Furness Abbey

Between October 1990 and March 1991, the company I was working for placed me on a project at Vickers in Barrow. In my memory, the weather was uniformly bad to the extent that my two colleagues, Rob and Roger, and I had a daily game involving three pennies and the loser had to brave the weather to pick up our lunches. 

Since then I've had some lovely drives out around the south-west coast of Cumbria in all sorts of fine weather but I'm afraid that my mental image of Barrow remains wet and gloomy. So it was a delight, this morning, to find that the weather was bordering on glorious for the trip that the Minx and I had planned out to Furness Abbey.

We set off early just in case there was a deluge of staycationers who'd all decided to visit the English Heritage site but we had worried unnecessarily. We had a nice circular walk while we waited for the site to open and then we spent a happy half-hour or so mooching around. 

It's stunning to think that the buildings are nearly nine hundred years old and I found it hard to resist trying to superimpose my understanding* of the monks' lives onto the ruins around me. I wonder whether they were content? I guess it depended on the weather!

After that we took a drive out onto Walney Island to get a view of Piel Island (see my first extra) before driving back through Barrow to pick up the coast road to Ulverston. By now, though, we were feeling peckish and on a whim we went into Rampside where we found Clarkes Hotel and had an excellent lunch, kindly subsidised by the last day of the Chancellor's 'eat out to help out' scheme.

While we were waiting for our food and as the Minx was reading her book, I took a short stroll, where I took a photo of Rampside lighthouse (my second extra). 

*only recently obtained from the visitors' centre

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-11.0 kgs
'The Vanishing Half' by Brit Bennett