Half-term Happenings: Back to Little Salkeld

Addingham Church.

We were all keen to get out for a family walk, none more so than my dad, but he struggles with the cold these days and I wanted to find a route which had both the potential for a good walk, but also the option to cut the walk short if need be. After a bit of deliberation, I hit upon the idea of two shorter walks based around Little Salkeld in the Eden valley. We parked initially by Addingham Church near the village of Glassonby (curiously, the village of Addingham no longer exists).

This walk, or variations on it, have become a firm favourite of ours. Here’s A beside the Saxon Cross in the churchyard…

And here she is posing for a similar photo back in 2011….

In the intervening years the cross seems to have shrunk!

I can rarely resist the temptation to have a peek inside any churches I pass and Addingham certainly repays the effort. The lady on the right here is St. Cecilia, an early Christian martyr. I thought that the instrument she’s shown playing seemed entirely unlikely, but apparently she is often depicted playing it and it’s a real instrument – a portative organ or organetto. My lazy internet research also revealed that St. Cecilia appeared on the reverse of the old Edward Elgar £20 note.

There she is bottom left, beneath Worcester Cathedral. Presumably because she is the patron saint of musician’s. I can’t say that I’ve ever realised that she was there. How many times I have handled notes like this one, over the years, without ever really looking at them?

Then again, I didn’t know that King David is traditionally associated with the harp either, a fact which appears in the Book of Samuel, just before the more familiar story of David and Goliath.

Talking of familiar stories, here’s Saint George and the unfortunate dragon in my favourite window at Addingham.

Addingham also has two hogback gravestones, which, I’ve learned, were unique to the Viking settlers in Britain and haven’t been found in Scandinavia. The best preserved example is at St. Peters in Heysham, which I’ve walked past many times, but never been inside – an omission I must rectify soon.

It’s a short downhill stroll from Addingham Church to the huge stone circle of Long Meg and her Daughters.

I didn’t take many photos on this occasion, just these of my mum and Dad and my brother, but the stones have appeared on the blog many times before.

Winter Aconites on a roadside verge.

Another short stroll brings you to Little Salkeld, where we enjoyed a fabulous lunch in the cafe at the Watermill….

Steve and I then walked briskly back up to collect the cars and park them in Little Salkeld, whilst the rest set-off for a wander along the River Eden to Lacy’s Caves…

We managed to catch them up at the caves themselves.

By the time we had turned to walk back to Little Salkeld, an already cold day had become even colder, but that didn’t detract from a marvellous family outing.

Bread Making at Heron Corn Mill

For my Birthday present TBH booked me onto a bread-making course. That’s some of my bread in the foreground of the photo above. My rolls were misshapen and looked a bit ‘rustic’ compared to everybody else’s – insufficient kneading was to blame apparently – but they tasted great anyway.

The course was held in a ‘Shepherd’s Hut’…

These things seem to be all the rage these days, but were they ever actually used by genuine shepherds? They seem a bit cumbersome and impractical. I’ve just been reading about the annual transhumance which was traditional in the hillier parts of these isles, but the women involved – and apparently it was mostly women – lived in Shielings which were temporary structures made of wood and sticks not fancy-Dan cottages on wheels. The women were with the dairy herd and making butter and cheese, the shepherds meanwhile, out with their flocks, surely didn’t have anything like this.

Anyway, the ‘shepherd’s hut’ is situated by Heron Corn Mill near Beetham…

…where some of the flours we were using were stoneground. I bought Wholemeal, Spelt and Rye flour whilst I was there so that I could practice at home.

The corn mill has a state-of-the-art hydroelectricity generator which usually provides all of their power and also much of their income since any excess power is sold to the paper mill which you can see across the river here…

You can also see that the water levels are exceptionally low – so low in fact that the generator isn’t working at all. (You can see more usual summer levels over the weir in this post from June last year.)

Anyway, the course was huge fun. I’ve posted in the past about making bread, but whilst my previous bread making attempts have generally produced something tasty, the bread has always been a bit brick like in texture. This time the bread was delicious and well….bread like – light and not too chewy.

The course was on the same weekend as Silverdale’s annual Art Trail weekend. When I got home it was to find that TBH and our guest J were still out and about so I decided to stretch my legs and get some fresh air with a wander through Eaves Wood to Castlebarrow…

…and the Pepper Pot and then a walk down to the Cove, across the Lots and back through the village (of which more later).

Rather predictably, I managed to leave the recipes we were given behind at the end of the course, but my subsequent attempts to make bread have still managed to be less dense than your average blackhole.

This was Sunday’s family lunch, open-sandwiches on homemade bread…

Haverbrack, Beetham Fell, Lunch at the Bull’s Head

Sunday, fortunately, brought more settled weather and some sunshine. The title of the post should really be ‘Heron Corn Mill, Lunch at the Bull’s Head, Haverbrack and Beetham Fell’ but that’s a bit long, and this present one mirrors that of an earlier post.

The photo above shows the Heron Corn Mill, on the left, and the modern paper mill on the right, with, in between, the mill pond on the Bela backed up behind this weir…

The corn mill seems to have had a new lease of life in recent years and, although it doesn’t take long to look around, it’s worth a visit, especially since it’s free, with a handy car-park which has an honesty box with a request for a £2 donation for all-day parking.

