A tour of Kendal the Lake District

For a tour of Kendal, the Town Hall makes a convenient starting point. The Tourist Information Office was formerly the office where A Wainwright worked as Borough Treasurer from 1947 to 1967, the period when he was writing and illustrating his incomparable Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells (seven volumes, 1955-66). (Wainwright donated his royalties to charity. The animal sanctuary he supported is the Wainwright Shelter Kapellan (visitors by appointment only): to get there, leave Kendal following signs to Brough, A685; look for white sign at roadside roughly 5m after leaving Kendal.) Turn down Lowther Street (at s side of Town Hall) and at the foot of the street bear L and cross the bridge over the Kent for Gilkes's factory. Walk s along the riverbank. When you come level with a small footbridge over the river turn L (E) into Parr Street which leads to a gate into the Castle grounds. Kendal Castle is open at all times because several public footpaths run through the grounds. An impressive ruin (mainly thirteenth century) with three massive, well preserved towers, it belonged to the father of Catherine Parr, sixth and last queen of Henry VIII whence Gordon Bottomley's 1912 poem 'The Pride of Westmoreland' celebrates his marriage to a Kendal girl:
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When I married the pride of Westmoreland Youth's wisdom did not floor me, I took my pick in Kendal town Like Harry the Eighth before me. Return to the river bank, continue s to the next bridge, and cross it. Turn L (s); after 200yds, on the w side, you will see the plaque marking the house of the painter George Romney, who died here in his native region after a successful London career in 1802.

Turn back and walk N past the bridge. You will see (on R, between road and river) Holy Trinity Church, the beautiful and enormous parish church (said to be the largest in Cumbria). On the wall at the sw corner by the door as you enter is Romney's memorial, a black stone tablet with an urn and the tersely eloquent assertion that 'So long as Genius and Talent shall be reversed his Fame will live' . A brass plate on the floor at the E end (under the largest stained glass window) shows a more elaborate eloquence in the verse epitaph composed for himself by Hest Bank Ambleside St John's in the Vale Ralph Tyrer, vicar of Kendal (died 1627):

London bred me, Westminster fed me Cambridge sped me, my Sister wed me, Study taught me, Liuing sought me, Learning brought me, Kendal caught me, Labour pressed me, sickness distressed me, Death oppressed me, & graue possessed me, God first gave me, Christ did saue me Earth did craue mee, heauen would haue me.

(Line two presumably refers to a marriage arranged through his sister's influence. ) A less conventional memorial is an old and tarnished helmet hanging high up from a bracket at the E end of the N wall, known as the Rebel's Cap. This is said to be a relic of the Civil War, worn by the royalist Robert Phillipson (alias Robin the Devil) when he pursued his Parliamentarian enemy Colonel Briggs into the church on a Sunday. Phillipson barely escaped alive from the Puritan congregation and lost his helmet in the melee.

An early nineteenth century Vicar of the church, Matthew Murfitt, is commemorated by Wordsworth in his 1814 sonnet, 'Lines written on a blank leaf in ... The Excursion'. Murfitt was an early admirer of the poem.Just N of the church is the Abbott Hall Museum of Lakeland Life and Industry (open 10.305 Monday to Friday all year; Saturdays from Spring Bank Holiday to end of October, 10.305; winter Saturdays, 25; Sundays, 25 all year; car park; admission charge). There are displays on local history, industry, agriculture and crafts, as well as rooms devoted to two contrasting children's authors John Cunliffe, author of the Postman Pat books and television scripts for young children (the series was conceived when he was teaching at Castle Park School in Kendal), and Arthur Ransome. The Arthur Ransome room contains manuscripts, drawings, photographs, letters, and books as well as personal items, including Ransome's desk (with typewriter, lucky holed stone from Coniston Old Man, and a vast array of pipes), his fishing rods, chess set and a Jolly Roger flag. A bookcase displays many of his favorite books, including Homer, The Hobbit, volumes of folktales and Icelandic sagas, and works on natural history.

Kendal things to do

During any tour of the lakes, take time to glance at Kendal, which is  a well built and well paved town, pleasantly situated It is famous for several manufactories; the chief of which is that of Knit stockings, employing near 5000 hands by computation.

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Hot on the heels of the economic tourist came the aesthetic one. The poet Thomas Gray visited in October 1769: the dusk of evening coming on, I entered Kendal almost in the dark, and could distinguish only a shadow of the castle on a hill, and tenter grounds spread far and wide round the town, which I mistook for houses. My inn promised sadly, having two wooden galleries, like Scotland, in front of it: it was indeed an old ill contrived house, but kept by civil and sensible people; so I stayed two nights with them, and fared and slept very comfortably.

