The North: Friday

17 September 2010
Home again today, but yesterday's all day car ride didn't make much southerly progress. We spanned the length and breadth of Cumbria, and ended up in a perfect chocolate-box country town, Kirkby Lonsdale, that I had never heard of, but is apparently a prized destination for many. We booked a comfortable room and ate a fantastic dinner and breakfast at The Sun which helpfully provided a copy of a walk to something called Ruskin's View in their information notebook.

First stop was the church, one of our 1000 Best Churches, directly behind the pub. A Norman church with fat carved piers just like Durham's.

I love the Rainbow Banners

Each pier has a different carved pattern

A Green Man capital

Continuing through the churchyard we arrived at Ruskin's View, which turns out to be a spot where Turner painted and which Ruskin considered to be the finest natural landscape in the country. It is pretty spectacular.

The walk continued around the outskirts of Kirkby (pronounced Kirby) and back to the Market Square.

The 13th c. Market Cross in the Swine Market

The River Lune

The town sheep

The 13th c. bridge

By midday we started on the long ride back to London, making a few rest stops on the way. First in Saltaire, a Victorian planned town, built by Titus Salt for the employees of his textile mill. Another UNESCO World Heritage Site, but we had no time to walk beyond the mill building for photos that offer a flavour of the townscape. The fabulous church was under layers of scaffolding, so I couldn't even snap that.

Salt's Mill

We also stopped in Sheffield, England's Steel City before deindustrialisation. The new museum complex includes a small metalwork gallery, a small crafts gallery, a special exhibits gallery (closed for mounting a new display), and the weirdly presented Ruskin Gallery. Ruskin's enthusiasms were prodigious, and one of them was to open a chain of museums in the industrial cities to bring culture to the masses and to train their eyes to appreciate beauty. Sheffield's was the only one to open and to close, leaving the city with a Ruskin Collection of bits and bobs intended to elevate common thoughts. The new Gallery is a hodge podge of rocks and minerals, copies of famous Italian paintings, watercolours of Venice, renderings of architectural ornamentaion, Audubon birds, and hundreds of other items. The running theme of commentary accompanying the display is that you too can be trained to appreciate beauty just as Ruskin desired, and thus inspired to go forth and be creative. Whatever.

And that completes our five days in The North.