bridge over untroubled water

I often wonder how it is possible to walk, cycle or otherwise pass by an interesting feature without even noticing it, but it happened to me again the other week. The village of Ivegill, which is located about 12 miles north of Penrith, lies on one of the first routes that I established when I started cycling, so I will have cycled through it dozens of times during the past two decades. According to Wikipedia, ‘It takes its name from the River Ive, which flows through the centre of the village’. This is not correct. The entire village lies east of the river along an unclassified road with no junctions. It has a church and a primary school, but no pub. I don’t know the origin of the river’s name but –gill, mistakenly spelled ‘ghyll’ by Victorian antiquarians (e.g., Dungeon Ghyll in Langdale), derives from the Old Norse word for ‘ravine’.

I’d never previously stopped hereabouts, but on our last ride through the village, Paula and I had been battling a vicious headwind for the past couple of miles, and I was on the lookout for somewhere to sit down and take a break. I spotted a convenient bench by the side of the road just as we were leaving the village, so we stopped. And that’s when I saw it:

I had absolutely no previous knowledge of its existence! The second photo was taken by Paula.

Although the text section of the Wikipedia entry for Ivegill contained no useful information, there is a photo of the bridge in the side panel, and from the caption I learned that it is a Grade II listed structure that is known as Wharton Bridge, Further research dated its construction to the early eighteenth century. It is described as a packhorse bridge, although it doesn’t appear to lead anywhere. In fact, the gate that you can see in the above photos was padlocked, and the far bank appeared to be heavily overgrown, possibly impenetrable.

This is a view of the downstream side of the bridge:

On the evidence of this photo, it’s hard to imagine how this watercourse achieved the designation ‘river’, although it has been a very dry summer.

And this photo, also taken by Paula, shows a gradient sign—unusual on unclassified roads—that appears to read ‘15%’, so it clearly has considerable erosive power if measured over centuries. The photo also shows the convenient bench, which we’re likely to make use of in future whenever we come this way:

I wonder how many other interesting sites I’ve cycled past over the past two decades without noticing them, although I will continue to keep my eyes on the road ahead.

a grand day out, british style

When I started cycling in 1998, I quickly worked out a route that I could do regularly through the area northwest of Penrith. It wasn’t particularly long (20 miles), but it was good enough to do repeatedly, including one memorable year when I decided at one point to do it every day that it wasn’t raining. However, I reckoned without what turned out to be the driest September on record and ended up repeating it 13 days in a row! Tough!

And when I wrote A Grand Day Out back in March, I was describing what turned out to be the best ride of my most recent sojourn in Hong Kong. Not only was it my first 100km ride of the period (105km), but I discovered several new paths to add to a ride that I’d earlier named ‘journey to the west’, after the well-known Chinese literary classic. I tentatively named one of these discoveries ‘Yuen Long (south) path #4’, but I mentioned in this account that I needed a more fitting name, because it really was a severe test of one’s bike-handling ability. I’ve now settled on ‘adult entertainment’, because it’s in an area known as Shap Pat Heung (‘18 villages’). I’m sure you will see the connection. Shooting a video is a top priority when I get back to Hong Kong next month.

Meanwhile, my cycling habits around Penrith during the summer months have changed radically during the past couple of years, although I did add a couple of other routes to my repertoire years ago. However, Paula retired in 2019, and she has since been able to spend the entire summer with me. Starting last year, I decided that we should do a different route every time we went out. This often involved cycling through villages that I’d never previously visited in my entire life and had certainly never cycled through, a system that has continued this year.

Which brings me to the ride that Paula and I did on Wednesday. My plan was to follow the A686 eastwards as far as the village of Melmerby, which is located at the foot of the long climb over Hartside, notorious for treacherous winter conditions—it was blocked by snow drifts for three months during the hard winter of 1962/63. This would usually mean crossing the River Eden via a ‘temporary’ bridge at Langwathby, but I’d heard that it was currently closed for resurfacing. However, I learned from the county council website that there is a footbridge here that can be used by cyclists and pedestrians—I might not have considered coming this way if the road had been carrying its usual amount of traffic.

I remember having a wonderful geography teacher in the run-up to GCE O-levels in 1962 who taught us how to interpret Ordnance Survey maps to deduce the reason for the location of villages, and in the case of Langwathby, the reason is obvious: river crossing. This is confirmed by the name—the component –wath– derives from the Old Norse word for ‘ford’ (the suffix –by, extremely common in this area, simply means ‘village’). Upon returning home, I googled ‘Langwathby bridge’ to find out more about its recent history—I knew that the original seventeenth-century stone bridge had been destroyed by a horrendous flood of water down the river—and was staggered to learn that this event occurred as long ago as 25th March 1968, hence my enclosure of the word ‘temporary’ in quote marks above to describe its replacement.

