Unusual view of the Lune

If you walk upstream along the Lune from Devil's Bridge you have two options for getting back into Kirkby Lonsdale. You can ascend by road on Mill Brow or you can carry on a little further and climb up the Radical Steps.

There's a stream that runs beneath Kirkby Lonsdale - you can hear it from the basement of the Sun Inn - that then joins the Lune via a route down the aforementioned Mill Brow. You can still see where one of the water wheels was that powered the town's historic industries of "grinding corn, bark and bone, carding wool, manufacturing snuff, making bobbins, fulling cloth and sawing timber" (according to Wikipedia). Mill Brow is also where the town's secondary school was located until the mid-nineteenth century. 

The Radical Steps were built/installed in 1819 by a Francis Pearson, who was a liberal, and it was this political inclination that earned the 'radical' label. There are 86 very uneven steps, which bring you up onto the path from Kirkby Lonsdale to Underley, near Ruskin's View. Just a hundred yards later there is a path back down to the river. 

Dan and I have been looking at the stretch of the riverbank between the steps and where this path comes down and we'd convinced ourselves that it was navigable. But we were wrong! We went as far as we could but had to admit defeat and make our way back to the steps, which was when I took this photo. I don't think I've ever seen it from this angle before.

PS I spent the evening on my own with a bottle of wine. I cooked the best veggie lasagne I've ever made (see Extra) and spent pretty much the whole evening listening to the live versions of Alt-J's 'The Gospel Of John Hurt' and Kate Bush's 'King Of The Mountain' on constant rotation.

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-10.1 kgs
Reading: 'Kraftwerk: Future Music From Germany' by Uwe Schütte