The Roman votive stone at the Tunstall Church
An elegant scallop-shaped marble font (at the same church) described in the guide book as "white", but in reality with a translucent pinkish hue to it.
The (originally) very old, very picturesque and much-photographed "Devil's Bridge" over the river Lune at Kirkby Lonsdale (pronounced with a silent 2nd "K" - Kirby Lonsdale).
The lovely little rural market town of Kirkby Lonsdale, which is mentioned in the Domesday Book and is a Saxon name meaning "Church in the vale of the Lune"
The beautiful historic Kirkby Lonsdale church
"Ruskin's View" across the river Lune, where the poet and critic Ruskin used to sit in order to absorb the tranquility of the scene
The construction of the bridge (at the shallow place where the river could be forded in good weather) is attributed to the devil. The legend says that one day, when an old woman found the river was too deep to cross, the devil appeared and told the old woman he would build a bridge there on one condition. The devil's one condition was that the 1st living creature to cross the bridge would from that time on belong to him.
The old woman agreed to the devil's condition and she went away while the devil got on with building the bridge. When the woman returned, the bridge was completed and the devil stood over on the other side, waiting to claim the old woman. But she was a very astute old woman. She flung a piece of cake across the bridge so that her dog ran across to get it. The devil ran off in a tearing rage because he had been outwitted. He had anticipated that the old woman would be the first living soul to cross the bridge, and it was human souls which he wanted - not a dog!
(Yorkshire stone is extremely durable and was the material chosen for the building not only of York Minster but also of Westminster Abbey)
Anybody specially interested may like to know that a full discussion of these names can be found in Sedgefield's "Place Names of Westmoreland and Cumberland"
March 17, 2003, 1:54PM
Associated Press
LONDON
-- For many years, the kingdom of Angria has been known only to scholars who struggled through a manuscript crammed with tiny, spidery writing.
Now, Charlotte Brontė's novella Stancliffe's Hotel, set in a fictional land she and her brother Branwell created, will be published for the first time, shedding new light on one of Britain's most famous writers.
Brontė scholar Heather Glen said Friday, "I think it will change the way in which she's still seen, rather patronizingly, as a woman writer who wrote only about her own concerns," said Glen, who teaches at Cambridge University. "It's very humorous and racy; there's something almost modernist about it with the odd juxtaposition of scenes."
Written in 1838, when Brontė was 23,Stancliffe's Hotel is a series of ironic vignettes that debunk some of the manners and fashions of 1830s England, Glen said.
Edited by Glen, it will be published by Penguin in June [2003]and later this year in a volume with four other novellas set in the fictional kingdom. The others have been published before, but Glen is editing them for the new edition. A U.S. publication date was not immediately available.
Ann Dinsdale, librarian of the Brontė Parsonage Museum in northern England, said the novellas "have been in our collection for many years."
She said most of the work was in the minute handwriting that originated when the Brontės were children, and readers needed a magnifying glass.
"They used to compile little books that were designed to be small enough to be read by a set of toy soldiers Branwell had been given," she said. "It was also a way of keeping the material from adults and an economy measure. They carried on the tiny writing after they grew up."
Glen said Stancliffe's Hotel had not been published before "because there's been a mystique about it because it alludes to this fictional country. So there was a feeling that it was inaccessible, and many people regarded it as juvenilia."
Brontė is best known for Jane Eyre, the tale of a poor governess who survives traumatic events to marry the master of the house. Her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, and another sister, Anne, produced The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
In Stancliffe's Hotel, the story is told in a series of disconnected episodes, and there are sudden changes in mood and scene. The narrator, Charles Townsend, is a dandy who confesses that he takes "a full half-hour to dress and another half-hour to view myself over from head to foot."
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