Past and present

A fascinating day we’ve had today. Lovely weather, with lots of sun and we were taken on a guided tour of the Furness Peninsula, South Cumbria. Our driver and guide was a colleague and friend of Gordon’s who comes from the area and knows just about everything there is to know about it.

So we learnt about slate quarrying, iron and steel, shipbuilding, the history of Barrow and the part that railways played in this. We were shown wonderful views of the coast and the hills, had a tour of Barrow itself and of Walney Island and also learnt a bit about football in Barrow! A quite splendid day. Thank you so much to both of you for the trip, the fascinating history and fine company.

I had many pictures to choose from, but decided in the end to blip this rather strange but significant picture. It was taken from the inside of the excellent Dock Museum down by Barrow Docks. The museum is built into an original Victorian dry dock (or graving dock, as I learnt today) and that’s what you can see in the bottom part of the picture. It’s possible to climb down and explore the dry dock from the museum. Then through the museum windows can be seen a little of the enormous BAE Systems building where submarines are currently built. So, Barrow past and present.