The poetry path in Kirkby Stephen is an innovative and beautiful idea. A circular walk (takes about an hour and a half) with twelve carved poems along the way to commerate the year of a hill famer.
The poems were written by Meg Peacocke and engraved by lettering artist Pip Hall into blocks of stone which were incorporated into walls and stiles or positioned as milestones at intervals along the route.
Each one has carved decorative motifs which depict some of the activities associated with each month of the hill farmer's year. Kids can make rubbings of the illustrations so take paper and crayons with you.
A PDF map of the route is available from the the East Cumbria Countryside Project http://www.eccp.org.uk/images/recent-projects/PoetryPath2.pdf
pictures taken gratefully from visitbritain.com and english-lakes.com
Our little adventurers are 6 and nearly 4 now. We've done our fair share of pushchair walks and ambles around lakes, the time has now come to heighten their horizons! This afternoon they did their first ever Wainwright - a very short but steep hike up to Walla Crag above Derwentwater and Keswick.
There are 214 peaks in Alfred Wainwright's series of books about the Cumbrian Fells, we've been thinking that it would be cool to start off doing some of the smaller ones and get higher and higher as the boys get older. We've found two really great free resources on t'internet to help us with our mission - the first is http://www.hill-bagging.co.uk/ which lets you register and log your peaks as you climb them, and the second is http://www.stridingedge.net/ - a photo diary of one family's walks on the fells. The great thing about Stridingedge is that it has photos of all the walks and a little map of the routes used showing where to park, it also lists the walks in order of height as well as geographical location - very useful for those of us wanting to start at the bottom of the list! So here we are - Barney and George at 379 metres on the cairn at the summit of their Wainwright number1 - Walla Crag. Good work boys!
