With a 326 mile drive ahead of us, we were on the road at 8am. We took the M40 north, the M62 toll round Birmingham, the M6 between Liverpool and Manchester and on to Carlisle before turning right for the final stretch.
We took turns driving, made a couple of stops for coffee and lunch and made fair time considering there were a couple of sections with slow traffic.
We we excited to see Tebay Services was on our route because there had been a recent tv show called the Lake District Farmshop all about the only family owned service station in the UK. It was opened in 1972 by John and Barbara Dunning after the M6 motorway was built through their farm and began as a small restaurant and shop selling locally sourced crafts and drivers’ essentials. Today they work with more than 70 producers from within a 30-mile radius, even selling local lamb and beef raised on their farm and butchered on site. It certainly didn’t look like any other service station I’ve been to and we bought pies, local cheese, a ginger cake, pasta sauce and some bread rolls.
Around 5pm we made our final approach from the main road onto a narrow side road, passed a couple of farms, over a cattle grid to an unfenced road with sheep everywhere and lastly to a rough track leading to Scotchcoultard Farm. Just four miles north of Hadrian’s Wall in the Northumberland National Park, we really are in the middle of nowhere, with just sheep for company.
We are staying in Hope Sike, part of a converted stone farm building made into a holiday apartment and named after the small stream which runs through the farm. We settled ourselves in and relaxed with a cuppa and a piece of the excellent ginger cake procured at Tebay.
Later we went for a wander to stretch our legs and acquaint ourselves with the local inhabitants … sheep, cows, pigs and a little dog who barked a lot and wanted us to throw a tennis ball for him … and also spotted the stream.
Chris came to terms with the combi microwave and persuaded it to heat our pies while I negotiated the two ring hob to cook veg, made interesting as all markings were missing from the dials!
Somewhere along the way, it became obvious that not only was the wifi a bit hit and miss, although we were prepared for that, but that neither of us had a phone signal either and we resigned ourselves to the refreshing concept that we really had got away from it all!
We had a play with the tv to check out which channels would be good for a weather forecast in the morning then I started writing my journal for the day offline, while Chris resorted to Digital Photographer and his comic … oops, Private Eye!
Off Travelling Together 