A bit of Quaker history - baaaaaaaaa!

Picture 1: a view from near the summit of Pendle Hill.
Picture 2: lamb in the valley on our climb down from the summit.
Picture 3: the only sign on the entire 5-mile trail or near it that actually indicated our destination (the English aren't ones for directional signs on trails OR roads, it seems, from this experience and our driving experience)
Picture 4 & 5: peacock pictures from Warwick Castle, taken yesterday.

Our only activity today, other than driving, was climbing Pendle Hill. Located in Lancashire west of York and northeast of Manchester, Leeds, and that general conglomeration of industrial cities, it's the highest thing for miles around. The tourist website I looked at yesterday claimed that, on a perfectly clear day, one can see the ocean from Pendle Hill. I'm a bit skeptical for a couple of reasons. Now, the day was completely hazy when we climbed Pendle Hill and overcast until we were about halfway down the Hill and nearing the end of our hike but it seemed pretty clear that, while Pendle Hill is the highest thing for many miles around, there are equally high or higher hills in pretty much any direction. Further, that central part of England is bounded on the west by the Irish Sea, the south by hundreds of miles of England, the east by the North Sea, and the north by hundreds of miles of England and Scotland. So I'm not really sure what ocean they're talking about. :) The view was incredible, however, especially after the trail that mom and I took to get up the Hill. Not that the trail was ugly since it was actually incredibly beautiful as well, but it was very contained.

We started in the lowlands pretty much due east of the hill in a teeny tiny village called Barley. From the visitors' car park and cafe in the center of town, we walked up a small road that ran past the Village Hall and then out the eastern edge of town. It pretty quickly turned into a limited access road and, past the last house, no public vehicles were allowed - only county utility vehicles. The road started to go up pretty steeply and quickly lost its paving and became more and more pot-holed. We walked by two beautiful reservoirs, the upper one almost empty of water with canyons carved by streams of water at the bottom of the reservoir visible. Our trail followed the feeder to the upper reservoir, Ogden Clough, into a narrow, treeless valley full of sheep. The hike was really fun because the trail consisted of public footpaths that had been drawn right through private sheep pastures. Every now and then we'd round a curve in the valley and startle a mama sheep with a lamb or two, and they'd all take off running with the lambs usually impeding each others' escape and their mother's by trying to huddle underneath her as they ran. Not productive, little guys. The narrowness of the valley made it completely silent except for the nervous baaa-ing of the sheep and the low noise of wind passing along the moors on the rim of the valley so that, even though we were never more than a two hour walk back to the village at our farthest point, we felt completely severed from civilization. Finally, our trail cut steeply up one of the valley walls and after a panting climb we emerged up on the moor. This ecosystem was amazing - inhabited by just a few plant species that I could see, and they were clearly adapted to living up on the windswept heights. The moor looked flat, like a field of mini-shrubs across the hills, but as we followed our now-paved-with-stones path, deep channels kept opening up in the landscape. Not geological channels like gullies or valleys but places where the plant cover was not continuous and we could see that the plants held about a foot of rich-looking dark dirt in place on top of the hill. In the channels the bare rock and lighter dirt was visible. I have no idea why those channels existed but it showed what at first appeared to be a two-dimensional landscape to be instead a complex rumple - we were glad of the stone path because navigating across all of those channels would have taken much longer. After a good ways of walking across the upland moor, we finally arrived at the summit where all of a sudden the ground (what was not beaten down by tourists) was covered in normal grass and blankets of little white flowers. Not sure why they were just on the summit and not elsewhere in the uplands, and why the moor plants weren't on the summit. The view was absolutely gorgeous and there were things to see all around. Unfortunately, the pictures aren't very good because of the haze. As soon as we were a mile or two down the Hill, of course the sun came out and the weather was clear and beautiful. Coming across that upland moor and following our meandering little trail through the sheep pastures in the valley, though, we could understand how people in this part of the world could have been attracted by George Fox's teachings in the 1660s. His simple message seemed to fit in that harsh landscape and vast scene in contrast to the rich worldliness and fussiness of the city churches or even the small village churches of that time (and today). So Mom and I felt that the hike was a great experience (+ exercise!) and are glad that we included it in our tour of England.

After spending the afternoon at Pendle Hill, we drove up here to the Lake District where we are spending the night in Ulverston. The village of Swarthmoor is just a mile or two up the road including the original Swarthmoor Hall - another Quaker history site and of course the namesake of my alma mater. I'm old!!! We're going to explore the Lake District over the next couple of days, spending the next two nights in Keswick. On Sunday there will probably, hopefully, be an exciting surprise change to our itinerary! We might leave the Lake District that day to do something elsewhere and come back to Keswick to spend the night. We'll see!