Day 17 – From Auldgirth to Burnsall

Thistle

In which Sid and Doris enjoy both the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales in one fell swoop.

Before we could leave Scotland this morning we had two motor based discussions. Coming to the car park we found a gent examining Teal. He runs a garage and has no time for the early BMW Minis that had French engines that drink oil worse than an A Series. People thought they were getting BMW and they ended up with Chryslers. Please could he have a look under the bonnet? Oh, yes, that’s very clean. Is it still on points. No it is electronic, we whisper, and goes very well.
Our next discussion is with a maintenance guy come to work at the hotel. He used to race Weslake and JAP engined dirt bikes. He hill climbed a Fiat Uno, with the head off a FIRE 70 and the carbs off a hot Strada. One of the big houses at Auld Girth had a drive long enough for hill climb competition but it changed hands.
The plot today takes us across the border by Gretna Green. On our way we pass the Devil’s Porridge Museum, an ex-munitions factory. And we pass a munitions dump, also turned into a museum. We do not stoop to being Bothied by the blacksmith’s shop where young English persons eloping could be married just inside Scotland.

 

We are still in the country and are delighted to see cowboys herding their charges down the main road through Wigtown.

The Lakes are bustling with tourists (like Sid and Doris). Rather than stop in Keswick, Ambleside or Rydal we press on to the new Windermere Jetty Museum, www.windermerejetty.org

This builds on a private collection of Lake boats that might have started with the steam launches that the Victorian grandees had built to go with the grandee houses they were building. You can take a ride on the lake in one. The collection extends to work boats including a fabulous ferry that could carry a cart and a carriage. There are pretty day boats and one from 1937 that looks like a miniature Venetian water taxi. There is a racing boat with a strornery rare Rolls Royce Hawk engine from 1917. There are hydroplanes. Many of these are exhibited in the boat house where they are displayed afloat. In the conservation shed are those not yet ready to float.
There is a room devoted to Arthur Ransome. He was a British journalist in Russia in 1917. His second wife was Trotsky’s secretary. He is better known as the author of the Swallows and Amazons children’s books about boys and girls sailing and having adventures on islands in the Lakes. These children were allowed much freedom. They were not duffers and did not drown. Much of Sid’s education came from Battersea’s Lurline Gardens public lending library and they had the lot. This may not be Speyer but it is a lovely few hours.
We are quickly out of the Lake District, which is only about 30 miles square – tiny in comparison to previous days’ travels – and climbing into the Pennines.

People who believe that Yorkshire and Cumbria are separated by the busy towns of Lancashire have not looked at the map properly.  In fact there is almost no intermission between the Lakes and Yorkshire Dales – the M6 north/south motorway needed some pretty serious engineering to get it over this stretch of country, and if you, our treasured and only reader, have 27 minutes to spare, we can offer you this film to fill them in a most satisfying manner.

We are soon into Garsdale and Wensleydale. Doris has made a route over the fells from Hawes to Burnsall. This has plenty of contour. We stop by some pick-ups and ATVs on one of the tops for a picture. In the trailer are many of the dogs from the local hunt, which today has drawn no fox. The master of the hounds is blowing his hunting horn and has been for some while; dogs are still coming in.

In Burnsall we are lodging with the Duke of Devonshire. From our room we see across the River Wharfe to green fields, sheep and dry stone walls. It’s relatively easy to build the 5,000 or so miles of drystone walls that you see in the Dales – all you need is a field full of stones and a house full of fit young men who need some exercise during the winter, and a few hundred years later you will have it all sorted.
We go and sit in the hotel bar and revel in the sheer naughtiness of drinking beer after 6pm in a public space.

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