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.

luxury hotels in the lake district

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.