(He too was at the inevitable King's Arms.) The 'tentergrounds' were the many fields around the town where new cloth, dampened during 'milling' to improve its texture, was stretched on frames to dry. The town, which he explored next day, did not appeal to him: the town consists chiefly of three nearly parallel streets, almost a mile long; except these, all the other houses seem as if they had been dancing a country dance, and were out: there they stand back to back, corner to corner, some uphill, some down, without intent or meaning. Along by their side runs a fine brisk stream, over which are three stone bridges; the buildings (a few comfortable houses accepted) are mean, of stone, and covered with a bad rough cast.

In general, the town has appealed most to observers who have taken Some pleasure in its industries. Joseph Budworth in 1792 noticed with approval that 'the country people, both men and women, were knitting stockings as they drove their peat carts into the town', and quite apart from its cloth (today only a memory), Kendal's products have always had their own strongly marked character. In the early nineteenth century it was known for Kendal Black Drop, a preparation of opium and spices said to have been used by Coleridge; a century later it was noted for Black Kendal Twist, still available from local tobacconists, a pipe tobacco much favoured by Arthur Ransome but described by his friend Edward Thomas as 'strong enough to knock out the unaccustomed southerner like a blow from a battering ram'. W H Auden, in his 1959 prose poem Dichtung und Wahrheit, praises his lover more ‘more beautiful than a badger, a seahorse or a turbine built by Gilkes & Co of Kendal'. Sure enough, you will find Gilkes's factory (not open to the public) on the E side of the river, just over the bridge behind the Town Hall, still producing some of the world's best water turbines.

Lake District poets

The poet Thomas Gray visited on his Lakeland tour in 1769. He walked in the park, and his account gives a fascinating glimpse of the very beginning of the industrial revolution, when its activities were seen as demonic but sublime, like an illustration to Paradise Lost:
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This seat of the Stricklands, an old catholic family, is an ancient hallhouse, with a very large tower embattled ... I soon came to the river; it works its way in a narrow and deep rocky channel over hung with trees. The calmness and brightness of the evening, the roar of the waters, and the thumping of huge hammers at an iron forge not far distant, made it a singular walk: but as to the falls (for there are two) they are not four feet high. I went on, down to the forge, and saw the demons at work by the light of their own fires: the iron is brought in pigs to Milthrop [Milnthorpe] by sea from Scotland, &co. and is here beat into bars and plates.

To reach the walk, take the lane E from the Hall entrance and go under the road. Follow the lane to its end, and then turn L (N) until you reach a footbridge. You can follow the river for about 2m. There are no ironworks now, and perhaps Gray means that he went down to Milnthorpe, then a busy little port (the Kent estuary has since silted up).

Continue 4m N to Kendal (several well hidden car parks, and a truly fiendish oneway system), a pleasant town of silver-gray limestone clustered in the Kent valley. Drayton's Polyolbion (1619) gives us an eloquent introduction:

Where Can first creeping forth, her feet hath scarcely found, But gives that Dale her name, where Kendal towne doth stand, For making of our Cloth scarce match'd in all the land. 'Can', of course, is the River Kent, which flows attractively through the town centre. Kendal was famous as a cloth town from the fourteenth century onwards: hence Falstaff's tall story of the 'three misbegotten knaves in Kendal green' who gave him so much trouble in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part One.

Most early visitors mention the cloth industry. Celia Fiennes gives a characteristically breathless sketch in 1698: Kendal is a town built all of stone, one very broad streete which is the Market Crosse, it’s a goode trading town mostly famed for the cottons; Kendal Cotton is used for blankets and the Scots use them for their plodds [plaids] and there is much made here and also linsi woolseys and a great deal of leather tann's here and all sorts of commodities twice a week is the market furnished with all sorts of things.

She visited the King's Arms (now gone), where One Mrs Rowlandson she does pott up the charr fish the best of any in the country, I was curious to have some and so bespoke some of her. The food (including the potted charr) was still good at the King's Arms in 1768 when Arthur Young, busy touring the north of England to report on its economic potential and productivity, recorded:

A good house, very civil, and remarkably cheap. A brace of woodcocks, veal cutlets, and cheese, Is. a head, dinner. A boiled fowl and sauce, a roast partidge, potted charr, cold ham, tarts, and three or four sorts of foreign sweetmeats, 8d. a head; three people supped. Another supper; cold ham, tarts, potted charr, anchovies, butter and cheese, 6d. a head. Tea or coffee 6d. a head. Other things proportionably cheap.

