Dr Bingham entertains

Roger Bingham, the distinguished local historian from Milnthorpe, waits for the rest of the party to catch up. We are walking through the avenue of beeches planted in 1800 between Dallam Tower and the South Lodge. This was the first day in the weekend of events organised and run with military precision by Peter Standing of the Landscape Trust on the Landscape History of the Arnside & Silverdale AONB.

I learned a huge amount from the talks in the morning, including that this journal is littered with factual inaccuracies which the 5 day editing rule means I cannot now change. As for Dr Bingham, how can a single human brain house so much information, amassed over a lifetime spent in this part of Cumbria? He is quite extraordinary. I was particularly interested to join his walk around Sandside and Dallam, a place I used to visit on an almost daily basis before the arrival of Gus. It was a tour de force, and highly entertaining for his anecdotes, historical and contemporary. He hardly stopped for breath in nearly three hours, and was as energetic at the end as the beginning.