Tuesday 4 June

Up early (and one thing about getting up early, it’s definitely not in the dark – it doesn’t get fully dark until after 10pm and is getting light by 4am so the days are quite long) and delivered to Leeds-Bradford airport by our lovely hosts.   They live on an estate made up of several cul de sacs, 8 – 10 houses in each of similar though not identical design but all made of the lovely local soft goldy-brown Yorkshire stone, nice gardens, and a very friendly ‘family’ atmosphere.  We were very impressed by the Harrogate area; it would be very easy to spend several days touring around the little villages etc.

We picked up the rental car though not without incident.  All documentation said to report to the ‘Desk in terminal’ which we did but……. no, hadn’t been there for two years, take the shuttle to the rental depot half a mile away.  There’s no ‘kiss and fly’ zone outside the terminal (which is seriously weird, not to mention totally inconvenient) but there is a one-hour free parking zone a few minutes walk away – shame if its tipping down with rain and you have bags to haul.   Luckily Liz and Gary kept hold of the bags and delivered them to the depot then left us to get on our way.

We have a really nice Volvo, easy to drive Pete says, and with built-in GPS BUT even the rental man had problems getting that set up for us and there were no instructions.  We managed finally by finding the postcode for Beatrix Potter’s cottage and eventually got away almost an hour later than we’d anticipated.   It was drizzly through to the Lake District but easy enough driving on a mix of dual carriageways and some rather more winding local roads.   There’s definitely no doubt about speed limits; the car shows up the speed you should be doing on a light on the dashboard, a white and red circle, which mimics the circles on very frequent signposts along the roads.    We did think the speed allowance on some of the narrower roads was a bit fast though, no way Pete was wanting to do 60mph on a definite 40mph part.  

We saw lots of black-faced sheep, familiar names on signposts such as for Clitheroe, Bradford, Burnley (and I could just hear Martin Robertson’s accent from ‘Homes Under the Hammer’ on TV saying ‘Baairn-leh’), Skipton, Ilkley.   And some funny names too – Lawkston Broth, Ferzor, Cold Cotes, Ings, Black Moss, White Moss…….  I couldn’t get over the mile upon mile of drystone walls, how many tens of thousands of hours went into not just building them over the years but also hauling the stone.  There were a couple of traditional-looking ‘gypsy’ caravans, horse-drawn, that we overtook, wish I’d been able to get a photo.  

The road took us to busy Windermere, full of tourists, we stopped for a leg-stretch by the lake and watched a tour boat setting out on the water.   Drove on a short way to catch a small ferry which took maybe a dozen cars a few hundred meters across a narrow part of the lake, saving us a drive right around the lake to get to the little village of Near Sawrey (yes, we drove through Far Sawrey first) and our destination of Beatrix Potter’s Hilltop Farm.   What a lovely spot and exactly what you imagine an unspoiled English village to look like, despite it being a really major tourist destination.

‘Miss Potter’ as she was known, was engaged but her fiancé died and even though she was quite old she was still the dutiful Victorian daughter living with her parents.  She broke the mould and eventually bought the cottage and moved in, started buying up land, married her solicitor Mr Healis who lived just across the paddocks.    Beatrix kept her ‘Potter’ identity in the cottage, entertained there, wrote her books, but when she went across the way she became Mrs Healis and had a different life.   She had bought old oak furniture for the cottage including a carved chest with 1667 in the decoration, and a carved panelled tester bed which looked majorly uncomfortable, especially when we were shown the ‘base’ which was just stretched ropes.   I learned that a four-poster bed was just that, but a tester bed has a ‘roof’ made of wooden panels.   This one had beautifully carved headboard panels and the same made up the roof, all black with age.

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Entries to the cottage are at timed intervals so we had 45 minutes to wait for our turn at 1.50pm, plenty of time to have a wander around and check out the marked spots Beatrix painted in her books such as Peter Rabbit's post box, the inn etc.     And time for a wander through the gift shop of course, all very tempting goodies, countless soft toys (Tom Kitten was appealing of course), and I did think about a Peter Rabbit apron costing 25 pounds – NOT!

