Gimme shelter

We drove home via Wastwater, a favourite spot of the DSM's. I tend to find it, yes, beautiful, but a little grim. Mind you, this may be because my view is somewhat coloured by memories of once doing the circumnavigation, all twelve miles of it with a hideous chunk across the bottom of the Screes....boy, was that a long time ago!

You can easily see from the following photographs that the weather was.....not good.





And who knew? there is a Gull Island in the lake (the noise, even from within the car, window open, was tremendous.



Then, of course, there were sheep.



And there would be a photo of a herdwick lamb, but Flickr is playing silly bs. Although the image is there on Flickr, if I click on it I simply get taken to "comments". And I can't re-upload it at the moment because the original is on the pc which isn't switched on, and oh screw it, it isn't that great a photo anyway!

Moving on. There is, on the fringes of the southern Lakes this wonderful institution called "Laal Ratty", or, if you want to be formal, the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway. In the most amazingly serendipitous happenstance, we arrived at the station at the end of the line just as they were turning the engine on the turntable. Enjoy!







And then, just to prove that it was still raining, probably worse than ever, here is somewhere in the Hardknott/Wrynose area. I perhaps should confess that whilst I do demonstrably know how to spell "Wrynose", in my mind I always see it as "Rhino's"....whoever he was.



We stopped for lunch at a pub that we had been to a couple of times in the dim and distant past that I had really wanted to get back to, and that has a terrific reputation for atmosphere and excellent food.

http://www.drunkenduckinn.co.uk/

Totally exceeded our expectations. We were feeling damp and tired, definitely a bit on the despondent side one way and another. But sitting in comfortable leather armchairs in the window of a beautiful old building, eating the very best butternut squash soup I have ever tasted (that is me, the Soup Queen, speaking, remember) followed by smoked salmon and tartare sauce sandwiches, bread with both homemade - well, talk about heaven. Certainly uplifted our spirits a bit, I can tell you.

Then home again, home again - few hold-ups on the M6 notwithstanding - and a few days of recovery. And rain.

And rain. Some respite today, but summer it ain't. Someone send me a ritual I can do, or something.

For....somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something - bad.