Things to do near Levens Hall the Lake District

Opposite the Hall gates a walk leads NE alongside the River Kent for 1m. At the far end, where the A590 now crosses the river, was formerly the 'little bridge ... with some steps in the crag leading down to it', where Laura in Helbeck waits for her secret twilight meeting with Hubert Mason. Returning across the park she is mistaken for the ghost of 'the Bannisdale Lady' (modeled of course, on the Levens Lady).

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Immediately N of the bridge by the Hall gates, turn L (w) on A590 for 2m, then R (N) on to A5074. The road runs up the Lyth Valley under the slope of Whitbarrow Scar, an enormous limestone ridge wooded on its lower reaches. The valley is yet another setting for Helbeck of Bannisdale, which describes it well in springtime: The course of the bright twisting stream was dimmed here and there by mists of fruit blossom. For the damson trees were all out, patterning the valleys; marking the bounds of orchard and field, of stream and road. Each with its larch clump, the grey and white farms lay scattered on the pale green of the pastures; on either side of the valley the limestone pushed upward, through the grassy slopes of the fells, and made long edges and 'scars' against the sky; while down by the river hummed the old mill.


This little known region is celebrated also in Margot Adamson's poem 'Spring Under Whitbarrow Scar'. Visitors to this 'Wide silent valley/ Beneath whose scree faced hill the sea birds call' will still see the 'Good, greys tone, whitewashed farms with northern names' just as she catalogues them in her poem: Foulshaw, Rus Mickle, Grassgarth, Flodder Hall, Johnscales that's hidden in the shadowing trees, High Sampool where the restless lapwings call though not quite in that order. To appreciate the area's gentle delights properly, park where you can (not easy) and walk w up the lane that leaves A5074 1m N of the main junction with A590. This tiny road takes you past all the farms mentioned in the poem, and when you reach The Row, a hamlet at the N end of the valley, you can go past the houses and follow a path up on to the top of the Scar itself a strange gentle wasteland of grey limestone fragments, remnants of an ancient seabed, with marvelous views.


The naturalist William Pearson gives lively sketches of the area, its wildlife and human goings-on in his Notes on the Natural History of Crosthwaite and Lyth, and the Valley of the Winster (1839). Few details escaped him, and one is grateful to him for preserving the text of a notice he once found barring the main road up the valley

Levens Hall the Lake District

Turner sketched the Hall in August 1816. From March to June 1897 Mrs Humphry Ward rented the house whilst writing Helbeck of Bannisdale, using the Hall as the main model for the novel's 'Bannisdale Hall'. The house delighted her: at last we arrived saw the wonderful grey house rising above the river in the evening light, & plunged into the hall, the drawing rooms, the dining room, and all the intricacies of the upper passages & turrets with the delight and the curiosity of a pack of children. Great wood and peat fires were burning everywhere; the magnificent carved chimney pieces in the drawing rooms, the arms of Elizabeth over the hall fire, the strange stucco birds and beasts running round the hall, shewing dimly in the scanty lamplight we shall want about six more lamps and the beauty of the marvelous old place took us all by storm. Then through endless passages and vast kitchens, bright with long rows of copper pans & moulds we made our way out into the gardens among the yews and cedars, and had just enough light to see that Levens apparently is like nothing else but itself, and that there are broad straight graveled paths among the fantastic creatures & pyramids & crowns ... It is hard to stop quoting: one can feel the novelist's imagination taking fire. The house had everything even a ghost, the 'Levens Lady', a legend which figures in the novel.

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The dining room, its walls covered with gilded leather, is clearly described in the novel: 'It [the leather] is very dim and dingy now,' said Helbeck, 'but when it was fresh, it was the wonder of the place. The room got the name of Paradise from it , Helbeck also describes the grounds, including the extraordinary topiary garden. The seventeenth century owner was a friend of the diarist John Evelyn, an early enthusiast for landscape gardening, and the garden is the best one of its period still intact. During Mrs Ward's tenancy several literary visitors came, notably Henry James, about whose visit (alas) we have no details.

Arnside and the Lake District

Continue N following signs (about 4m) to Arnside, the quiet and amiable vestige of a minor Victorian seaside resort. This is a pleasant place to potter about; Arthur Ransome enthusiasts will want to follow the promenade w to its end, then take the causeway footpath a further 250yds for the abandoned sheds of Crossfield's Boatyard, where the original dinghy Swallow, which was owned by Ransome and helped inspire his Swallows and Amazons, was built.