The gardens are very much like the watercolours in the books and the cottage is very familiar-looking.   There were half a dozen National Trust guides in the house and we could go into two rooms downstairs and four upstairs.   The house was left to the nation on the proviso that it was to stay exactly as it was when Beatrix died, right down to a hat on a chair, book by the bed and so on. One room upstairs was small, and had her dolls house in it, very detailed and pretty.      There was a fire going in the kitchen, I heard several people remarking on that evocative open fire smell which always brings back memories.      The cottage walls are thick and we could sit on the window seats which had Potter books on each to pick up and pick out scenes because she did use her cottage as settings.  It was built in about 1650, altered in 1760 and again by Beatrix in 1906.   I can’t remember if it was Beatrix or her husband the guide was talking about but it was something to do with a death certificate and he said ‘not like these days when you probably get a single cause of death, this one read like War and Peace’.  Had to laugh at that.  

I guess we were 40 minutes looking around house and garden, then wandered back to the car – it was raining so we decided not to stop to eat but to get on the way.    We drove through more very narrow roads, some barely wide enough for two cars, and more than once I found myself drawing in breath and inching away from the car door to ‘give us more room to pass’.   Funny.   We couldn’t see much of the scenery due to misty rain but I took a few photos just to prove we’d been there.   The alternative was to have retraced our steps to Windermere and gone on the M6 all the way to Glasgow but the scenic route was better, a bit longer, and needed concentration but maybe in a different way from on the motorway with dozens of big trucks and much faster traffic.  

Cottages started to change to a mix of white-painted and golden-brown stone but the roads and villages were still the same.   By this time it was fairly solid rain but the hardy walkers were still marching along happily beside the small lakes and up against the hills, definitely not plodding, wet as could be, happy.      We drove as far as Keswick, turned east towards Penrith (and definitely on a ‘real’ road), then north on the motorway, three lanes.    The speed limit went up to 70mph in some stretches which would be very realistic in fine weather, there were uncountable huge hauler trucks one after the other in the left lane but doing a good speed – not so much fun when you were driving by and could barely see through the spray they kick up.   And there were the fast drivers too, speeding well past us into the distance.  Pete stuck to the centre lane and we got on fine.   

We stopped at a service centre at Gretna (a chain called ‘Welcome Break’ which also has accommodation and petrol at these sites, they must make a fortune), just off the motorway, nice and new, good toilets, clean, with a central area with plenty of tables and a range of shops in a circle including KFC, Burger King, a coffee place, Scottish souvenirs, WH Smith, travel accessories, and a small Waitrose where we picked up fruit and biscuits to sustain us for supper.    We had good old KFC, ready for it too as it was a long time since breakfast at 7.30.    We had to laugh at the service – gave our order, paid then stood back expecting to wait ages as you do at KFC Tahuna, but no, Pete had barely put his wallet in his pocket, looked at the receipt and said ‘we’re number 2017’ when they called it out.   Couldn’t believe it, great service and very pleasant staff too.

The weather didn’t improve, not much scenery other than several wind farms or small groups of wind turbines, traffic got heavier towards the city and then…….a big slowdown because of an accident and two lanes blocked not far from our destination.  Then the GPS wasn’t quite as exact as we’d have liked it so we missed a sharp turn and ended up going back down the motorway!!  Luckily there was an off ramp after a few minutes so away we went, this time getting the turn but taking another wrong one.   We were very pleased to reach the Air BnB I can tell you.   Very comfortable other than a really bony sofa (God help anyone sleeping on that!), nice and warm, fresh and clean.    It was great to settle in for the two nights with fruit and a cuppa, TV and laptops.  Pete was asleep in the chair in front of TV within a few minutes, he really deserves a medal for today’s driving.