Bowness on Lake Windermere, 1981

Wednesday 3 June 1981. A trip out to Bowness-on-Windermere in the Lake District.

Lake Windermere is England's largest lake, by length and surface area and volume. It is 11 miles long (18 kilometres) and 1 mile (1.6 kilometres) wide at its widest point. It reaches a depth of 210 feet (64 metres) and yet is dwarfed by some Scottish lochs and Northern Irish loughs.

Finding a car parking space even in 1981 was difficult enough, at time of writing in 2023 it is nigh on impossible unless you get there really early in the morning or are willing and able to walk a long way!

Bowness is just over halfway up the lake from south to north and the line of the lake takes a gentle curve to the west at Bowness. This has formed an area of shingle beach from which a pier and several jetties allow access to various steamer services and pleasure craft.

Looking roughly nor nor west up the lake. Despite the name it is more a lake than a mere, which is defined as being broad in relation to its depth, not the case at Windermere. There is a town also called Windermere one and a half miles (2 kilometres) north of Bowness so the term "Lake Windermere" doesn't so much describe it twice, but serves to distinguish the lake from the town.

Lake cruiser Teal setting out from Bowness. At the time there were four large cruisers on the lake: Tern (1881), Swift (1900), Teal (1936), and Swan (1938). Swift was broken up in 1998, 17 years after this visit.

The beach and moorings at Bowness. In addition to the large "steamers" (they were all converted to diesel engines in the 1950s), there are numerous smaller pleasure boats from small row boats and self-drive motor boats to mid-sized cruisers, some of which visit stops at the head (north) of the lake and/or the foot (south) of the lake and many which take you for a boat ride around a few islands, the largest being Belle Isle, which is 0.62 miles (one kilomettre) in length, oriented southwest to northeast opposite Bowness.

The slender beach, as with the one at Waterhead at the top of the lake, is a favourite haunt of many of the lake's waterfowl and ducks and swans often expect to share some of your picnic with you! Which does lead them to eating far too much bread than is good for them and can even be dangerous as when wet it expands and can cause blockages to their windpipes.

A line of rowboats pulled up onto the shingle with a couple of mid-sized launches waiting to go out on sight-seeing cruises. Nearest us is Muriel II, built by Borwicks in the nearby town of Windermere in 1935-6. With open air bench seating in the bows she has a single enclosed deck behind.

Another shot of Muriel II later in the afternoon, returning from a sightseeing cruise. This photograph was for many years my only successful magazine front cover shot.

It was published in the July issue of the following year of the magazine Lakescene, a brilliant surprise and achievement of a long cherished milestone made even better when I flipped the page to see another of my shots taking the entirety of the magazine's page 3. Ah yes - a Page 3 photographer...! I would achieve another couple of cover shots in later years in other magazines, but as they say: you always remember your first!

Not that I was the only photographer active that day! These three ladies were taking joint interest in getting the very best from their Kodak 110 Instamatic camera. These took a negative about the size of your ring finger's fingernail.

A brief foray into Bowness itself away from the lakeside. The parish church of St Martin dates from an earlier church which was on this site as early as the year 1203. This burned down in 1480 and the current church was built and consecrated in 1483.

The main shopping street of Bowness is found on the steep rise from the lakeside leading towards the town of Windermere. Thus it can be very busy with traffic whilst often being crowded by tourists.

There are a few side streets but Bowness could hardly be called a large town. Towards the outskirts there are more tranquil scenes to be found.

Back at the lake. The three ladies from before have finished their film in the Instamtic camera. "Have you taken all 12?" comes an indignant voice, "Eeh, I'm going to have to buy another film now ready for Christmas!"

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Curiosities: Windmills, Wind Pumps, Watermills Index

A series of articles about windmills, watermills, wind-powered drainage pumps and (if I ever get round to them) wind farms.

Each article can be viewed by clicking/tapping the linked photographs below. A link at the end of each article will bring you back to this index.

