7/12/17 travel days

We drove south through the Scottish lowlands stopping for the night at Gretna Green on the border of Scotland and England.
Gretna Green got famous when, 200 years ago, it became the destination for underage lovers running off to get married without parental consent.

Talk about a tourist trap! Busloads of tourists come to see the “famous” blacksmith’s anvil where the marriages took place. The souvenir shops sell the kitschiest items for exorbitant prices and the lines at the register are long. Ugh.
And people still come to Gretna Green to get married.

We left Scotland and drove south through the Lake District.
Oh. My. Gosh. What a beautiful area.
Of course we’d heard of the Lake District just as we’d heard of the Yorkshire Dales and Moors, but you have to see them to appreciate them.
Years ago I read an opinion that the UK – with all its civilized land – was one of the most beautiful islands in the world. When we toured Britain in 2000 we heartily agreed with that assessment.
The Lake District is the most beautiful area we’ve seen in a beautiful country (Robin – remember we haven’t been to the Highlands. Call off the Floggers!) And I don’t have a photo to share that does it justice.

Our road took us through a necklace of fairytale stone villages sitting on glittering lakes with a backdrop of fields dotted with stone walls. Low lying mountains rimmed the vales where the lakes lay. It is so hard to describe the beauty of the area. Evidently we are not alone in that assessment because the Lakes District is visited by something like 23 million people each year and I think they all come in the summer.

 

We found a stone circle at Castlerigg on a hilltop and we spent the night at a camping in Keswick. The camping – and the town – sat on the edge of one of the lakes the district was named after. The view reminded us of Lake McDonald in Glacier Park (sans snow).
We drove through Grasmere, where the poet William Wadsworth lived for 14 years. We passed by Beatrix Potter’s village of Near Sawrey and made our lunch in Windermere. Eventually we passed through the Lake District and stopped outside of Blackpool on our way to Chester. We are not visiting Blackpool, known as a seaside resort with an amusement park, because we want to devote a couple of days to Chester, a town with Roman origins, before continuing to Northern Wales and then to the South.