Cockermouth’s most famous son is the poet William Wordsworth.

There is a huge statue of a Lord Mayo on Main Street, though. From the inscription it sounds like Mayo was a bit of an imperial adventurer. He became Viceroy of India and was assassinated in the Andaman Islands!

Anyway, below is Wordsworth’s boyhood home on the junction of Main Street (right) and Crown Street (left.)

Quite imposing. And difficult to photograph without a car in the shot!

We viewed the house and garden – both overseen by the National Trust. We got there just as it was opening at eleven a.m. and there was a queue. Apparently at the height of the tourist season it’s mobbed.

Here’s a view of the garden from the house. It’s a bit sparse looking after the coldest early spring in Britain for 50 years. The River Derwent is a footpath or so beyond the wall at the back. It was from the terrace there I photographed the bridge over the Derwent I featured a couple of posts ago.

There is a small bust of Wordsworth on a pedestal on Gallowbarro – the bar of the “T” to Main Street and Crown Street.

Just to the right of where I took the above photo is a memorial fountain to both William and his sister Dorothy. This was taken at more or less a right angle to where I photographed their childhood home.

The Water Garden adjoins Fountains Abbey which I posted about yesterday. It’s a shortish walk from the Abbey to the Water Garden following the river; which looks canalised, a prelude to the artificiality of the Water Garden itself. (There is a paved path if you prefer not to walk on the grass.)

This is a stitch to show the trees and water along the way.

There are several neo-classical buildings in the Water Garden. This is the Temple of Fame.

This is the Rustic Bridge.

Again, a few more photos are on my flickr.

On the day we went to Ripon we had visited Fountains Abbey earlier.

Note the party of schoolchildren dressed as monks to the left here.

Ruins.

Internal view and a cloister.

Nice waterfall on the walk to Studley Royal Water Garden (see link above.)

The monks built out over the river which is bridged at at least four points (one of which held the toilet block – I wouldn’t have liked to live down river of that!)

A few more photos of Fountains Abbey and its grounds are on my flickr.

Even Alloway has Art Deco.

That central portion looks like a converted doorway, though.

The River Doon was surprisingly bonnie. (Most hyped-up scenic views are disappointing but the Doon runs clear and sparkling by ye banks and braes.)

The Auld Brig O’ Doon, immortalised in Tam O’Shanter, also looks great. This is from a newer bridge.

The Auld Brig is protected now but amazingly there have been proposals in the past to demolish it.

Here it is from the east side.

And this is the view from the Auld Brig to the newer.

Looking in the opposite direction from the newer bridge there is a third.

Alloway is not lacking in scenes to photograph!

The Bridge over the Severn at Worcester is nice but not particularly striking.

This piqued my interest. It’s a gate across an alley hard by the Railway Station. It may lead to a car park there or something. Very childrens’ story like.

Just opposite Worcester Cathedral at the edge of the town centre is this statue of the composer Edward Elgar (who wrote, among many other pieces, Pomp and Circumstance March No 1; sometimes known as Land of Hope and Glory, though the words were a later addition.)

On Saturday we took a wee trip to South Queensferry really just for something to do but also to check out an antique shop we’d seen featured on the TV. (We didn’t buy anything in the end.)

Just by the jetty from where the boat trips to Inchcolm island set off there is this sculpture. The plaque mentions there is a large grey seal colony on the island.

South Queensferry is of course dominated by the two Forth Bridges but mainly by the original (rail) Forth Bridge. The trains seem to be every few minutes one way or the other. They look like toys against the Bridge’s sheer size. Here’s one coming off the bridge to the south. The photo captured the reflections in the water quite well.

The local shops etc make great play of the bridge connection. This is the Rail Bridge Bistro and Gift Shop.

I like the way the Rail Bridge motif is maintained on the fencing to the left front and also on the door handles on the entrance.

The sculpture of one of the bridge spans is to commemorate those who built the bridge.

This, I believe, contains the only commemoration to those who died in its construction, who are not enumerated individually anywhere. (Edited to add:- there is now such a memorial on the pavement opposite to this.)

A couple more pictures of South Queensferry have been added to my South Queensferry flickr set.

I’ve been waiting a couple of years to post this one. When I first photographed this building it looked like this:-

Prior to having been left more or less to rot for a good few years it had been a Vogue Furniture shop – in fact the good lady and I had bought a chair from it not long after moving in to Son of the Rock Towers. Long before that I believe it had been a garage, with those doors that opened very wide so that the cars could be driven in and out. That was many years before we moved to Kirkcaldy, though.

It’s been undergoing refurbishment recently and has now opened as an Undertaker’s – the business moving from a hundred or so yards away round a corner.

So now it’s much more spruce. This one shows a bit of the railway bridge over Nicol Street. And the clock on the wall.

You’ll notice the flagpole has gone. Quite why an undertaker’s needs a clock I don’t know. Here’s the front view. There’s a high tech steel staircase inside that you can barely see due to the reflections.

Crosbie and Matthew seem to call themslves Funeral Directors. (At least it’s not morticians.)

Two more photos – one of the dilapidated building, the other of the refurbished one – are on my flickr.

On the way down on our trip we stopped off at Wetherby just to have a bite to eat and stretch the legs. I didn’t spot much in the way of Deco but there was a nice bridge over the River Wharfe.

As you can see the river was quite high, in fact flooding the banks so that you couldn’t walk on the bank underneath the bridge.

Just to the right of the above photo Wetherby War Memorial stands on the bridge parapet – see photo on the left below. I’m not too keen on the ones which feature angels like this. (Edited to add, figure of Victory/Nike.) A day later I also photographed Lincoln’s War Memorial, on the right below, a more intricate and to my mind more æsthetic design. A couple more photos of Wetherby are on my flickr.

This is Thomas Telford’s Dene Bridge over the Water Of Leith viewed from the West. I’ve crossed this bridge many times but hadn’t seen it from below before (except on television.) You don’t get any idea when you’re on it just how high it is nor of its detailing.

The photo is a stitch of three (I think I didn’t quite get my angles right so the match isn’t perfect. It also shows only two of the three spans. Too many trees in the way.)

Here are the individual photos.

This is the view from the other (East) side.

This thing is massive.

Yesterday I drove my son and his girlfriend to Prestwick for them to pick up a flight to Belgium. Lucky so and sos.

It was a good day for it what with the sun splitting the pavements (as my father used to say.)

To break the trip up the good lady and I dropped into an antique centre at Garrion on the way back. The centre, which is part of a complex including a Garden Centre, various retailing ventures and the obligatory tea/coffee shop, is named after the two bridges which carry the A71 across the Clyde a couple of hundred metres west from there.

We didn’t actually buy anything yesterday but I include this link just in case anyone wants to go.

The bridges themselves are quite scenic so I took a few pictures.

This is the older bridge (the northern of the two.) Due to the short distance between the two bridges I couldn’t get the whole of this one in a single frame so this is actually a stitched together amalgam of two photographs.

This is the newer bridge which has a nice arched span. It was built in 2001. The two act as a kind of roundabout a bit like a motorway flyover. Westbound traffic takes the new bridge, eastbound traffic the old one.

Here’s the view from the southern bridge.

Scotland in summer. Don’t you just love it?