Unicycle Emptiness

I should save this for the new year but I have not updated this week as all we did was attempt a nice walk but went the wrong way and ended up back at the car park and had a bicker and I really could not think of ways to make that interesting as it wasn’t even for me.

Plus the new year exists only for those really bad hangovers from mixing alcohol and cream and regurgitated media where a writer reminds you of that time last month when all those people died, look, here’s that photo that affected you in July and remember when that film came out in September? I feel short-changed reading newspapers in the New Year.

I have  been writing this blog for a good few years now and some older entries are lost in the annals of time (well, actually filed under ‘Older Entries’) so I thought I would do a quick retrospective of the Ten Best Things So Far Discovered in the North-feel free to send in your own. It would make me very happy.

10. Steals- Blackpool. A nylon paradise of fashions that never were, the zip fell off or were just vaguely wrong to the general public. But you are not the general public, you have your own sense of style and panache and for a tenner you can buy a new wardrobe. Then discard it after seeing a full length mirror and cry.

9. The Coven- Wigan Possibly, just possibly the only (mostly) vegetarian café associated with witchcraft that also dabbles in raw gluten free food haute cuisine in the whole of Wigan. It is excellent. Not many establishments take your baby off you when you are eating your dehydrated mushroom burger and take it off down the street. More places should. Friendly, bohemian and excellent food at unsilly prices.

8. Williamson Park- Lancaster– Sit on top of a sundial and look across Morecambe Bay to the Lakes beyond. Healthy romping people walk their dogs, teenagers snigger, there is a dank butterfly house which suddenly makes butterflies seem a bit scary and should this be in London, the press would never stop raving on about utterly amazing and wonderful it is, whilst interviewing not that famous actors looking all windswept on the sundial. As it’s Lancaster, it just exists.

7. The New Continental-Preston-I like a pub that encompasses the gap between death metal nights and oak smoked rainbow trout on a bed of fennel. Light, large and with a massive beer garden to let your beloved children roam free as nature intended as you drink real ales because they have funny names.

6. The Palatine-Morecambe- It has newspapers from right wing to left, excellent pizza, excellent views across the bay and decent ciders.  Should the baby not have been born, you would have had to take me out of here in a body bag, Which to be fair would not have taken long.

5. Kirkcudbright Swimming Pool Charity Shop- It has tableaux in the window of topical events but with the items from the charity shop. The royal wedding was a godsend but sadly I was not in the vicinity on September 11^th. Kirkcudbright is also the best town in the world. But be wary of its pasties.

4. Hazlemere café, Grange Over Sands– And talking of pasties, here is pasty nirvana, a flaky heaven of cholesterol. And with more than the normal prosaic cheese and onion choice for the vegetarian. I felt like the only gay in the village reaching the fleshpots of Soho when having a choice between spicy lentil and Homity Pie. The cakes will end your life sooner than anticipated but it will be worth it. Not stupidly priced either.

3. The bargain food shop selling cold cans of Pepsi Maxx for 30p In Ulverston. I possibly gained half a stone on the 10p posh crisps as well.

2. The Dining Rooms, Southport– Fancy and delicious food and everything is £2.50. Yes, £2.50. I assumed a catch but several months later and I’m still alive. But still slightly suspicious.

1. The random manor house buried in the woods somewhere in Lancashire-Because it was a random manor house buried in the woods. And haunted. And had a shrine. Nuff said.

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I hate nature and I hate life.

I am treading in deadly ground, Battenberg cake soft, too soft and spongily unpleasant. The car and the hill we left the car on have long since vanished and the worst thing is someone from the fucking Guardian has managed to traverse this territory, someone from WC1, no doubt in shoes more insensible than mine has found this hellish place forever in the distance and I fucking haven’t.

The Nine Standards are described in The Guardian’s travel section (where they decide for a week a year to cheer on good old Britain and recommend embarrassingly obvious places to go to instead of your usual fortnights luxury safari in Zambia) as something along the lines of ‘worth the walk to see them looming up through the mist.’

