Yesterday was our one fine day of this week. I was working on a report and the sun was streaming tantalisingly through the window onto the computer screen.
So when Paolo asked if I was going out with him for the dogs’ early evening walk, that was it, no arm twisting needed.
We are lucky enough to live near Williamson Park which has wonderful grounds and wonderful vantage points to look out over the bay and to the lakes.
Spider and Wilbur however find other things to distract them….
Anyone who has passed Lancaster on the M6 will have noticed the Ashton Memorial, A wonderful folly built by Lord Ashton in memory of his wife, indeed it has been called England’s Grandest Folly, and perhaps just a little prosaically ‘The Taj Mahal of the North’. Baroque in style it was certainly built to impress but I often wonder how much linoluem it took to build – Lord Ashton was an industrialist who made his money in oil cloth and linoleum. A subject for another day perhaps.
Anyway as we arrived in the park the sun was low in the sky and illuminating the memorial…
However, as we walked around Fenham Carr the sun was dropping and the moon rising.
Fenham Carr is great for the dogs, it’s an extension of the park which used to be part of the Moor Hospital estate. The Hospital itself was a large gothic hospital opened in 1816 and built following the County Asylums Act 1808. Housing up to 3000 patients at its peak it closed in 2000 and is now a large housing estate, although given the practices of psychiatric hospitals at that time I wouldn’t fancy living in the converted main buildings. The Carr is less formal than the rest of the park so the dogs can rush about as much as they like.
By the time we’d walked around the park it really was dusk….
