Framedlight

Last May, Alan's Mum moved from Milnthorpe in Cumbria to an apartment in Preston. We went up for the week to help her and Alan's sister Anne flew over from Florida to lend a hand. As Anne was taking holiday we decided that we would have a couple of days off and visit the north Cumbrian coast. We had the camper van with us and so we booked Anne in to a rambling hotel by the sea in St Bees, just for the night. The first day we travelled up there, going over Hardknott Pass in the van which was speculative and involved several goes at getting round one of the bends. I was sitting in the back and it was a truly vomit worthy experience! We stopped at the fort on the top where the first two pictures were taken. the Romans really chose some draughty places to stay. We descended the pass and drove to Muncaster Castle where Anne and Alan went inside for a tour and I stayed outside to take pictures of the heronry. The herons hang around, roosting in the tall trees at the back of the ca...

We went up to Milnthorpe again to visit Rene, Alan's mother, to see how she was getting on with her new knee. The weather going up was pretty dire but settled into a dry but overcast Saturday and a windy scuddy Sunday. As Rene had not been able to drive and also because we did not want to sit in the house all day we went on a couple of excursions, Saturday to Wasdale and Wastwater and Sunday to Walney Island on the Barrow peninsula. On the Saturday we had lunch in the Wasdale Head Hotel and then walked through fields down to see St Olaf's church, reputably one of the oldest and smallest churches in England. It lies snuggled between yew trees looking towards  Great Gable and Scafell Pike. There are a number of graves of climbers in the churchyard, all with views towards the mountains and a memorial to a group of climbers who died on the Karakoram in the Himalaya (excuse the plastic cup). We drove back via the Hardknott and Wrynose passes and sat in a layby at the bottom of Har...