I like very much to see things looming up through the mist unless it’s a rapist. I am exited despite my anger that some twat in a North Face jacket worth more than my house has managed to find the looming stones in the midst.

And there isn’t even any bloody mist.

I am not a stalwart denizen of the north; my vowels go on for far too long when I speak and have lived here for but five years. But I grew too big for my boots with my little read blog of the north, thought I was something, grandiosely talked about little known places that I as a local knew about and now I am lost in turgid spongy Battenberg hell. And someone from the Guardian found it but not me. I have sodden ripped printed out OS maps in my pocket like some sort of retired old woman with jolly cheeks but still cannot find it. I plead for help to some rugged Cumbrians with border collies walking nearby who have never heard of it. That is not a good omen.

The OS map is remarkable in its minimalism.  If Philippe Starke were to do a map it would look like this. A slight red curvature on bold white A4 and a red arrow pointing vaguely and enticingly at the white. Maybe it is misty on the map.

I wanted to discover these ancient stones looming up through the mist all by myself. I resigned myself to finding them second handedly after reading about them in the Guardian but to not find them after reading about them in the Guardian is simply beyond the pale.

We walk, bicker, and physically fight over the potentiality of hideously distant Cairns on hill/mountain tops being the ancient stones of importance looming through the mist. We then trudge through the ankle turning Battenberg to find small piles of unimportant stones but then see other toppling lumps which could be the ancient ones of importance beckoning enticingly from other distant hilltops. In front of suspiciously green mires.

I want to see the Nine Standards looming through the mist more than anything ever now out of sheer spite and aggression, always a good starting point for a walk through nature with your boyfriend and baby but not a North Face clad skeleton with rusted iphone is to be seen, just more moist brackish nature.

I have formerly sneered at the rotund lovers of the picturesque who traverse around the outskirts of nature on clearly designated footpaths harking at the surrounding neat hedges before retreating for a nice picnic in the car park but there are no footpaths here, merely possible inklings, more abstract than real and I yearn suddenly to be in an overheated Tk Maxx. It is beautiful here but relentlessly so. Scarily so and to infinity.   I can’t even see the mountain near where the car is meant to be. The hills lead on to more hills and then the dusky outline of the hills beyond, beyond that, a slightly fainter hue of more sodding hills. And the oncoming rain.

We scrabble up hills towards distant Cairns, which must be the Nine Standards looming up through the mist. They are not. My boyfriend keeps insisting they are just over that ridge. And bog. And mire.

He says he can see them. I think he lies. I give up. The baby’s legs are slightly blue. We retreat away from the looming stones in the mist. At a vague essence of a crossroads, he consults his map and cheerily realises we have been the wrong way. The looming stones in the mist are that way.  Twenty minutes that way. We have never been closer. But we never will be again as I refuse to walk another step to see some stupid fucking stones.

I wish I had now. In retrospect I love stupid fucking stones.

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On the way to Kirkby Stephen and The Stones We Did Not See, there is a sign designating a steaming cup of coffee and pointing towards a train station. We go there because I need a wee. It is an excellent train station, one for pleasure not the daily commute, abounding with hanging baskets and general pleasantness. We enter the Midland Room café on the platform-it is  vegetarian and also aimed at trainspotters, an ambitious attempt at two niche markets and at least there is no chance of seeing Jeremy Clarkson here.  Workers ties from a defunct Kent Line can be purchased for six pounds. It sells many train books but also proper books -fiction books aimed at people who are not excited at the thought of looking like a man who worked on the Kent railway at some point in the 1980s but want to read about a bloody fictional murder more than many self published, adjective free  and strangely punctuated histories of the Settle to Carlisle route.

The café is excellent. The food is all under four pounds, simple and fresh. I have a feta cheese salad with sun-dried tomato cous cous and my boyfriend a baton of ciabatta with Wensleydale cheese and tomato pesto. The baby throws things around with merry abandon and rather than tutting darkly from a distance, the nice woman working there offers to wash his utterly horrific plastic bib. The cakes are the epitome of gorgeous homemade country cakedom and we leave awash with that flushed wholesome grin that finding such a place does to you and change from a tenner.