Grasmere, June 1983

June 1983. We took a trip up to Grasmere in the Lake District. At the time I was supplying photographs to numerous magazines and one of them that regularly featured my work was a small local magazine called Lakescene, based on Cumbria and particularly the Lake District National Park.

The Lake District is said to be England's wettest area and certainly, no matter what the weather was like around 40 miles south (64 kilometres) as the crow flies (and almost double that for a car journey), there was no guarantee of good weather by the time you reached the Lakes.

And so it proved as we reached the car park at Grasmere under cloudy skies and chilly temperatures on this particular day. But dull weather doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible to take decent photographs and indeed as most magazines were still only just starting to use colour for photographs other than on their front cover (and Lakescene used black and white exclusively) the added drama of even wet days could look quite attractive and were certainly not unrepresentative!

Dove Cottage was the home of poet William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, from 1799 until May 1808 when the former inn became too small following William's marriage to Mary Hutchinson. As William lived with his sister, so Mary moved her own sister into Dove Cottage and then with three children being born within four years, they moved out in search of larger accomodation.

Grasmere Church. It is dedicated to Saint Oswald, the 7th century King of Northumbria who was said to have preached on the site. The present church dates from the 1300s however. It still holds an annual Rushbearing Festival. In fact the floor of the church remained earthen until 1841. Burials under this floor were only stopped in 1823 so regular replacement of some sort of floor covering preferably a pungent sweet-smelling one would have been very necessary.

It is in the churchyard, however, that we find the graves of William Wordsworth and his wife, plus those of his sister, Dorothy and others of his family.

William Wordsworth alongside some of his friends, Coleridge and Richard Southey became known as The Lake Poets and with them he brought the Romantic Age to English literature. He was Poet Laureate 1843 to 1850 having at first refused the position due to his age until Prime Minister Robert Peel told him that he need write no new work and he remains the only Poet Laureate without an official work published during his tenure.

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Artworks, 2023

Time to catch up on what my pencil, crayons, pastels and paints have been up to this year!

We start in February this year with a pastel pencil shetch done from one of my collection of old sepia postcards from somewhere between the late 1800s to the 1930s. It depicts Ispley Mill, Redditch in Worcestershire.

Trying to do an A2 sized painting from a postcard and particularly a monochrome postcard where the contrast many not be ideal can be a bit fraught. I'd finished this and then on poring over the postcard again I realised that the gate should actually swing to enclose the roadway from the main road on the left and that the brick wall should have extended to the hedge at the side of the main road. Oh yes - I'm still rubbish at trees... Sigh...

28-29 May 2023. Britannia Pier and Promenade Tea Huts, Great Yarmouth. We had gone down for a week which turned out to be a bit blustery. First plein air sketch of the year! I did the pencil bits in situ then added the colour using pastel pencils in the hotel bar the following night. The hut on the right with the green boarding was the Shemara which has provided our morning coffees whilst on holiday in Great Yarmouth for around sixty years...

A few weeks later we were in Bridlington on the Yorkshire coast for a few days and if we thought Great Yarmouth had been blustery then we had to adjust our ideas of how much wind made it blustery...

This was June, yet the temperatures were so low that sitting in one spot for longer than 30 minutes at most was just about inviting frostbite... There was hardly anyone knocking about and I had my pick of benches. I got the basic pencil marks done in situ that once again finished off the colour work in the A4 sketch pad from the calm of the hotel bar.

Towards the end of June we took a coach holiday with Lochs & Glens to Loch Tummel in the Scottish Trossachs. As we approached our hotel in Scotland on the first evening the coach was travelling down a narrow winding road with a drop to the loch on the left and a wall and steep rise on the right.

As we approached a bend to the right I spotted a pair of brown legs disappear round the corner ahead. "There's something running up the road!" I said. When we rounded the corner it was a hare, running up the road before us until a handy gateway allowed it to nip off into a yard.

