Ah I read the news today, oh boy Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire And though the holes were rather small They had to count them all Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall The world over, if asked to name a town in Lancashire, most people would give you a blank stare. If you hum the tune and prod them with a pointed stick, a few might remember the lyrics to A Day…
You have to love a town that has a shop called Reptile Wonderland. Come on, you know you want to sing along. Lizards croak, are you listenin’ In the lane, snakes are twisting A beautiful sight, we’re happy tonight Walking in a reptile wonderland Here we are in Rishton, Lancashire, a quirky town that also has a dive shop… … and a balti restaurant. For our American readers, a balti is a curry cooked in a metal bowl, and the…
It’s not every day you get to say, “Go past the pangolin and turn right at the mummy” but today was one of those days. It was raining again, so we decided to stay in Burnley, and take a look the the civic museum Towneley Hall. The Towneley family lived there for five hundred years before selling the place to Burnley Council in 1901, though the building changed quite a bit over the centuries. It was sold unfurnished apart from…
The Burnley Embankment, half a million tons of earth hauled into place by horse and cart, piled up with shovel and wheelbarrow to a height of up to sixty feet, and carrying the canal through three quarters of a mile past the rooftops of Burnley. They call it The Straight Mile, because after you build something like that you’re entitled to a bit of exaggeration. Yes, that is a bush growing out of the side of that chimney. I’m guessing…
Yesterday was every bit as rainy as expected, so we sat tight and watched the first four episodes of the latest season of House of Cards. The boat has a small stove which burns coal based fuel, like overgrown charcoal briquettes, so we lit that up. This morning the rain stopped for a while and was not forecast to be as heavy, so we decided to make a move. We would have had to run the engine anyway to charge…
There are places that are neither here nor there, sometimes because both sides want them (Kashmir, The West Bank) and sometimes because neither does. Berwick-upon-Tweed, might perhaps be part of England or Scotland, but neither really wants it. Legend has it that when the Crimean War was declared in 1853, it was declared by Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed (pronounced BER-ick) and all British Dominions. When the Treaty of Paris was signed to end the war, Berwick-upon-Tweed was omitted, so they…
Skipton Castle bills itself as one of the best preserved medieval castles. In fact the Tudor wing on the right of this picture is still a private residence. But though one or two of the walls have been around since the 11th century, it has been gloriously mucked about since then. For instance, here’s a perfectly serviceable medieval arrow slot turned into an air vent for a Tudor fireplace. You may notice the castle looks a bit on the short…
Fifty years today since the US release of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and we passed a boat called Mr Kite. No locks today, but many swing bridges to get through. We are currently out of sheep country and into cow country, which makes the first cows of the day a much earlier event. Haworth was around the boundary. From one spot you could see sheep, horses, and cows all at the same time, which is actually pretty rare…
Back in the 1960s, the Tory government decided that roads were part of the national infrastructure deserving of vast expenditure of taxpayers money, but that railways were not. They closed more than half of Britain’s railway stations and around five thousand miles of track. One little branch line running from Keighley up past Haworth was taken over by steam enthusiasts, and is still in use running vintage trains. What’s more, they’ve kept the original British Railways signage, as a reminder…