Even though you know the joy from finding a well-priced tearoom on a train platform should really be saved until retirement years.

On the way back from The Stones We Did Not See, we stop at Ravenstonedale.  Because I like the name of it in a vaguely gothic way and I need a wee. Ravenstonedale does not disappoint. It is the epitome of a place called Ravenstonedale. How could it not be ‘positively darling’? The grey stoned village shop selling local ice cream is attached to the village pub and has a sign stating that if no one is in then to go to the pub. It is like Enid Blyton wrote non fiction. Until you see the prices in the quintessential English pub awash with brass, fake flowers, old books and bought in snuggliness.

A man is berating a fellow colleague for arranging the chairs in the wrong way, all meals seem to be £12.95, a woman booms in banging on loudly about her recent stay in Malmaison (the sort of hotel porn you look up and weep over) but it has Thatchers cider, a rarity in the North and according to the sign in the window, it is commended by the Countryside Alliance.

The Countryside Alliance.

My morals and my love of cider fight a brief fight but then I also remember I have no money (or it appears morals) so bid a sad retreat leaving the sad eyed stuffed deer on the wall, the dog eared books about train stations and the genial pursuers of the ambitious and glamorous menu we don’t even bother with the pretence of looking at it once we hear the word’ mango’ when referring to the main course. We know our place. We pick up the remnants of the baby eaten beer mat and leave.

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I open the car door and the wind slams it shut again. I briefly smell the sweet dank smell of industrial cow shit, have an unprepossessing glimpse of flat desolate landscape devoid of feature-the landscape of depression. And do not bother to open the car door again.  The only sign of movement apart from the wind is a frantically flapping sign advertising luxury self-catering accommodation up a muddy track. Poor fuckers. Bet they wish they had gone to Spain.

It is August. It is the worst day I have ever seen. But to go to stately homes and the like is expensive and we need to have something for when we retire, the house is dirty and to stay in it means I should really do something about it and nothing fun like cinemas, DVD’s, books or pubs can be done with an angrily teething six month old baby.

So we get into the car and head the only way we haven’t been before. Towards Fleetwood in the rain. We’re that desperate. And it’s closer than the orphanage.

We go through Pilling. It might be fun! It’s amazing the little gems you discover when travelling around undiscovered places off the tourist trap!

Except you can’t sodding see them through the lashing freezing rain, wind and is that hail? Shivering hanging baskets are flung against modern brick walls, pathetic unripe flowery debris littering the road. Poor Pilling. It is a squat little place but has tried its best. The farm shop seems to only sell dead stuff, the village shop although pleasingly a true village shop rather than a Tesco Express or similar advertises both fresh meat and cooked meat-there is little choice seemingly for those who want both. We see a sign for an art exhibition at the church and so desperate for stimuli are we that we go in. The sign was for last Saturday.  I can really see why people go abroad.

A sign appears through the gloom. ‘To The Shore’. We follow it To The Shore. The Shore is strangely strangulated by long strands of industrial plastic, the rocks all appear to be manmade, such is their mediocre form and consistency, there is no sand but only clag and we can’t see the sea, just another shade of suicide grey in the distance. We have travelled a few yards from the car but are soaked right through and hopefully close to death. The baby is beaming. That is not good. I really really hope he isn’t getting a taste for this. We need to go to Spain.

Next stop Knott End. I was expecting a tiny huddle of a hamlet but come to a little obscure town, so near to where I have lived for years but previously unknown and I am excited and glad I am not in Spain. Until I try to open the car door and the howling wind slams it shut. Again. There is a cheese shop, a wine merchants, a couple of shops I think are charity shops but sadly are not but then the strangely apostrophised ‘Gran’pas.’ And it is magical. An emporium of childhood; wooden intricately carved small worlds-mobiles, pirate ships with such minute detail, a circus with animals, clowns, ring seats containing wooden dolls with jolly wool hair. It is sixty pounds, a bargain when mass produced plastic crap from Argos costs similar and the bad baby will be getting all his presents from here from now on whether he wants them or not. And if he so much as mentions Ben 10, the orphanage awaits.

