I have never been to the Lake District, so when my husband
was spending a few days there for work, I took the opportunity to join him at
the weekend. My work schedule meant that
I got to Penrith late on Friday night and had to leave again on Sunday morning,
so the idea was to have a leisurely day.
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| Castlerigg Stone Circle |
And so I did. But I still managed to see two historic
houses, a pencil museum and a prehistoric stone circle, and browse a couple of
secondhand bookshops.
We started with breakfast in a
café in Penrith which had a display of knitted tea cosies in the window. We
pushed open the door and walked in to find it full of elderly customers who all
fell silent and looked at us. We held
our nerve and went in search of the additional seating upstairs, which turned
out to be entirely unoccupied until we arrived. The menu here was very
traditional: for breakfast the choice was full English, ‘small’ cooked
breakfast or toasted teacake. None of
your fancy croissants or hipster-pleasing porridge here. The ‘small’cooked
breakfast included a fried egg, two sausages, two rashers of bacon and two hash
browns, so I dread to think what the full version was like. But their filter
coffee was delicious, and at £1.20 a mug, half the price it would be in London
(or the trendier place we later found for lunch).
We explored the town a little. St
Andrew’s church is surrounded by attractive Georgian houses, but the church
itself, which was rebuilt in 1720-22, incorporating a medieval tower, has
something faintly reminiscent of a Victorian factory about it. We found an
excellent secondhand bookshop nearby. Luckily, I had no room in my suitcase for
excessive book purchases.
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| Kitchen, The Wordsworth House |
We drove along the A66 to
Cockermouth in order to visit the Wordsworth House and Garden, the birthplace
and childhood home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, presented by the National
Trust as it would have been in the 1770s when they lived here with their
parents. The dining table was set with
typical dishes, and in the kitchen a costumed maid was bustling about and offering
samples of Cumberland Rum Butter to try.
Upstairs, in one room there was an outbreak of the painting of
quotations on walls that has broken out in the heritage industry recently. This
took the form of poetry on the subject of ‘home’, with excerpts from the poems
of Wordsworth, Neil Simon and McFly among others! Outside was a very impressive kitchen garden
– with free samples of apples to take away.
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| Cumberland Pencil Museum |
Exploring Cockermouth afterwards
we found another excellent second hand bookshop, before deciding to drive back
to Keswick for lunch. We parked in a car park by the former Cumberland Pencil
Factory, where the world’s only pencil museum is located. After a lunch of a meat platter (smoked duck,
scotch egg, beef, sausage and pickles) at Treeby’s Café and Gallery we decided
to investigate. Pencil production began in the Keswick area in 1832 because of
local source of graphite in the Borrowdale Valley. We paid our £4.50 and were
handed our ‘tickets’, which doubled as complimentary pencils. It’s a small museum explaining about discovery
of graphite and the invention of the pencil (by the French), modern production
methods and the history of the Cumberland factory and products. During World
War II some of the managers did extra secret shifts at night in order to produce special pencils with a secret
compartment just large enough to contain a tightly-rolled map and tiny compass.
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| St Bega's churchyard |
Having come to the Lake District,
we felt that we really needed to see a lake (or mere or water), so drove around
Bassenthwaite Lake and came across Mirehouse, a historic house which happened
to be open, so we decided to visit. The house was built in 1666 by the 8th
Earl of Derby. He sold it to his agent Robert Gregg in 1688 - the only time it has been sold. It has been passed on through inheritance
ever since, and has been in the hands of the Spedding family since 1802. James Spedding (1808-81) was a scholar who
devoted most of his life to the study of Bacon and whose friends included
Tennyson, Thackeray, Carlyle and other literary figures of the period. It’s a
beautiful house. We didn’t much time to explore the grounds, but did manage to
dash down to the 10th century St Bega’s church by the lake. There
was just time for tea in the Old Sawmill Tea Room, where I can thoroughly
recommend the carrot cake.
On our way back to Penrith we stopped
at Castlerigg stone circle, which was very atmospheric as the sun was setting.
