HALFWAY!!!!!!! To John O’Groats

Highly recommend the Bulls Head in Milnthorpe; comfortable, excellent dinner and breakfast, very helpful staff (barman-do-everything a young thirties guy married to a Brisbane girl).

Nice flattish day, some hills but no steep ones. Not much traffic, accidentally missed Kendal, gateway to the Lakes District, by taking back roads. Bruce Robinson had told us to make sure we got to Kendal to get the mint biscuits.

So first stop was by the harbour in Windermere for coffee and cake while watching the throngs boarding the lake cruises. Even this early in the season Windermere township and the wharf in particular was busy. Must be bedlam in mid-summer school holidays.

Apart from one 180 m hill between Grasmere and Thirlmere the rest of the day was flat, just trying not to get run over on the ‘A’ road sections and not to hold up too much traffic. Narrow road, little shoulder, lots of cars and lots of tour busses.

Most exciting bit was me slipping off the edge of the relaid bitumen and nearly crashing within sight of The Kings Head, another very nice hotel at Thirlmere where we were to stay tonight. Judging by the beams and sagging floors it is at least partly late 1700’s, early 1800’s massively redecorated to Edwardian style since.

Saw log piles of Scots pine or Sitka spruce, harvesting plantations planted in 1930’s. Very steep hillsides and slick rock outcrops so a lot would have been hand fallen which would be dangerous work with a chainsaw on that ground.

Apparently the damming of the local river to form Lake Thirlmere and the establishment of the plantations in 1877 brought together landscape protectionists in one of the first community campaigns against development (poet Wordsworth’s popularising of the Lakes District probably had something to do with it). Now protestors are against solar farms (“no farms, no food”) and spruce plantations.

Waiting for dinner if I don’t go to sleep first.