I wander around wide eyed and remember the magic of childhood before it all contained running down batteries and peeling TV characters with fixed Hollywood smiles, quiffs and sunglasses. Here suspended from the ceiling are little mice on a Ferris wheel. I melt a little inside. The lovely woman behind the till makes the angry baby beam and talks about Father Christmas and despite it being August (allegedly) I feel like I am in an Elves workshop-it does not feel like lurid Argos reality and I am sad to leave but now carry with me a bag containing a moving seagull mobile with grinning yellow beak and beady eyes. The baby better not touch it. It’s mine.

The elements outside terrify me-I walk past a pub I remember reading about, its infamy a result of being the scene of a murderers confession-he rushed in blood covered and terrified having killed his wife and swung for it later at Lancaster Castle. It looks a welcome relief from the wind which is actually making me stagger, we enter, sit next to a picture window showing us the terror and inhumanity of an English summer and have a soup startling for its salinity. Maybe the murderers wife had asked for the recipe. The pub however is pleasant enough and the wine glosses over the terror of the walk back to the car.

Past Skippool creek, a boat mooring and graveyard, shiny well-kept boats bob next to the skeletal remains of their neighbours and then to Fleetwood.

Fleetwood does not lend itself to the rain. It struggles to be beautiful when dappled in sunlight. A long straggling strip of shops cloistered by remnants of industry, the worst situated new builds I have ever seen, perched precariously on a spit betwixt old fishing factories and the cold black Irish sea-salt covered beaming faces on the advertising hoards hardly visible through the rain.

We think about walking up the high street, a high street I know from my past as being pleasant, friendly and at least free of the usual high street chains but today I really cannot be arsed. Sorry Fleetwood. But the chips and mushy peas at The Eating Plaice are worthy of Michelin stars. Seriously. The peas are not a stagnant yellow green slush reminiscent of first-born nappies but slightly crushed, fresh, vibrant and the essence of pea. They were 60p and possibly the best thing I have ever eaten whilst I look out at the swelling churning boating lake, which looks like it has sunk the Titanic and would do it again given half a chance. Just as we have decided that Fleetwood is really not that bad, a whiskered man shoots out from the Model Yacht Club and tries to start a fight with my boyfriend for parking near his Jaguar.

We retreat to the North Euston Hotel nearby, a brave stalwart against the decline of Northern holiday resorts. It has made an effort to stay true to its rather more superior roots and heyday with its porticoed entrance way and revolving door. People chat at the well stocked bar, the cricket is on but it smells of fried food and the laminated menu offers the normal deep fried pub food albeit with a free trip to the salad bar which stands nearby, appetising looking enough but ignored. Nobody is talking about the rioting going on in other areas of England and it is hard to imagine listing to the soft northern hum at the bar that outside much of England is still smouldering from the flames of the night before.

http://www.grandpaswoodtoys.co.uk/

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We are in the south-west drinking orange cider and eating unpleasant fudge. You will be able to read about the delights of Minehead, Dunster, Tarr steps and other places we have not been to yet within the next few days after we have arrived back in the North and mourned the lack of orange cider there. I do like orange cider. If you happen to be in the South West, may I recommend Cheddar Valley, readybrek coloured and as potent as Kryptonite.

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It is easy to be blasé about Britain. There is the south, which is mostly nice, but we can laugh at Slough. The North is poor, friendly and used to have factories. Scotland is pretty but has Glasgow, alkies and things fried which shouldn’t be fried. Why go on holiday here and shop for the same produce in the same supermarket, be unimpressed by a ruin of unimportance and get drizzled upon when for the same price or less you could be munching oozing cheese in a pleasingly crumbling château or getting extravagantly drunk and sunburnt on a Spanish beach?

