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September 2024 Our first member’s blog
Thanks to Janet MacDonald for our inaugural blog post.
Around the Lake
I recently spent a few days in the Lake District, and though I’d share a few highlights of the visit with ACFA members.
Bowness-on-Windermere is home to the Windermere Jetty Museum, originally built to house the collection of boats made by local businessman George Pattinson, and is now run by the Lakeland Arts Trust. The museum opened in 1977 and has a variety of steam launches and other boats on display, including the catamaran Trimite, which broke the world water speed record in 1982, reaching a speed of 144.16mph.
The Trust aims to conserve and/or restore the boats in its care, in some cases making the decision to conserve the fabric, in others to return the vessel to operational use, but in each case determining its significance in order to guide any decisions.
A nice example of a restored vessel is the steam launch ‘Branksome’ (1896), which can be seen inside the museum, while outside is the hull of the twin-screw steam yacht ‘Esperance’, built in 1869 by T.B. Seath of Rutherglen, and which was the inspiration for Captain Flint’s houseboat in Swallows and Amazons. In the boathouse can be seen the ‘Swallow’ and the ‘Amazon’ as used in the 2016 film version of Arthur Ransome’s famous book.
Another boat built in Rutherglen was the steam yacht ‘Britannia’, owned by Col. John Ridehalgh. It was 107 feet long, and could carry up to 122 passengers. The model (below) was also made by Seaths.
Several boats were salvaged from underwater, including the ‘Esperance’, the hydroplane ‘White Lady II’ which sank in Windermere during a race in 1937, and the steam launch ‘Dolly’, raised from Ullswater in 1962, having sunk in 1895. Beatrix Potter’s flat-bottomed rowing boat sank in Moss Eccles tarn in 1950, and was brought up after 26 years at the bottom of the tarn.
Also in the care of the Lakeland Arts Trust is Blackwell House, a beautiful Arts & Crafts House near Bowness. Designed in 1898 by M.H. Baillie Scott as a holiday home for wealthy Manchester industrialist Sir Edward Holt and his family, it was later used as a girls’ school from WW2 until 1976, and has been faithfully restored to its former glory. It contains beautiful tiled fireplaces by William de Morgan, carved oak panelling (some of which was reclaimed from a church in Warwick), delicate stained glass, and a beautiful peacock-patterned wallpaper frieze in the Main Hall. Baillie Scott himself designed a block-printed and stencilled hessian wall covering, which has been conserved and restored to the dining room.
At the northern end of Lake Windermere is Ambleside, near which you can go gallivanting around Galava Roman fort, originally constructed in wood around the late 90s AD. This was replaced by a bigger stone-built fort (internally 395×270 feet) between AD122 and AD 125, and could have housed a garrison of around 500 men. A project currently underway by Edinburgh University and the Trimontium Trust is looking at a particular period of conflict in the fort’s history – keep an eye out for more on this.
In Ambleside itself is the Armitt Library, Museum and Gallery, founded by Mary Louisa Armitt. As well as an extensive collection of books on local topics, it currently has an exhibition on the history of fell-running in the Lake District, a number of paintings by German artist Kurt Schwitter, who painted portraits of local people and hotel visitors during WW2, and a history of Beatrix Potter, looking not only at her career as an author and artist, but also as a famer, sheep breeder, estate manager and conservationist – on her death she bequeathed 1600 hectares of land and 14 farms to the National Trust. On display are some of her paintings of fungi, a particular interest of hers, and the Armitt holds several hundred of her natural history illustrations. Other items of interest include a 17th-century carved oak press, the largest on record. There are also artefacts from the Roman period and later, and accounts of some of the area’s most distinguished residents.
Finally, for those of a nautical bent, I’d highly recommend a cruise of the lake, complete with commentary, on one of the many vessels that sail up and down its length, from the most modern of the fleet, the ‘Swift’, launched in 2020, the ‘Swan’ and the ‘Teal’ from the 1930s, or the ‘Tern’ which has been carrying passengers on Windermere since 1891, or if you’re feeling fit, hire one of the traditional rowing boats and get rowing!
August 2024
To introduce the blog here’s a photo of a survey team hard at work, unusually enjoying some sunny conditions, in the Halterburn Valley in the Scottish Borders.
