previous | home page | this month| e-mail me | next

Browsing in Bowness

Richard Bell’s nature diary, Cumbria, Tuesday, 7th October 2008

previous | home page | this month| e-mail me | next

AS THE RAIN is forecast to last all day and most of the night, we amble around Bowness and Windermere, tasting the tapas at the Bodega bar, browsing the bookshops and sketching the shoppers at the Lakeland kitchen store.

Jackdaws, sometimes in a flock of 100 or more, circle over the grey-green slate roofs, calling to each other.

Bowness’s bed-and-breakfast area has occasional becks flowing in slate-lined culverts between the shrubby gardens of the bay-windowed Victorian villas. We find several leafy shortcut paths (which actually take us the long way round) through pocket-sized parks and alongside tumbling torrents where the wild Lakeland scenery of the surrounding fells penetrates this quieter side town.