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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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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Lake District and Cumbria Index

A series of articles set in the county of Cumbria in the north of England. This area includes the Lake District National Park.

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

Stock Ghyll and Ambleside in Black and White

We are heading back to 1982 for this entry. Long-standing readers will know that I have a vast collection of photographs from my freelancing days from the 1970s through to 90s.

Every now and then as technology gets better and screen resolutions get larger I get the urge to re-scan my old film negatives and the quality always makes me feel it's worth the effort. It could be the scanning software (not though the scanner which I don't upgrade as often), or it could be Adobe Photo Shop software. It could even be my skills with the Adobe. But probably not...

Anyway whatever it is, the photos here were taken on 5 May 1982. On this day we had driven up to Ambleside in the Lake District and walked up the river or stream - I'm never certain as to whether there are rules that say when a stream becomes a river... Anyway the water in this case is called Stock Ghyll. "ghyll" is a northern word for narrow valley or ravine or mountain stream and is derived from the Norse "gil". We climbed up this fairly steep ravine as far as Stock Ghyll Force - "force" being another local word for "waterfall".

At the time I was regularly supplying photographs as stock images to a number of magazines. The two local magazines most inclined to actually use them were Lancashire Magazine which at the time was a bi-monthly magazine who encouraged me to start writing articles for them and Lakescene - What's On In Lakeland which was a small A5-size magazine that gave a monthly round-up of special events taking place in Cumbria over the next month.

Despite the small page size, Lakescene printed one photograph full page every issue on the right hand on the first opened page. Two of the photographs from this article would eventually make their way onto this exalted page.

Which is the reason why I took so many of them in portrait orientation. I used to research my magazines quite thoroughly. What was the ratio of colour to black and white? In 1982 only top end magazines had much colour apart from maybe the cover. Lakescene, with a relatively small readership, used black and white even on the cover and making that spot was an even more satisfying achievement than their full-page "page 3" spread.

Then I checked the ratio of portrait to landscape photos, whether human figures were always/never included, whether views were identifiable or general, whether they were balanced, tended to be dark or light in tone, whether they were always taken in sunshine or was bad weather sometimes included etc. If you wanted to be successful it was no good sending a magazine photos that they would never even consider. Doing your homework was essential. Editors were busy people. They would send your photos back (if you had supplied a stamped and addressed envelope) but never, ever, with a letter saying "We would have accepted these if..."

And here, having walked back down the hill into Ambleside, taking photos all the way, we arrive back to see Stock Ghyll make the stone-lined curve at the foot of the hill to flow underneath the quaint Bridge House.

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