Tag: Cumbria

Going behind the scenes of the last working mill in Cumbria

A trip to the Lake District this week for a look behind the scenes at Stott Park Bobbin Mill [pictured above] as the English Heritage property gears up to opening for the new season.

It’s a story of industrial heritage, a rural Lakeland backwater that was home to the bobbin mills that served Manchester’s ‘Cottonopolis’.

The Industrial Revolution-era industry has long since disappeared from the Cumbrian fells but Stott Park remains — the last working mill in Cumbria.

Here’s a preview of my article:

The four-acre site provides a striking contrast to the surrounding Lakeland fells, the working mill set amongst woodland and dominated by a towering brick chimney.

Unlike other nearby English Heritage sites, such as Furness Abbey and Brougham Castle, the conservation task at Stott Park is a very different proposition.

Property manager Mick Callaghan says:

“We’re trying to preserve a workplace as it was in its heyday. It’s as if the workers had just gone for a break, leaving their coats on hooks by the door.”

Read the full story in the next issue of English Heritage magazine.

Why 2019 is the best time to discover Ruskin’s Cumbria

I started the year with an assignment in the Lake District and I was back this weekend for probably my last freelance job of 2018 — a feature for Discover Britain magazine.

This time it was Coniston water [pictured above] and a visit to Brantwood for a preview of events to mark the bicentenary of the birth of John Ruskin in 2019.

Ruskin was a hugely influential figure but has fallen out of fashion compared to the Romantic Poets.

Next year is a chance to put his legacy back on the map of the Cumbrian fells.

Inspiring landscape

While the Romantics were busy crafting purple prose about the beauty of the Lakes, a new movement of artists was also discovering Cumbria.

JMW Turner, Gainsborough and, later, Constable all journeyed north in search of those quintessentially brooding Lakeland vistas.

Most importantly, it is the Victorian polymath, John Ruskin, who picked up the mantle and took the Romantic Movement forward to a new era.

Lakeland home

When Ruskin moved to Brantwood House, the elegant, stately home on the peaceful eastern shore of Coniston Water, the Lakes Poets had waned.

Wordsworth had become increasingly disillusioned with what he saw as the invading hordes and Coleridge, a victim of ill health and opium addiction, had settled into a steady decline.

But Ruskin, the artist, writer and social reformer, took their ideas, blending them with his patronage of Turner and his friendship with Charles Darwin.

His ideas would inspire a new generation of thinkers, writers and activists, Ghandi and Tolstoy amongst them.

Brantwood Director, Howard Hull, explains:

“Ruskin evolved the ideas of the Romantics. His vital role was taking the notion of nature as an inspiration to the human spirit and reconciling it with the scientific world.”

Accommodation at Badger’s Cottage, Coniston, provided via The Coppermines & Lakes Cottages Ltd.

101 good reasons why whisky is the drink right now

Forget your Ginuary.

My first assignment of a new year took me to the Lake District, the traditional domain of Romantic Poets and Gore-Tex botherers, for a wee dram.

The Lakes Distillery [pictured above] is to release this summer the first 101 bottles of the Lakes Single Malt, a limited edition whisky and Cumbria’s first in a century.

I travelled to the western Lakes, making base in Cockermouth, to find out more about a spirit-distilling tradition that dates back to the days of smugglers and bootleggers on the shores of Lake Bassenthwaite.

The article was commissioned by Immediate Media and will appear in magazines from March.

Here’s a preview:

The growth of The Lakes Distillery has coincided with the ongoing British spirits revival, making it the biggest of just 15 whisky distilleries in England and Wales.

Indeed, the spirits industry generates £9.8bn in UK sales with spirits now enjoyed by 43 per cent of British adults, according to The Wine and Spirit Trade Association 2016.

New-year escape: A walking and meditation trip to the Lake District

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I tried to make a more healthy start to 2015.

That’s why I headed off to Cumbria on New Year’s Day, bombing up the M6 while everyone else was still busily nursing hangovers.

The reason? To join a walking group [pictured above, just outside Loweswater] and test drive a new Mindfulness in the Mountains package from Ramblers Countrywide Holidays.

The story is out today in the Independent and here’s an extract:

Back on the banks of Loweswater, meanwhile, the afternoon sun was starting to fade like the gentle ebbing of a new-year hangover.

A pint of the local Sneck Lifter ale at The Fish Inn in Buttermere would spur me on for the final few miles and a supper of beef-stew dumplings and plums in vanilla custard would be slow cooking back at Hassness.

Most of all, I had found a few days of walking and mindfulness offered me a fresh perspective on new year.

I had come to know closeness to Cumbrian nature that inspired the Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge; the meditative power of simply putting one foot in front of another over the fells; and the sheer carpe-diem joy of just loosing yourself in the moment.

Read the full story, Sole searching.