I find Britain fascinating. I have to because I can’t afford to get my passport renewed.

I like to be surprised by an unexpected place-tourist thronged perfection bores me because you cannot see, or write about anything that has not already been said, seen or photographed a million times. I used to live in Bath. This ruined me-I became saturated by beauty, unimpressed by forced history.

I yearn to travel but I have no passport, money or even a driving licence. So I write about what my boyfriend can drive to with a fractious baby in the back. My wings have been clipped so far back they are mere stubs but still I yearn. So I seek to be intrigued by the unknown that is known. I am bored and I want to be surprised.

So dear reader, surprise me. Tell me about somewhere, anywhere but it has to be in Britain. I am angrily envious of those who write in the travel supplements of broadsheets regaling us with their tales of Cambodia-of course that is interesting but many of us can’t sodding afford it. Where have you been in this country, this fascinating country that is pockmarked with industrial estates, Morrisons and suburbia but where true fascination, beauty and history still exists?

It does not have to be pretty. It has to be a memory that stays with you. I went to Nelson, Lancashire on a Northern day ranger train ticket. It was awful but I am happy with the memory of it. It seems cruel and obvious to go to a northern poverty struck town then hark at the horror of it all but it was the only town in the North I have been to and been horrified by.

It was a Wednesday morning, we arrived at ten am. As a recent economic migrant from Bath and having spent the previous five years living in an unfashionable poor area of London, I was used to poverty. But not with such pleasing house prices. The estate agents had houses for thirty grand. Pendle hill, a source of utter fascination for me, being inaccessible on a rail card loomed overhead. There was a swastika spray painted on the train platform. By 11am a riot van had shot up the high street. This was impressive for a Wednesday morning by anywhere’s standards. My boyfriend went to purchase a cheese and onion pie and there was a furious argument about who should serve him by two girls in the shop. Women in saris swept elegantly by. It was the strangest place I have ever been to.

Now dear reader, please tell me about somewhere, anywhere, that you find interesting, it does not have to be obvious, I would prefer it not to be-just write and maybe, just maybe when you look at the familiar through unfamiliar eyes, you will see the utter utter wonder in the everyday.

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It is Saturday afternoon and I am performing a clumsy forward roll under a turnstile in a public toilet in Ilkley.  I am sorry Ilkley for coming to your lovely prosperous town simply to cheat you of a municipal 20p but I was utterly desperate for the loo, left my purse in the car and simply could not wait. I bided my time, performing exaggerated horrified patting looking for 20p motions on my dress in the hope someone would realise my plight but the well heeled neat women in camel coloured clothes and smart hair merely swept neatly past me so I waited until they were all having some impeccably neat silent wee then made my move like a post natal Indiana Jones in platform boots.

Sorry, Ilkley- you looked a lovely place, all modern Italians and café bars, stately terraces and small trees in ornate pots. You would be twee if you weren’t ensnared by Ilkley Moor and thus look like Toytown encircled by untamed nature although like a pox the executive detached homes have started to climb up untamed nature and claim it their own.

I would have been more impressed with Ilkley had I not lost my fickle heart already to Settle. We are on an overcomplicated drive through Yorkshire on the way to Harrogate-there are all sorts of road alterations and diversions hence accidental Ilkley, a place I would like to return to should I be allowed after my brief anti-social sojourn here.

Settle, despite being without the thrill of latent criminality is a delightful place without being self-consciously so. A small grey stone market town huddled cosily amidst gentle hills and bountiful with tearooms, old fashioned ironmongers and people with white hair and sensible catalogue footwear stopping to natter on the street.  There are two charity shops for local charities, tearooms and a pub, which has the excellent notion of exchanging drinks vouchers in return for fruit and vegetables from local gardens and allotments. A hitherto undiscovered green finger begins to twitch and I decide I like Settle very much.

