Our next destination after Blackpool was Keswick, in the popular Lake District in the northwest. However we decided on a detour to Barrow-in-Furness, the ancestral home of KLS’s grandma.
I was unprepared for how reminiscent of Australia much of England is. It is perhaps obvious given our heritage, but the similarities go far beyond languages into such things as street signs, shops and even the ‘flavour’ of the variety shows on television. Even though we only whirlwinded through, Barrow-In-Furness was the place that reminded me most of my home town Newcastle, and it was a bit surreal. Walking through an empty pedestrian shopping district on a Sunday almost gave me Hunter Street deja vu.
One of the most unexpected delights of our trip was to be found in Barrow – and that was Furness Abbey.
Once the seat of power in the region, the abbey was abandoned hundreds of years ago and now exists as a large and spectacular ruin.
As you can see we were free to wander (and climb up on) the ruins as much as we wanted. The site is managed by the national heritage organization and they have done a great job explaining the history of the abbey and the events that led up to todays ruin.
We couldn’t help but imagine how suitable the ruins would have been for a movie site. I also dubbed it the best live-action AD&D site in the world. Take a look at that shot above right – couldn’t that be a room of storopers just awaiting an unwary adventurer? 🙂
After Barrow, we drove a motion-sickeningly-and-yet-mesmerizingly-beautiful road to Keswick. Here I am making friends with the carved bear outside the B&B:
Yep, that’s the umbrella I bought in Blackpool. At this point, we haven’t quite worked out how to get it back to the USA…
Keswick is a picturesque little town on a lake surrounded by sheep fields. Take a look:
The water was crystal clear and mirror-still. Although it wasn’t raining, the sky was overcast and the clouds sat low on the surrounding mountains:
Late in the day we walked through a sheep field into the town…
…where dinner was Chinese followed by ice-creams each!
