The Journey Began!

There is something quite wonderful about camping, once you've set everything up and can sit down in your fabric tent and then survey the world around you. Fortunately we have had a pre arranged trip to a place called Cartmel, located within the world famous, lake district, one of the UK's most picturesque areas. I have only ever been here once before, for our honeymoon, four years ago, to Ambleside, which is fairly central to the lakes. This time, we are in the south of the lakes, away from the really, really touristy parts.


There is a splendid sense of isolation here, the village has no recognisable pavements for pedestrians to use. The village is still a creation of the time before cars when the streets where all for people, probably before the invention of the wheel enabled carts to hinder the road wandering yokel.

And that age old feel of tight streets, small cottages, big houses set in large grounds, all with colourful flowers outside the kitchen window, under which, inside sits the ubiquitous Belfast sink and rustic farmhouse kitchen. And this is the key to these places and why you can relax in isolation. I call it the 'prisoner' syndrome, after the 60's TV show. It's a village that exists but does not appear to be alive. In any town on a weekday there would be people coming and going, but here it's a ghost town, populated only by tourists in beer gardens and wealthy commuters or second home owners. Walkers and ramblers. A village in appearance perfect, yet underneath the veener, a symptom if the wealth and economic divides this country faces. I would like to live in that picture postcard chocolate box, English village, but could I exist in one, a soulless pretence. Only enjoyed as a anthropologist as a mark as to how the UK has so completely been been altered by it's post war development.