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.