Waxwing

Waxwing
"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."

From "Auguries of Innocence"

by William Blake

Monday 25 October 2010

Castlerigg Stone Circle and Watendlath

Day 4 Wednesday, 20th October

Our last day in the Lake District and the weather was beautiful - cold and frosty with clear blue skies and sunshine.

We drove northwards towards Keswick to visit Castlerigg Stone Circle. The circle was built around 3200 BC in Neolithic times and was used for ceremonies. Today it consists of 38 stones of different sizes and shapes, some of which are now lying on the ground. It is believed that originally there may have been 41 stones. It was very atmospheric there with superb views and ravens "kronking" overhead.

Near Keswick we saw our one and only red squirrel of the trip which sadly was lying dead in the road. 15 - 30 years ago we regularly had red squirrel sightings on every holiday but in more recent years we have only seen one every 3 or 4 visits.

Before driving home we made a brief visit to Watendlath.

Not sure how the layout of this posting will work out but I am keeping my fingers crossed I won't have problems with text appearing at the side of the images instead of above or below!!!

Photos taken from the ferry crossing Windermere (first 2 taken by my son)










The next few photos were taken from a moving car as we travelled from Grasmere to Keswick. They are not very good but I was surprised that they came out at all although I did set a high speed on the camera. The lake in a few of the pictures is Thirlmere.













Castlerigg Stone Circle - first photo taken by my son













Traditional packhorse bridge at Watendlath (the lake in the distance in the middle photo is Derwentwater)





2 comments:

Phil said...

I was looking at Dean's (daily diary) latest post and happened to see the word 'Watendlath' on a blog on his sidebar. This is one of our favourite walks in the Lake District. During our latest visit at the end of August we too only saw one Red Squirrel and unfortunately that too was a road kill victim. We stay in Grasmere mostly and usually see a few Reds there but not this year.
Ref your side text problem, have you tried uploading your excellent photos in large format? I think that might stop it as there won't be enough room for text at the side of them. Hope that helps and look forward to your next post.

Ragged Robin said...

Thanks so much for your kind comments,Phil. The area around Watendlath isvery beautiful.

Thanks so much for your suggestion re: text problem - I think I have now found a solution! When looking into how to make the photos larger I noticed that if you place photos on the left (as mine recently have been) the text appears at the side whereas if you centre them the text appears above and below. Perhaps Blogger has changed the default setting from centre to left as in the past photos have appeared automatically in the centre. So many thanks for helping me resolve the problem.