the window and said, “Bonjour” (our number plates) and I replied, “Gidday”.  The barge/ferry thing is quite interesting, it runs on 2 pulleys, either side (port and starboard) on large blue ropes which stretch from one shore to the other.


 It is so graceful and quiet that we were well on our journey before any of us noticed the shore on the other side getting closer.  I’m not sure how it works exactly because the pulleys seem to be near the surface and yet sail boats and other pleasure craft were passing over them unencumbered. 

Hill Top

Beautiful lilly

Close up of lilly, with my old hand holding it.

The local pub, picture from ??? book

Ginger and Pickles' shop

We drove straight to Hill Top in Near Sawrey, which is a house Beatrix owned (she bought it with the proceeds from her first book, “Peter Rabbit”.) Hilary was given a copy of “Samuel Whiskers” to refer to during her tour, as many of the pictures from that particular book were painted by Beatrix of views/furniture/features in the house.  The guide also took delight in pointing out 3 large rat holes created in the kitchen by some of the 97 rats that Beatrix and her kitten killed in the first year of her ownership and habitation.  It was these characters and their relatives who inspired Samuel and his wife Anna-Maria who captured Tom Kitten and tried to make him into a rolly-polly pudding.  The dressing table that Moppet accessed to find clothes to dress Tom Kitten and his sisters was also there just as it appears in the book (Tom Kitten) which was on a chair opened to the illustration for reference. There were a few other pictures too, out the window up the road and roof-tops, and the landing and clock on the stairs. Of particular delight though were the china cabinet with models/of the characters, and the dolls’ house with the ham on the plate that Hunca Munca broke and the other food in that book (The Two Bad Mice).  

The garden was lovely in a green, interspersed with a splash of colour sort of way. Cottagey, not a formal precise garden, very much a useful vegetable garden which rabbits would surely enjoy visiting. Some gorgeous aquilegias and a very interesting lily, flowering pale lilac and white wisteria…

From here we drove towards Hawkshead, we intended going to the Beatrix Potter Gallery but Hilary was ambivalent and Di and I had been before and were happy enough to miss it. Instead we drove to Grisedale Forest where we sat in the van drinking soup and eating bread and cheese and whatever else we had that took our fancy.

Rather than taking the ferry back across the lake we decided to drive around the long way. We had seen a write up about a bobbin mill down that way that was owned by English Heritage which took our fancy so headed that way. More pretty scenery, narrow roads, and drizzle.

We stopped at the bobbin mill, (Stott Park Bobbin Mill) and did a guided tour.

One of the storage areas with the logs seasoning.

The mill was built in 1835 and ceased production in 1971 when the production of plastic bobbins made this factory unproductive. All the machinery at that stage was still the original, and this is what is in the museum now.  They produced bobbins (260 different sized and shaped ones) predominantly for the linen mills in the area, but also made them for woollen mills, fuse wire, and other electrical wires.

Some of the 260 different bobbins produced at the mill

Some of the different "bits" used for cutting the "blocks" out of the "cakes"

The reason they set it up here was partly because that was where the market was and also because they had the water here to run the machinery (turbines to run the belts, and steam engine) and also the trees to use for the actual bobbins. They used birch, sycamore, alder and ash in the production the latter three being used fresh from the forest, but the birch needing to “season” for a year out in the big shelters. Boys as young as 8 and nine worked here, the first job they had (for a few years until they were ready for the next stage) was to strip, with a sharp knife, a few slices of bark off each log, partly to make the logs/branches more rounded but also to allow the wood to dry evenly so they didn’t split.

The logs were sliced into “cakes” a round a few inches thick depending on the length of bobbin wanted, and then these “cakes” were “blocked” by hand. Blocking involved working with a machine with sharp teeth (a bit like and apple corer) which rotated at 3000rpm to punch/cut out rounds. The men would work 12 hour shifts doing this, making about 10,000 in  a day. They were paid by “the gross” (144), but most wouldn’t be able to count very well. So long as they could count to 12 though they were OK because they would put every 12^th one aside, and once they had 12 to the side they knew they had a gross, and the tallyman would come and put a notch in his tally stick for them. There was a saying related to this but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. One I do remember is the term “knocking off” at the end of the day. This comes from the method of stopping the big saws at the end of the day’s work. The saws ran by a belt system and didn’t have an on/off switch, so in order to stop the blades the operator would use a leave to knock the belt off the part of the belt mechanism which was connected to the cogs, onto a free spinning wheel, in effect stopping the blades working.

                                        By pushing the lever in front of Hilary, the conveyor belt is "knocked off" the working wheel onto the free spinning wheel.

Wood shavings in the background were allowed to accumulate to waist depth, to keep the workers warm.

 One of the barrels the bobbins were waxed in

Huge baskets were filled with finished bobbins, and loaded onto horse and carts which were waiting outside, to be taken to the mills in the area.

Some unfinished bobbins, waiting to be smoothed and waxed

The mill

Another term was “happy hour” which is nothing to do with pubs at all but comes from the lacquering process. Most of the bobbins were finished by putting them into a big drum which had chips of beeswax added, and then the drums were rotated for an hour or so until the wood was coated with wax. However those being used for the woollen mills had to be lacquered.  The lacquer was mixed with methylated spirits and applied to each bobbin. Apparently the fumes were quite intoxicating and so the job was left until the last hour on a Friday because of its effects on the workers, hence the term “happy hour”. 

The guide said that because it was so dusty with all the sawing and sanding going on, they worked with the doors open, even in mid-winter so it was freezing. One way they kept warm was to leave all the shavings on the floor, they had them at least waist deep with just channels dug out so they could move from place to place. This helped in one way with safety in that the channels kept the workers away from the fast moving belts and saws, but I’m not sure how they coped with OSH when it came to risk management and fires? 

We all found this mill and the tour really interesting, something a bit different, not all commercialised, and an authentic worker (David) who operated one of the lathes for us who worked in a similar mill until 1984 (and looks as though he should have been retired then) and spoke like a local.

Peter's descendant

Scenes around Fell Foot Park

After the mill we headed back to the campsite, but stopped for an hour or so at a park called Fell Foot Park, where we boiled up a cup of tea, I fought with the cosmos to get internet access, Hilary painted and Di read up about Beatrix Potter. I went for a small stroll through the park, just next to the lake, steam train going past, white swans, yachts at anchor, rhododendrons in bloom, many of Peter Rabbits descendants at pasture. 

This gloomy cold weather is really impacting on our ability to exercise (or should I say, our willingness) and looking at the 10 day forecast, unless we head back to the Continent quickly we will have more of the same for the forecasted future. At this rate I think our sojourn to Scotland may be curtailed. I don’t think it is good for anyone’s mental health to be cooped up in a small van (comparative) with other people for days on end with no chance of respite.