This morning, looking in any direction from my home in the Eden Valley it seemed clear (although actually it’s ‘misty’ and unclear in a literal sense) that whether to the north (The North Pennines), to the west (The Lake District) or to the south-east (The Yorkshire Dales) it was quite probable that people were going to get rained upon today.

The Dales Countryside Museum, Hawes, Wensleydale

Here’s the first, of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority’s “Dales Countryside Museum” at Hawes – telling “the story of the people and landscape of the Yorkshire Dales past and present … school days, home life, leisure time, religion, transport, communication and tourism, farming, local crafts and industries”. The museum shares the building with the Hawes National Park Centre, and is wheelchair friendly. Now, where next? Yes, there’s still lots more to do in Hawes.

The Wensleydale Creamery, Hawes, The Yorkshire Dales

With your mind thoroughly informed about the Yorkshire Dales from your visit to the Dales Countryside Museum you can now turn to thinking about your body and visit the Wensleydale Creamery. I suggest that, in common with the other 200,000 or so visitors that come here every year, you forget slimming for an hour or so and enjoy the creamery’s visitor centre with its museum and observation area – then, of course, there’s the shop with its Yorkshire Wensleydale Cheese and lots of other goodies!

Enjoy your Wensleydale “Day in the Damp” – and don’t forget the Wensleydale heritage railway with its station right next to the Dales Countryside Museum.

In September Cumbria welcomes the World Sheepdog Trials to the parkland at Lowther Castle, near Penrith, Cumbria. More than 200 dogs and their handlers from over 20 nations will compete. Many thousands of spectators are expected at this prestigious event and its associated Food & Country Festival.

A parade through Penrith is planned for Wednesday, 14th September, and the trials commence the following day. After four days of competition the grand final is scheduled for Sunday, September 18th. This beautiful location, on the eastern fringe of the Lake District, could hardly be bettered.

For further details see the World Sheepdog Trials web site.

Next to the entrance into Grasmere village churchyard is an old house.  It was once a schoolhouse but in 1854 Wilfred and Sarah Nelson moved in with their family of two daughters, and this became the home of Grasmere Gingerbread.

Sarah was at this time in her late-thirties, and had been employed in a number of wealthy homes in the kitchens.  It was in one of these that she had experimented with her recipe for gingerbread and brought it to perfection.

During the second half of the nineteenth century  not only did Lake District tourism grow in general terms but more specifically the flow of visitors to Grasmere increased enormously following the death of the poet William Wordsworth.  The Wordsworth family graves became a place of literary pilgrimage, and for fifty years Sarah supplied a growing clientele with her unique gingerbread until she died in the early years of the twentieth century.

Today, more than one and  a half centuries later, Grasmere Gingerbread is still made to Sarah Nelson’s original recipe, a closely guarded secret, and is sold from the same house by the entrance to Grasmere village churchyard to its many thousands of visitors every year.  I suspect that Sarah, for all her belief in her unique formula, would have been astonished to know the number of countries in the world to which her gingerbread has travelled.