Langwathby would be our first stop on the ride. Most villages have a convenient bench seat somewhere, and I took the following photo here from just such a vantage point:

Not many local villages have such an extensive village green. The village’s church can be seen on the far side of the green, just right of centre, while the village hall is on the far left. The local pub, the Shepherd’s Inn, is just off the photo to the right. The road out of the village towards our next objective turned out to be quite a tough challenge, which I hadn’t expected, and I was quietly dismayed, because our intended route beyond Melmerby would follow the foot of the Pennines, a mountain range known colloquially as the ‘backbone of England’, and I had anticipated that there would be some seriously difficult hills on that section of the ride. However, when I googled ‘Langwathby bridge’ after the ride, the relevant Google Maps section appeared at the top of the search, and from this I learned that this hill had a name: ‘Storey Bank’, which would have been a clear warning signal, had I known this in advance—hills that have been given names are usually quite brutal. And although there were plenty more hills to contend with later in the ride, Storey Bank turned out to be the toughest climb of the day. Phew!

Melmerby would be our next stop. I didn’t notice anything particularly interesting here, although I took this photo from the bench we used for our rest:

Nothing particularly interesting here, although the black sign next to the signpost has been placed there by the local pub, also called the Shepherd’s Inn.

From Melmerby, our route diverts from the A686 onto a typical unclassified road that leads to the village of Gamblesby. One difference between villages in England and Hong Kong is that almost every village in Hong Kong has a public toilet, while I’ve yet to see such a facility in any village hereabouts. Consequently, shortly after leaving Melmerby, we had to stop for a toilet break. I took this photo, which shows the road ahead, while we were stopped:

I hadn’t intended to stop in Gamblesby, but I simply had to take a photo of the church here and its unusual rounded apse:

While stopped, I took this photo of the road ahead through the village:

…and this photo of the other side of the church:

Navigation of the route to Renwick, our next objective, was quite tricky, but we didn’t make any mistakes. This village also has an interesting church:

The clock, an uncommon feature on village churches, still functions. While resting here, a local resident (with a strong Midlands accent) asked us if we were on the coast-to-coast, a popular cycling route that passes through Penrith.

“No!” I replied. “We’re just day trippers from Penrith.”

Had we actually been on the coast-to-coast, we’d have been well off route at this point. The resident then asked whether we had enough water. I thanked him for his kind offer, but we were okay.

Before reaching Croglin, we joined the B6413, although you would never guess that it’s a classified road. Although wider than the roads we’d been negotiating up to that point, the actual condition of the road surface is no better. And there was no traffic! Just before reaching what I expected to be our next stop, we passed a junction with a signpost to a place that I’d occasionally heard mentioned in conversations but tacitly assumed was a silly name invented to bamboozle people like me: Scarrowmanwick. Had the start of this side road not been quite a steep hill, we might have diverted just to be able to say we’d been there.

I’d never visited Croglin before, and there really isn’t any reason to do so. This side road off the road through the place, which is a dead end, is pretty much all there is to see:

There certainly aren’t any public buildings.

I’d memorized the route to our next target, the village of Ainstable, because it had seemed from my map (see below) to be quite a complex sequence of junctions, but the first left turn after leaving Croglin was signposted to Ainstable and Armathwaite, so getting there turned out to be straightforward. After a second toilet break before reaching Ainstable, I took the next photo looking back the way we’d just come, with views of the Pennines in the distance:

We didn’t stop in Ainstable, because we couldn’t see anywhere comfortable to sit down for a few minutes, so no photos. The next two photos were taken as we re-crossed the River Eden as we entered Armathwaite, first looking upstream:

…then downstream:

The water level is very low, which isn’t surprising given the lack of rainfall this summer.

Armathwaite is the largest village on this route, probably because it is located on one of the few crossing points over the river, although the suffix –thwaite derives from the Old Norse word for ‘clearing’—the area was densely forested when the Norsemen arrived here 1,500 years ago. We didn’t stop here until we’d almost left the village, which has two pubs and seemed quite busy. I took this photo while we were enjoying a short rest. It shows the road leading to the village’s railway station:

As you may guess from the alignment of our bikes, we would be continuing to the left.

The remainder of the route is familiar territory, because we’d reached Armathwaite by a different route last year, and the continuation that we did then is by far the best option. Our next stop will be Calthwaite, which we pass through on several other routes, so we already knew where the seat is. This is that village’s church:

You can see hay bales in a field behind the church—local farmer’s will have had no problem drying their crop this year.

Our route then continued through Hutton End, past the transmitter complex from which the BBC broadcasts its World Service radio on short wave, to Skelton, where we made our last stop. This is a view looking back down the hill, the way we’ve just come:

You may just be able to make out the tallest of the BBC’s transmitter masts in the distance above the middle house in the row of three.

We’ve often used this bench, because Skelton is on routes that go in all directions, and opposite the bench is what is obviously a public building:

I’d originally conjectured that this is a school, but after a bit of sleuthing, I can now state that it is Toppin Memorial Hall. Skelton also has two churches, neither of which our route passed, and a pub.