From the Corn Mill a footbridge takes you across the river and then the path winds around the paper mill, beside the River Bela…

We crossed the busy A6, hoping to get some lunch at the cafe at Beetham Garden Centre. This wasn’t the original plan. We had been hoping to revisit The Ship at Sandside. Naively, I had been expecting that we could just rock-up when we pleased and order Sunday lunch. Andy pointed out that, on a Bank Holiday Sunday, a popular pub might be busy, and that an advance booking might be advisable. I made a phone call and discovered that he was quite right: a booking was advisable, or would have been, if I’d rung a couple of weeks earlier. So it was that we were a party in search of somewhere to buy lunch and were travelling more in hope than in expectation.

The cafe at the Garden Centre looked excellent. And full.

There were surprisingly few rumblings of discontent as we continued. If anybody was angry about my lack of organisation, they kept it to themselves. Unlike this pair of female Chaffinches…

…which were brawling in the road.

I’ve seen birds fighting before, but not fighting birds with such complete disregard for what was going on around them, as these two were. I have lots of other photos, but they are mostly blurred shots, showing the moments when one or both birds briefly disengaged and flew a little into the air before diving back into the fray, in a bid to gain the upper-hand.

A male Chaffinch kept making appearances over the adjacent hedge. Whether he was an anxious or disinterested spectator will remain as mysterious as the cause of the ruckus in the first place.

When the fight either finished or possibly moved on to another venue, we retraced our steps to the corn mill.

Small White. Or Green-viened White. White anyway. The unopened and partially opened buds are Oxeye Daisies – I’m amazed that I haven’t noticed that very striking, bold pattern before.

We crossed Dallam Deer park, the deer obligingly, if somewhat distantly, makng an appearance for our guests.

Outside the Bull’s Head in Milnthorpe we hesitated. I’ve never heard any opinions about it, good or bad. I think I might have had a pint here and watched part of a football match, many moons ago. Which is not much to go on.

TBH asked a girl, who was smoking a fag in the doorway, what the food was like, and she assured us that it was excellent. Later, I noticed that the same girl was collecting glasses in the pub and wondered whether she was an employee. But if we were gently duped, we didn’t lose out in any way. The food was very good, with an amazingly wide variety on offer, but everything apparently cooked from scratch. I’m very surprised that nobody has recommended it to me before. Judging by the prices on the menu, it was good value too, although we didn’t have to worry about that, since Andy very generously picked up the tab.

At this point, our boys gleefully revealed their own agenda: since we were in Milnthorpe and the sun was shining, they insisted on visiting the play area and trying out the new equipment there. It was only a brief stop and it gave me a chance to watch the many bumblebees on the flowering shrubs in the border there. They seemed mainly to be of two species: Early Bumblebees, with two yellow stripes and an orange tail and Tree Bumblebees…

…which, now that I know how to identify them, seem to be everywhere I go.

Dallam Hall and the Bela.

We continued our walk along the Bela, following it out to its confluence with the Kent…

Whitbarrow Scar across the Bela and the Kent.

At the Orchid Triangle, there were…

…orchids! I think that this is Common Spotted Orchid. And this…

…is Common Twayblade…

….which according to my orchid field guide is ‘a close companion of nearly all our most beautiful and rare orchids’. (Of which, more in a forthcoming post.)

From the Orchid Triangle, it’s a short, but very rewarding, climb up Haverbrack.

Red Admiral.

From Haverbrack we crossed Cockshot Lane, walked through Longtail Wood to Beetham Fell and The Fairy Steps…

Here’s Andy negotiating the steps without touching the sides, so that the fairies will grant him a wish…

Sort of.

Rock Rose.

Dropping down through the woods back towards Beetham we stumbled across a Roe Deer. We watched in hushed silence for a moment, until A broke the spell with, “It’s only a deer, I can see those in the garden at home.”

I think our kids do appreciate what they have, living here, but maybe they’ll have to move away before they really appreciate it properly?

I mooted the idea that some of us might walk home from Beetham, but when the initial enthusiasm evaporated I was secretly relieved – we were out of water and I was gasping for a cup of tea.

Later, the Shandy Sherpa and TBF joined me for a wander around Eaves Wood in the gloaming. We spent quite a while watching the juvenile Woodpecker featured in a recent post, and as long again sitting by the Pepper Pot absorbing the peace and quiet. A marvellous day.

Long Meg Walk III – Little Salkeld Watermill

From the standing stones it was a short stroll to lunch, taken in the cafe at Little Salked Watermill. The food was outstanding – I had Moroccan lentil soup, with four different breads home-made with flour from the mill. The mill also has a little shop selling their own flour, various other organic goodies and a curious mixture of books – some cookbooks and others about watermills and megaliths.

It’s also possible, for a small fee, to take a tour of the mill. It’s advertised as self-led, but we had the great fortune to be shown around by one of the people working in the mill. We were shown all of the machines in operation, and the ingenious way in which various cogs and pulleys could be engaged or disengaged so that the waterwheels could drive everything. There are two wheels, one outside and the other partly hidden away inside the building. Before our tour the outdoor wheel wasn’t running but we saw how simply releasing a chain allowed a sluice to open and very quickly the second wheel was turning and running a winnowing machine.

The kids were fascinated, in fact we all were.