We pick around a small rubbish car boot sale, buy some pleasingly cheap cheese from a pleasingly cheap deli and are filled with that glorious sense of well being that only pottering around nice places spending money you don’t really have on things you don’t really need can bring. I wonder how many homes have been repossessed and lives destroyed due to the allure of blackcurrant and almond cake and vanilla scented candles.

It is a place that is wonderful to visit but would probably be sheer hell to reside in-I suspect there are not many dub or techno nights at The Golden Lion and that should you need a halogen heater, Wilkinson’s is half the price of the traditional iron mongers, you would soon tire of being nattered to by people with white hair and sensible catalogue footwear and yearn for the bright lights and fleshpots of Giggleswick. But it is a nice summery day and today we like Settle very much and shall put our fingers in our ears and go ‘tra la la’ if someone mentions the recession or rural poverty.

Then Ilkley pops up out of the moor to make Settle look like Mossside and to tell me to stop going ‘tra la la’ because how can a recession exist in such a pretty place with no parking spaces for miles and miles and independent shops selling designer children’s clothing and teddies?

But then like a Cath Kidson bedecked goliath, looming up from the horizon here comes Harrogate, where there is no car parking anywhere ever and where it has not just endured a recession and survived but  there never was or is or will be a recession and it grows richer and fatter by the day, by the second and poverty is having a car without a personalised number plate. And dear reader, I am from Bath.

There is certainly an element of surprise-I know my spa towns and was expecting something like genteel polite Buxton. Instead reared up an enormous over busy over rich gilded corniced strutting beauty. After a terrifying yet boring parking fiasco, we emerge on level ten of a shopping centre dripping in sweat and nerves and smelling of the reduced blue cheese from Settle.

Harrogate is big. Think of Kensington picked up and dropped near Bradford. It has all the posh high street chains I remember from Bath: The White Company, Joe Browns etc, it has small independent shops casually advertising five hundred pound lamps in the window, chocolatiers, designer retro boutiques and a man walks by, so hilariously pastichely posh with his blonde quiff, camel upturned trousers and jacket with a face elegantly impassively smooth and handsome as he strolls with a bland beautiful blonde in short dress hanging off his arm, I look for the TV cameras.  Seconds later we pass a caricature of a rich banker, lolling fatly against a lamppost.

We are hungry, skint, smell faintly of blue cheese and holding an angry baby. I had looked up places to eat in Harrogate but they seemed so plentiful, positively tumbling out of the internet search engine that it seemed ludicrous to write them down-on the internet Harrogate only consisted of streets lined with delicious cheap vegetarian fare but now we are small, smelly and humble dwarfed by Georgian and Victorian splendour housing posh chain shops featuring clothing of the white linen variety. I would kill for a pint of cider and some cheesy chips. I suspect I might have to.

An incredibly posh looking hotel with a small sweep of drive in front of it has a sign saying ‘two meals for ten pounds in ‘The Place’. I decide it can’t mean the hotel as it looks too posh to advertise meals by the price rather than the chef and also ‘The Place’ makes it sound like it will be housed in a municipal gym. But my friend bravely sallies forth through the revolving doors (told you it were posh, like) and then after a couple of acres of Farrow and Ball, embossed carpet and conference rooms, we come to ‘The Place,’ where the clientele of ‘The Place’ look like an advert for ‘The Place’ as they stand elegantly by their glasses of wine (women) and frosted tall glasses of lager (men) I suspect there are better places to attempt to feed an angry baby in but also delighted at our luck in finding such a glamorous yet reasonably priced place in which to eat.