The last seven miles are mostly downhill, apart from a short but quite steep hill in the village of Newton Reigny, where we didn’t stop. I was looking forward to a cold beer (or two). This map includes all places mentioned in the above account:

As a scale guide, Langwathby is about five miles from Penrith, and this account describes the longest ride of the summer to date: an estimated 41 miles. A grand day out? Definitely!

haw! haw! haw!

Haweswater is the most easterly lake in the Lake District, and also the highest above sea level—if you exclude the upland tarns, which were formed by a different physical process. It was once a natural lake, but its fate was sealed with the passing by Parliament, in 1919, of the Haweswater Act, which allowed Manchester Corporation to build a dam across the outflow from the lake. Construction of the dam began in the 1930s, and it was completed in 1940.

I hadn’t been up the valley containing what is now a reservoir for many years, and Paula had never seen Haweswater, so, given that nowadays I’m constantly thinking about new cycling routes, ones that we’ve never done before, I decided that a ride to Haweswater would be a good idea last Monday. The following map, which is a photo of a section of an Ordnance Survey road atlas with a scale of three miles to the inch, will allow me to describe the day’s ride (because the apparent scale of the photo will depend on the kind of device you’re reading this on, you can get an idea of the true scale from the fact that the village of Askham is about five miles from Penrith).

The first problem that we experienced on the ride was the sheer amount of tourist traffic on the B5320 between Eamont Bridge and Pooley Bridge, but we encountered a much more awkward problem when we reached Askham: a sign proclaiming that the road ahead was closed! The sign also indicated a diversion to the east to the A6, which would not have been any use to us, so we decided to continue on the originally planned route through Helton and Bampton. However, at the fork in the road a short distance south of Askham, we encountered another sign reminding us that the road ahead was closed, so on the spur of the moment I decided to follow the left-hand option, past the hamlet of Whale, which I’d never been along before but had originally planned to follow on the return journey.

I don’t think we’ll come this way again. Not only is this road extremely rough, probably because it carries very little traffic, but we encountered two closed gates, which we could pass through, but having to stop to open and close the gates breaks up your rhythm. However, we eventually reached Bampton Grange, which isn’t marked on the map but is just a short distance east of Bampton. I took a photo here of a bridge over the River Lowther in which you can also see this village’s church tower:

There were also signs pointing to Haweswater—and no indications of any road closures ahead. I took this photo of a second bridge a short distance further on:

I had anticipated a climb up to the dam, but although it is quite long, this hill isn’t particularly arduous. However, the road along the valley is very up and down, although none of the hills is hard work. We had good but intermittent views of the lake, and I made a mental note of where we might stop to take photos. We didn’t stop though, until we reached the top of a long hill and I noted what seemed like quite a steep plunge to the valley floor next.

While we considered whether to continue, we scrambled to the top of a rocky spur between the road and the lake, where I took quite a few photos. The following three photos show the view down, across and up the valley, respectively:

You may notice what appears to be a short series of terraces on the hillside to the right of the small tree plantation in the second photo. These are widely known as ‘sheep tracks’, although sheep have nothing to do with their creation. They are formed by a process known as solifluxion, which is the slow downhill creep of soil under the influence of gravity. The pink/purple colour in the foreground is heather, which is flowering earlier this year than usual.

I then shifted my position and took another photo looking up the valley in which you can see the continuation of the road:

I also shot a short left-to-right panoramic video:

When we finally continued up the valley, I couldn’t help thinking that the hill we were descending would be quite a tough one to ascend, but it turned out to be easy!

One of the sad effects of the construction of the dam was the drowning of the village of Mardale Green. The inhabitants were rehoused elsewhere, and all the buildings were demolished, including the Dun Bull Hotel and the seventeenth-century church of the Holy Trinity, although the interior fittings of the latter, which included a Jacobean oak pulpit, went to other churches. The corpses buried in the churchyard were exhumed and reburied in Shap.

Although nothing now remains of the village itself, the stone walls enclosing fields and marking narrow lanes can be seen when the water level in the reservoir is low, and given that there has been very little rain since we came back to Penrith in June, I wondered whether these features might be visible. They were:

This is a closer look at the area of interest:

There were quite a few parked cars at the road end, but all were likely to have belonged to walkers out for the day. There were no tourists, and consequently almost no traffic, which made cycling along this valley an absolute delight. I took this photo looking back down the valley before heading back home:

And I took this photo of the dam on our way home:

You can see that the water storage is well below capacity.

We returned home through Bampton and Helton and saw no sign anywhere of roadworks or road closures. However, due to the sheer volume of traffic on the B5320, we abandoned my original plan to return to Penrith via Pooley Bridge. Mind you, Eamont Bridge is a notorious traffic bottleneck, with its light-controlled humped bridge over the river, that took a while to negotiate. Nevertheless, another grand day out.