Roman Ruins, Ravenglass Railway, and a beach

Ambleside is in the middle of the peaks of the Lakes District, but for today's outing we needed to get down to the sea, on the west coast of Cumbria. We opted for the short and direct route, what the map showed as a narrow, steep road following the old Roman road through the Wrynose Pass and the Hardknott Pass down to the sea at Ravenglass. After looking at the way it was represented on various maps, I deduced that it would be a one-lane road with lots of twists and turns, and this was correct. But once it had climbed above the trees and stone walls, into the wide open, fern-&-sheep zone, it was easy to see cars coming. It was a delight.

We went past the signs saying things like "30% grade ahead" and "Road narrows to 6' 6" ahead" and climbed up Wrynose Pass. It was a rare treat of driving up on the fells. At the top we found a surprising number of cars, people using this as a sort of informal trailhead for walks. We played around for a while among the rocks and looked ahead to Hardknott Pass: we could see a line of cars crawling up it, and we realized this was actually a rather popular route. Hardknott Pass had the 30% grades, but plenty of pullouts, and although we met many cars it was never a problem. Got out there and played some more, and then descended to the Hardknott Roman Fort.

This was an interesting ruin. The Romans built this fort here, garrisoned with 500 men, to control the road from Ambleside to the port at Ravenglass, where Roman ships would deliver supplies for the troops on Hadrian's Wall. The fort was on the fells, high above the more sheltered lands below, and you could imagine the hardship of troops stationed here. It had a fine view of Scafell Pike to the north, and, to the west, down the valley of Eskdale to the sea. The walls still stand about four or five feet high, and the remarkable thing about it was its squareness. Although it's draped over an uneven rocky slope, the Romans built the walls straight and put a gate exactly in the middle of each wall. They liked things to be mathematical. They didn't care if the landscape saw it otherwise.

We drove down to Ravenglass, only getting lost a couple times, and parked at the station. You can get on regular national rail trains here, but one half of the station is for something else: the narrow gauge Ravenglass and Eskdale railway. We watched a train pull in: the engine was only about three feet high, with a tiny coal tender. The engineer (an adult barely fits in the cab) was shovelling coal into the tiny firebox door, about 8 inches wide. These were actual engines used on this mining railway to bring ore out of Eskdale in the late nineteenth century--now lovingly kept in service and run by mostly volunteers. We bought return tickets for the journey up to Eskdale.

After lunch at the station's pub we climbed into the open coaches. Everything on this railway was kid-sized. The rails were only 15 inches apart. In the cars you'd sit on little benches, two facing forward and two backward, your knees knocking against each other. But most of the customers were adults without children. The conductor blew his whistle, the engine peeped back, and off we started. We went fast! We were racing along--of course it felt faster because we were in these open cars, like roller-coaster cars, but without any kind of bar to hold you in, and an open door on one side. We went flying along, out the estuary, up the valley, calling at various stations (Muncaster Mill, Irton Road, Eskdale Green), for fully 40 minutes, until we were at the far end, at Dalegarth. It was tremendous. The sun was shining, the forest was green, the rhododendrons were purple, and the villages cute. It was unbelievably fun. It beat the heck out of any little railway at Disneyland. We even thought it was better than the Bluebell Railway in Sussex.

It was pretty late in the day by the time we got back down to Ravenglass, but it was our last chance to see the beach on this trip. So we drove out to St. Bees, a small town just up the coast that we had read had a good beach. Wow, traffic was pushy here: it was rush hour outside the nuclear fuel processing plant at Sellafield, and we were actually passed on narrow curvy roads by quite a few cars who thought we were too slow. Well, we were slow. The beach at St. Bees was not terribly inspiring, with its tiny waves, but a magical thing was happening. As we played there the tide went out fast. Will and I were standing up to our knees and in a few minutes we were only up to our ankles. Lots of sand appeared. There were tiny crab shells from molting crabs.

We drove home on the main roads via Whitehaven, Cockermouth, and Keswick. Luckily these were unusually wide and straight roads (for England), and we got home by 7:00. The mountainous portion of the Lakes district is really quite small--about 30 km by 30 km--but the windy roads make it seem much bigger.

Whew: enough of the car for a while!