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From the promenade also Mr Cedric Robinson's guided walks set out across Morecambe Bay. For details of dates and times, contact any local Tourist Information Office. A walk across the Bay is an exhilarating experience of a strange and beautiful terrain: if you are bound for a walking holiday in the Lakes, why not enter the district in the traditional way, across the sands, and share something of the sublimity tasted by the earliest tourists? Near the promenade the Kent Viaduct, a graceless utilitarian object of squat brick piers and grey metalwork, crosses the estuary. It is the subject of Gordon Bottomley's melancholy poem 'The Viaduct' (1906): the monotonous procession of 'Piled trucks, tarpaulin mounds, and heavy vans' lumbering over the viaduct reminds Bottomley of an Imperial Roman Triumph. Levens, the Lyth Valley, Crosthwaite and Sizergh Continue N on B6385 to Milnthorpe, then go L (N) on A6 3m to Levens Hall (open Easter to end of October; closed Friday and Saturday; car park; admission charge), a fine country house whose core is a medieval pele tower, around which cluster gabled Tudor wings, some with enormous barrel like Lakeland chimneys.

A tour of the Lake District

From Hest Bank, take the coast road N, following signs to Carnforth and then Silverdale; if coming directly from the M6, leave at junction 35 and follow signs to Silverdale, an attractive coastal village amongst wooded limestone hills. Leave the village going s and after V2m at junction go down small road (signed Jenny Brown's Point). On R you will see Gibraltar Farm and Tower House, formerly a single property. In the attractive Tower House garden is a square three storey stone tower. Elizabeth Gaskell often visited the farm, writing in a letter of 1850.

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Silverdale can hardly be called the seaside, as it is a little dale running down to Morecambe Bay, with grey limestone rocks on all sides, which in the sun or moonlight, glisten like silver. And we are keeping holiday in the most rural farmhouse lodgings, so that our children learn country interests, and ways of living and thinking. Sometimes the Gaskells rented the Tower as well as rooms in the farmhouse. In 1858 Mrs Gaskell reported:
We live in a queer, pretty crampy house, at the back of a great farm house ... the house is covered with roses, and great white virgin sceptred lilies, and sweetbriar bushes grow in the small flagged square court ... In the garden, half flower half kitchen is an old Square Tower, or 'Peel' a remnant of the Border towers.

She was wrong about the tower it is from the early nineteenth century but she loved it and found it a good place for work. 'You don't know how beautiful Silverdale is,' she told a friend, 'and a tower of our own! think of that!' In 1855 she began her Life of Charlotte Bronte here. Large parts of her novels Ruth (1853) and Sylvia's Lovers (1863) were also written here.

The village of Silverdale provided the model for' Abermouth' in Ruth, whose Chapter 24 portrays the black posts, which, rising above the heaving waters, marked where the fishermen's nets were laid ... and grey, silvery rocks, which sloped away into brown moorland, interspersed with a field here and there of golden, waving corn. Behind were purple hills, with sharp clear outlines, touching the sky.

Return to junction and go R (E) up Hollins Lane to rejoin main road; at next junction go L (N). After 100 yds private drive on R leads through woods to The Sheiling, built by Elizabeth Gaskell's daughters and later the home of the poet and dramatist Gordon Bottomley from March 1914 until his death in 1948. Hard now to believe that this pleasant but rather suburban looking dwelling, with its red tiles and half timbering, was once the last word in architectural design and supposed to harmonies perfectly with its rural setting. The house is described in Edward Thomas's poem 'The Sheiling', written after a visit to Bottomley in November 1916, shortly before Thomas's departure for the Western Front, where he died the following year:

It stands alone Up in a land of stone All worn like ancient stairs, A land of rocks and trees Nourished on wind and stone ...

During the visit Thomas entertained his host with 'a riotous collection of army songs' and walked in the nearby hills. The landscape hereabouts has been celebrated in several poems by an almost forgotten writer of the 1920s, Margot Adamson. 'Easter on Thrang End' surveys the view over farmland and sea from the hills above Thrang End Farm, just across the road from The Shieling the 'White rocks, green hill grass and wide sky' with the spring sun on brown brackens talks and the silver shallows of Morecambe Bay. 'Beyond Slack Head' notes the rich wildlife of this relatively untouched area, where the limestone pavements encourage a rich growth of wild flowers.