This time we are in a charming rented cottage in Arnside, on the edge of one of the most outstanding landscape features of the whole area: Arnside Knott. You can see the edge of it from the house - a dense band of trees on a steep slope blocking off the end of the lane. To get there I walk up the road until the houses stop, and a wide view to the north opens up. Here the road, bounded of course by a stone wall, runs alongside the woodland, and there's a gate and a sign saying Arnside Knott. The path is stony, it's thin layer of leaf mould warn away by our feet, and it gets very steep as I trudge up through the dark trees. Soon the wood thins and I am in a scrub area with young yew trees and native grassland. There are paths all round the hill and criss-crossing it. Some are green but most are a pavement of small stones tamped down, rained on, frozen, baked and trodden. The trees - oak, ash, birch, sycamore, yew, hawthorn hazel, blackthorn - are all native (unless you discount the sycamore). Even if you know little about trees and even less about grassland, you can still tell that this is different from your average farmland wood. There is none of the desperate dark green of fertilized vegetation, no rank grass, no nettles, docks, dandelions, buttercups and the other familiar weeds of land made artificially fertile. All this would be good enough on its own, but as you get closer to the top, huge vistas open up, and this is why Arnside Knott is famous locally: the views. At one point you can see almost the whole of Morecambe bay to the south, the long low Arnside rail bridge crossing the estuary to the north and then, round to the east, the sand-filled Kent river. All that sand! But that's not all: it's what lies the other side of the estuary which makes the view so outstanding. There's a look-out point where the whole panorama unfolds, and a shiny metal diagram of what you are looking at. There, etched across the horizon is a long list of peaks, of which I only recognize the names Helvellyn and Skiddaw, but since there are over 100 peaks above two thousand feet I'm not too ashamed.
Having only once visited the Lake District I had not realised how close it is. It took us just half an hour on a rainy afternoon to reach Kendal. We parked at the southern end of the centre and walked up the main street - Highgate. As we walked so our jaws metaphorically dropped at the opulence of the shops. Here is an ultra-traditional male barber's shop with gleaming accoutrements; here a high end fashion shop; gift shops, toy shops, homeware, yet another fashion shop, a second, even a third barber's shop, and to cap it all a fantastically posh supermarket from the Lancaster based Booths chain. This is clearly either a very wealthy town or it serves a very rich clientele. Since there is not much industry in the Lakes the wealth must come from the leisure industry, and makes us realise how neglected is our corner of Wales. It's true the mountains aren't as high and there are certainly less of them, but what we have is just as beautiful and no more wet and windy - but we tend to have it to ourselves. Selfishly I wouldn't want to change that but certainly the Cambrian mountains could take more tourists and we might see a more exciting blend of shops than poor Llandovery can boast at present.
On our last day we walked down to the station and took a rail trip across the estuary and back to the Edwardian era at Grange-Over-Sands. Alas the old Lido is in ruins, but you can still imagine yourself arriving on the exciting new railway, twirling your parasol as you walk the promenade, taking tea if not by the sea then at least by the sand, admiring the exotic ducks and the specimen trees in the parks, and perhaps listening to a brass band playing under the gorgeous pagoda. It would all have been new then; the trees small, the town full of builders, the shop signs glistening with new paint, because it was the railway which built Grange, and it's still the quickest way to get to it from the south.
