Not going for a walk...

The weather wasn't too bad this morning, comparatively speaking. It was cool, cloudy, windy and with frequent showers, but compared to most of the past week that's good, so we decided to get out for a walk while it wasn't bucketing down. After a session with maps and guide books we picked the area known as 'Potter Fell', at the back of Staveley, which is reasonably close to home, reasonably free of crowds, and not too strenuous. Or muddy. Which is a bonus after all the hours of rain.

The walk starts off from the lane between Staveley and the neighbouring village (hamlet?) of Bowston, a road known as the 'back road' which is narrow, twisting, amazingly lost given that it's only about 5 miles from the 21st century bustle of Kendal, and startlingly free of parking spaces. According to our Wainwright book, there was space for one car a few yards from the start of the walk, but that was in the 1970s when the book was last updated so for all we knew it might have disappeared.

It was still there, and would have been perfect for the walk. The only problem - someone was doing construction work in a nearby field, and had put 'no parking' bollards across the parking space, presumably to leave room for trucks and equipment. And there was nowhere else to park.

It was disappointing, but hopeless. We gave up, drove into Kendal instead, had a coffee and a mooch round (me with walking boots and a rucksack) and bought a couple of cookbooks from the discount book shop. We enjoyed the stroll, but it wasn't our nice walk to Potter Fell, Potter Tarn, and the wonderfully-named tarn of Gurnal Dubs. We'll save that for another day, and hope the building work ends soon. And that it isn't bucketing down again by then...

This is what we could have seen if we'd gone: Gurnal Dubs in typical local weather conditions. It looks so atmospheric that I'm even crosser we missed it!