6 People 6 Months

Over looking Hilltop - Beatrix Potter's home. Sorry again that I haven’t been quite so regular in writing about our adventures. We’ve been covering many miles and seeing so many things now that we have our National Trust membership and so I haven’t had as much time to get to the internet to update my blog. At the moment we are in Belgium, having crossed the channel very early this morning, but today’s post will be about our time in the Lake District and visiting Liverpool which was already three weeks ago! Beatrix Potter’s tales of cute little animals dressed in old fashioned clothes and living in the ‘Olden days’ have always been endearing to me and I loved them as a child, as do my own girls, so going to see where she lived and farmed and got her inspiration to write her familiar stories was a true treat. Hilltop - the farmhouse she owned - was close to Lake Windermere in the Lake District. Nearer the end of her life she owed many fields and...

Our camping spot on Skye. I think those islands are looking towards the Mainland of Scotland. Skye Our trip to the Isle of Skye was an impromptu decision late one night when we were at a cross roads. It did mean an extra 4 hours of driving but it was great to see a bit more of the northern side of Scotland and to visit the famous Isle of Skye. The weather forecast was for no rain, so Josh wanted to go and walk up some of the famous peaks of the Cuillin ranges - known as the most challenging peaks in the UK. But alas - the weather was really not on his side as what started out being a bit grey and dreary turned into a howling storm of horizontal rain pelting it’s icy fingers onto the van and through the windows. We ended up spending almost all of the day in the camper, peering at the sights through the rain mottled glass. The landscape was mostly the bracken and heather clad moor, sheep and cows huddling against rocks or bracing themselves against the weather. But th...

Eilean Donan - A castle at the meeting of three lochs. A fully restored castle dating from the 13th century. We spent the night just beside the castle and in the morning I saw a Golden Eagle. Pretty special! For some reason Scotland has always seemed so much like a mystical fairy-tale country (like the land of Narnia) that I’ve read so much about and the prospect of visiting it filled me with awe - and now I’m really here! And it has met my expectations - it’s so wild and desolate looking, especially with the rain and wind whistling around the hills. We drove up north and through the Lowlands to Edinburgh during the night and in the morning we parked in a suburb on the outskirts (free parking for a change!) and rode our bikes through a pretty forest lined track on the side of the city to the center. We hadn’t researched too much about what to see in Edinburgh and so were totally surprised and pleased to find out that we were in time to take part in the...

Sorry that these post are rather out of date! We have been travelling long distances most days to get to where we wanted to be so haven't had much time to stop in libraries along the way. But we found some internet where we are parked up tonight - in a wind swept corner on the Isle of Skye, though this story is about when we were still in England. Keep looking out for a new post about Scotland soon! The Lake District The farm on which I grew up in Nelson is named Rivington, and our ancestors originally came out of England in the 1840’s on one of the boats to the newly purchased land where my parents still live today. On our way up to Scotland we found we were in the vicinity to visit what we assume must be the Rivington of England that our farm was named after. It was a small little village consisting mostly of farmland, but with some very grand buildings, including a manor and a Pike, (a large conical monument on top of a mountain) a church, cafe, some gorgeous old sto...

View across Brockhampton Estate After some time in the bigger cities we found that we all could do with a bit of country air, and looked forwards to finding some winderness and smaller towns to enjoy. Stratford On Avon was our first stop after Oxford, and we liked the picturesque town (though of course this was rather touristy) but we enjoyed trying to imagine Shakespeare starting out his days in that same place and then retiring there next to the old church. We visited an interactive museum inside a 16th century house where we tried on clothes and lay on a bed like the Tudors would have had, and peered into rooms which the local quack doctor was trying to dole out medicine, and smelled the smells of the pub and the plague of those times. The following day we needed to get some laundry done, and found a laundrette in a sweet little town called Bromyard - just my kind of village - which was a narrow, bunting clad street crammed with shops leaning onto the street, the b...