I'm not going to try to con you that I dashed this off whilst bouncing up and down and swaying as we went round corners on the coach. Once home again I found a photo I could use as reference and once the hare was drawn I sketched the surrounding scenery from memory. Hey! It still works!

The Loch Tummel Hotel had a lawn at the front leading to this wonderful view looking down the length of the loch. On the left was an old waterwheel, probably attached to an old water mill which at one time made ingredients for porridge from not-so-old grains.

I started this sketch of St John's Kirk (church) in Perth from a photograph on my phone whilst we were sitting in the lounge one night. It didn't get finished until a fair few days after we got back and is pencil crayon over pencil drawing in the A4 sketch book. Getting mixed up with all the Scottish towns beginning with 'P' that we had visited (there were two - it's a big confusing number) I labelled it Pitlochry and then had an AGH! moment and had to spend ages tring to erase the text to label it correctly...

Sunday 27 August 2023. On another coach trip we visited Sidmouth for a week. Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens is a 20 acre garden, once a walled garden of the Earls of Lichfield who had a house here. It commenced in 1765, the house burned down in 1913, and the garden has remained whilst the earls returned to their home at Melbury House in Dorset.

There were a lot of fairly steep slopes and in the interest of staying upright and not falling over, I didn't take any photos which was a shame. The picture is a watercolour of the lily pond that I did once home. I know I'm a bit rubbish at watercolours but every now and then I feel the urge to have another go!

Monday 28 August 2023. Sidmouth donkey sanctuary was the second call of the day and the old bones were not all that enthusiastic about wandering around miles of pathways between fields that had donkeys several hundred yards away at the opposite end of the field to the path

I plonked myself on a bench and sketched this whilst Miss Franny went to look at the donkeys. I might have dropped off for a bit. Without Miss Franny at hand to nudge me I have no way of knowing. I do know that I didn't fall off the bench so that's a plus... That pig at the far side of the field on the left is definately a donkey, ok?

Tuesday 29 August 2023. I sat and sketched the view from the western end of Sidmouth's Connaught Gardens where a set of white-painted steps, known as Jacob's Ladder, reach down to the beach far below. It is a shingle beach but traces of sand can be seen just at the edge of the sea. A teenaged girl was jogging up the stairs, along past my bench and then down the cliff path to repeat her circuit. "Wow, that's really cool!" she said. Nice to know I can still impress teenaged girls at my age...

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Woodbridge, Suffolk for an Annual General Meeting

Tuesday, 25 February 2003. The 2003 Annual General Meeting of the National Information and Learning Technologies Association (NILTA) was being held at at British Telecom's headquarters in Ipswich.

BT had a team dedicated to thinking about future uses of technology and it was at one of these visits that we were introduced to self-service shopping checkouts, shelves that registered which products were being sold and all things to do away with the need for human staff so that no-one would be able to get a job unless highly qualified and therefore wouldn't be able to afford food or pretty much anything else in the future... Ah... nearly there!

This was a two-day event and we were all staying nearby in a small town and port, Woodbridge in Suffolk. The photographs in this article were taken on one of my usual before-breakfast forays on Wednesday 26th.

Given that this was February, it follows that the sun was not quite at its zenith as I shrugged on a coat and grabbed my camera. Temperatures were hovering around zero. The sun was making a valiant attempt but hadn't succeeded in making itself known as yet. Woodbridge is on the River Deben, eight miles from the sea. The area has been home to humans for around 4,000 years. Somewhere behind those trees on the far side of the river is the site of the Sutton Hoo ship burial.

The Romans were here for around 300 years once they had finally managed to get rid of Queen Boudicca. That's quite a long time to wait before deciding that she wasn't coming back... Once the Romans left around 410 CE, the Angles migrated in large numbers from modern Germany and gave their name to East Anglia.

