Coniston - 26/7/09

Clichés, clichés. Chucking it down with rain this morning – and I mean real, torrential, start-gathering-two-of-every-animal rain. So this morning the only trip was back to that tourist hot-spot, the supermarket at Ulverstone. Emily and Gemma, incidentally, are turning into right little buggers. They piss about, you tell them not to and they just laugh at you. And I'm babysitting them in a couple of week's time. Anyway, we had one of Christine's trademark enormous buffet lunches, by which time the rain had stopped. There was even a few hints of sun at times. With the Harvey girls repeatedly chanting “Aquarium! Aquarium!” (a place were you can stroke a sting ray, apparently, as if you'd want to) me, mum and dad struck out on our own. Drove along a typical Lakes road – windy, hilly and full of sheep – for a time alongside Coniston Water and finally reached Coniston itself. I swore I'd been here last year but apparently it was an almost identical Lake District town. Namely, fully of walkers and tourists, built in the odd local style of dark stone walls and slate roofs, and overshadowed by a great fuck-off hillside. We started walking along a little lane running alongside an understandably full and roaring stream. There were little waterfalls all along the stream, but I still think the tiny hydroelectric dam at the top was a bit optimistic; it might power two light bulbs but no more. Beyond this, the gorge suddenly opened into Coppermines Valley. This would once have been a standard beauty spot; a wide, shallow river at the bottom, little rocky nodules on the flanks and, at the head, the looming mass of the Coniston Old Man range. But they weren't joking when they named the valley. This used to be a thriving industrial centre. The old mine buildings have been converted into holiday homes and a YHA, but there's still two thumping great spoil heaps in the centre and yawning holes in many cliff faces. Wainwright spit acid at all this, of course, but I think it gives the valley some character. We walked along for a while, dad trying to locate a boulder he climbed on when he was 14. We did eventually see it, but it was laughing at us on the far horizon so we just turned around and went back. The insect problem has been solved by fly paper, temporarily turning this house into a series of hanging graveyards. And how stupid are flies anyway? When they see a strip of paper festooned with corpses of their cousins, why don't they think “This is something to avoid”?