Introduction
Here's the pictures from the rest of the holiday, which wasn't as exciting (there were no more docks and the really big chemical plants were only visible from a very long distance). Still, I managed to take a few pictures I liked.
Monday
The weather was grey and miserable, so we walked into Wigton (about three miles) to investigate the town.
The town's actually very nice, with lots of picturesque buildings (and I seem to remember we managed to find a tea shop first to eat cake in while it rained some more).
Wigton's church is extraordinarily fancy and well-maintained, nowadays due to Melvyn 'moneybags' Bragg.
Rest of the town centre has lots of fairly old buildings including plenty which are boarded up (mostly ex-pubs).
On our way back we went past the plastics factory - which, amazingly, is still operational.
Tuesday
We walked to Aspatria, another small town which is the next stop on the railway. The weather was a bit nicer.
Bizarrely, we then encountered what looks like a medieval tower (a pele tower, according to Wikipedia). It's part of somebody's private house/farm. I'm guessing they don't actually live in the tower bit, but it's pretty awesome.
The next village, Blennerhasset, had a combination of well-maintained, fancy-looking historical cottages, and those which were less so.
After that we followed the route of an old railway to Aspatria, entering its outskirts in the form of a village/housing estate called Harriston: their sign read 'Please die carefully'.
Appropriately, my GPS unit stopped working at this point, so from here on nothing is geotagged; sorry.
Having taken the bus back, we still had some distance to walk to the house. Initially we tried to follow a public footpath to do that, but found out (after quite some distance) that it had been entirely blocked by fields of maize. So we had to go back and by the road.
We did make it back in the end. Later that evening we went for a quick stroll toward the point which was supposed to be the other end of that missing path, but it had got a bit too dark to see much by then.
Wednesday
Wednesday's trip was to the Lake District proper.
A warning for those of a nervous disposition: there are a lot of pretty pictures in this section (four, by my count). If that sort of thing disturbs you, get ready to scroll past them quickly. Don't say I didn't warn you.
We got a lift there, starting our walk by a hill where, supposedly, some large bird or other (an osprey, maybe) was hanging out. We saw no sign of it but the path through the woods was very pleasant anyway.
Descending, we followed the river (Derwent, I guess) toward the lake (Derwentwater) and the town of Keswick.
Entering Keswick after having lunch by the river, pretty much the first thing we found was the pencil museum. For those who haven't come across this before, yes, really, there is a pencil museum. (We didn't feel we had time to go in, so I can't tell you if it's worth a visit. It does however contain the world's largest coloured pencil.)
The museum itself is housed in a bunch of prefabs next to the massive old three-storey pencil factory, which has 'The home of Cumberland pencils' written all across its top. It's not in bad shape but there are a few smashed windows; their website does appear to suggest that they might still make pencils there, but I'm not sure. The company is now owned by an American conglomerate.
After that we took a walk down to see the actual lake, which was much as you would expect; very pretty, also crowded.
We had a look in the church then returned to the town centre where we managed to meet with Jenny and Frank who gave us a lift back. (Incidentally, I took the opportunity of being in a town in the Lake District to buy a ginormous bar of Kendal Mint Cake, just because. I have since eaten it with the help of people at work.)
Thursday
We'd done 'pretty', now it was time for more 'bleak' with the Cumbria Coastal Way, specifically from Allonby to Maryport.
Actually it was another sunny day and it wasn't as un-pretty as all that. To start with, Allonby had an interesting selection of buildings.
Along the way we took a sidetrack uphill to see the Roman milefort (not a lot of fort left, just some lumps in the grass and a few wall foundations) and look down at what supposedly used to be saltpans, trying to figure out how that ever worked. Then back down to the coast.
After that we approached Maryport, which is a slightly larger town.
Maryport had an ex-naval-somethingorother which had been turned into a Roman museum. We went into this one. It had the country's largest collection of some kind of shrine markers - I forget the exact detail, but the Romans used to make a new one each year for some reason. They also gave an interesting tour of their field, which doesn't have anything much visible except grass, lumps in the ground, and sheep, but used to be a genuine full-size fort.
The actual town's a port town, as the name might possibly hint. It definitely had a maritime feel, although that might have been partly because we did walk out a fair distance on the harbour wall...
Friday
We headed home, but had some time to wait at Wigton station, so I took a few last pics.
