Introduction
I went on holiday to Cumbria, in a slightly less pretty bit just north of the Lake District. This was another group holiday with people from Ashram Community.
Day one: travelling and arrival
On starting my journey, I had a minor setback when the ticket machine which sells tickets to 'every UK railway station' hadn't heard of Wigton. To be fair, nor had I, but I'd looked it up quite carefully so I was pretty convinced there was a station there. I queued up to speak to a person instead and that worked.
My journey went via Crewe, where I had a bit of a wait so I took a few pictures.
After that the Glasgow train was really crowded - I managed to get a seat, but only just. Nobody actually wanted to go to Glasgow; the train practically emptied at 'Oxenholme the Lake District' (yes, that's what the station is actually called).
I had to change again at Carlisle; I met my parents there and we found the rather smaller train on the branch line. Apparently, the line that goes to Wigton only survived the Beeching cuts because it's the rail access to Sellafield nuclear power station / reprocessing plant (famed for its radioactive seagull shit).
We arrived in Wigton; the place we were staying was three miles out and we had luggage, so we got a taxi from a taxi company that didn't know where we were going either (bit of a pattern emerging). Luckily, we'd brought maps.
That's the house, which we weren't staying in :) We were staying in the stables. Well, okay, not really - it's a Christian holiday centre but it's not quite as biblical as all that; they'd been converted. (Another group was staying in the house.)
Day two: Silloth
We got a lift to the holiday resort of Silloth, which, again, I'd never heard of. It's an ex-holiday-resort really, but there's still an amusement arcade; that kind of place. Used to be where people from Carlisle went on holiday. Actually, it's quite high class; in particular the streets are very wide and still cobbled, which is a pretty effective traffic-calming method.
The railway company originally promoted it as a resort because they weren't getting enough rail traffic to the docks they'd built. There are two docks: an outer dock, and an inner dock which they built after the gate on the outer dock collapsed (rather than repair the gate). I have to say the disposable dock is a new concept on me, but it seems to be doing okay for them; although the dock wasn't exactly bustling there appear to be several working businesses around it, including the original flour mill.
After the excitement of the docks, we walked along the beach for a bit.
We passed the convalescent home, an old picture of which was bizarrely available on postcards (costing only 10p and presumably ironic; I sent one, anyhow). It wasn't that exciting in person, particularly because the car park was sort of in the way of taking the same photo. After that our walk basically circled back via the road to the docks.
After that we took a wander around the wide streets.
I took a few pictures inside the church, which was a moderately impressive one.
That's it for Silloth. I'll do part two with the rest of the holiday soon... ish. There are much fewer photos from the other days because those unfortunately didn't feature any more docks.