Woodbridge has a tidal mill. The mill wheel on the mill's website is described as "five metres wide" - I presume they mean "in diameter". It sits in the small extension seen on the right hand side of the mill in the photo. A mill has existed on the site since 1170 CE and it is thought that the one still existing is the third mill since that date. It is still working and can be visited. But not at 7:00am....

During the reign of Catholic Queen Mary Tudor a local woman, Alice Driver had her ears cut off as punishment for daring to likening Queen Mary to Jezebel. Being disfigured didn't stop her from continuing to have a go though and she ended up being burned at the stake as a heretic. Those were the days, eh?

The railway line follows the river and I had to use the footbridge to get to the harbour and return to the hotel. You can't help but feel that taking a train alongside the river must make for a brilliant scenic journey.

So it's now up and over as the cold and the growing pangs of hunger assault me. The rest of the day will be spent doing exercises as part of a marketing strategy. Some of the techniques we were introduced to stood me in good stead for the work that I was to undertake in the following years with JISC infoNet.

The hotel. My diary from the time says it was the Church Inn, dating from 1530 but I can't find any mention of it on the Internet now. So if anyone recognises it please leave a comment and let me know!

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Bannockburn and Canterbury, the Ups and Downs

It's up and down the British Isles for this one. In May 2023 work took me to Stirling in Scotland where I stayed in accomodation at the University.

The site of the Battle of Bannockburn was less than two miles away so on the evening of my arrival I nipped down the road to have a look. The photo shows the flagpole in the centre of the Bannockburn Monument - not quite surrounded by a circular wall as it has two sections of wall facing each other with the two other quarters of the circle left open.

The battle was fought over two days, 23-24 June 1314 following the two opposing sides, Scottish under King Robert the Bruce and English under King Edward II having camped on either side of what would become the battlefield. The photo shows a 1964 statue of Robert the Bruce in armour and mounted on a war horse. His skull, re-discovered at Dunfermline Abbey in 1818, was used in modelling the head.

On day one of the battle King Robert, not yet fully armed but dressed for reconnaisance and armed only with an axe, was spotted by Sir Henry de Bohun, the nephew of the Earl of Hereford, who had charge of one of King Edward's cavalry divisions. De Bohun, in full armour and armed with a lance, charged King Robert but being on a lighter horse, Robert dodged the lance and on passing, swung his axe at de Bohun's head, killing him.

A view of Stirling Castle - the white building in the distance - from the battlefield. At the end of the first day of battle the English had retreated across the line of the Bannockburn stream and unknown to them their position and weakness of morale were reported to King Robert by Sir Alexander Seton, a Scottish knight who had been in the service of King Edward II.

On day two the English were surprised to see Scottish pikemen advancing in formation towards them. The Earl of Gloucester tried to persuade Edward to postpone the battle but was accused of cowardice by the king. Outraged he advanced towards the enemy, was surrounded and killed. The Scots drove the English back and the English and Welsh longbows were ordered to stop firing as their own comrades were being killed by their arrows. An attempt to flank the Scots was thwarted by King Robert's cavalry. King Edward was forcibly led away from the field by his bodyguard including Giles d'Argentan, who once having Edward clear of danger insisted on returning to the field as "...never yet have I fled from battle..." He charged back at the Scots and was killed.

Robert the Bruce won a decisive victory. Perhaps of 16,000 troops under King Edward some 11,000 were killed either at the battle or during their retreat. Since my visit the Visitor Centre was rebuilt in 2014. Since then the view of historians has been that it was in the wrong place anyway and that the most likely place for the battle is a mile and a half away to the east... Sorry for wasting your time with these photos...!

We jump to June 2003 and I found myself in Canterbury in Kent at the University. Why, I'm not sure - for some reason I made no note as to whether this was for a conference, an event specifically for the university, or to present a training course for the Regional Support Centre for the South East region. I could spot the towers of Canterbury Cathedral from the university and decided to walk - I'll just repeat that for dramatic effect - WALK there AND BACK! all the way down into the city.

I have to report that going down was easier than walking back uphill...

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