I am so excited by the fact there is linen tablecloths, I do not mind the only veggie options being cold beetroot and cucumber soup or margarita pizza. My boyfriend and I order both. My ‘soup’ arrives and despite being initially excited by the unadvertised pieces of hard boiled egg floating on top, realise the only evidence of it containing beetroot is the faint pinkish hue and it is in fact a large bowl of tzaiki with a small dinner roll and despite by liking of said dip, I do not wish to eat it by the litre. I decide to eat my boyfriend’s pizza instead. When it arrives I mutter ‘Aah McCain’s, you’ve done it again’ but after biting into it, despite the rarefied surroundings, I shriek ‘that is fucking awful’. Not McCain’s, not even Iceland but one of those freezer outlets which only sell things battered, bread crumbed and by metric tonne. I am not a food snob-I cannot afford to be but this made Dominos look like haute cuisine. There was not a trace of real tomato, just a mass of bready base covered with a minimum swish of red paste, like a used sanitary towel and a slidey utterly separate topping of chewing gum cheese. And two lime and sodas cost three quid. It did however sell Thatchers cider so I drank that instead of eating.

I decide that Harrogate is rubbish but then a few strolls around looking bitterly at more enticing eating options, we see an excellent art exhibition of that man who did the glittery fairy (teenage me) pre Raphaelite Harrison Grimshaw at the Mercer Gallery and then discover a huge spectacular park in which there is a 1940s fun day in order to refurbish a magnesium well of importance within the park. We hear a lot about the well on a fuzzy speaker.  Fairy cakes are purchased as tanks are admired, chairpersons speak on the microphone to smattered handclaps and as the day slowly ebbs to a close, tired old men in ww2 regalia troop back home again and as if to show you cannot escape from modern life, teenagers emerge from the exotic shrubbery to reclaim the glorious park as their own again.

And then as if to mock us, on the way back through Ilkley, we see an organic vegetarian café, filled with happy people clearly not eating a sanitary towel. The bastards.

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This is something I have been looking forward to for a very long time. When perusing a library copy of Lancashire Pub Walks I discover that not too far away lies Chingle Hall, a 12^th century house, positively dripping in evil entities and reputed to be the most haunted house in England. I watch a documentary on youtube, which makes it apparent that if I leave without seeing at least one ghost, I am clearly not paying attention.

There is not one priest hole but two, not just one ghost but many undead-all drifting around in a big ghostly X-Factor, all competing to be the most tragic. I personally am rooting to feel the presence of Eleanor Singleton who was imprisoned, raped and forced to bear children by her uncle and finally murdered. Apparently in her bedchambers, a terrible sensation of fear and loss can be felt and what better way to spend a breezy summer day by getting titillated by the tragic story of a rape victim and hopefully being filled with utter utter terror?

I forget that I need to leave the bathroom light on at night despite being 32 years old and decide this sounds like a splendid day out and even more of a delightful trip into other peoples misery is the fact that the walk takes in an old abandoned mental hospital. I imagine stepping through gothic ruins carved with intricate crazed graffiti with gnawed straightjackets lying about. It is going to be the best day ever I decide.

Goosnargh is not the ancient windswept village I imagined but a modern smattering of suburbia cloistering around an old village green. There is The Grapes pub, the one famous for being in not only Lancashire Pub Walks but also Lancashire Pub Strolls but it is hemmed in by Audis and Mercedes and people in very expensive looking clothes, tans and laughter celebrating a very expensive looking wedding. I fear they can see and indeed smell the baby vomit down my left shoulder and we do not enter The Grapes.

I am not good at navigating but we successfully follow the Lancashire Pub Walk up someone’s drive, through a field, over a surprising variety and style of styles and then we see the abandoned mental hospital. It looks like a boarded up Toby Carvery and is a crushing blow. Then it starts to rain.

We get a bit lost until seeing the ghastly white veneer of Chingle Hall shining like a beacon of terror; I roll under the electrified wire that is blocking the alleged footpath.

A strange walk through strips of field that have been heavily creepily fenced seemingly at random and with no expense spared to height, cost and general forebodingness. A squat tin building sits surrounded by more looming fencing and gates bigger than my house. There are no windows or doors to be seen but a very expensive looking vehicle sits emptily in our path with blacked out windows. I think the alive are sometimes more scary than the undead.

We continue to walk through our fenced in strip until there it is. Chingle Hall. Recognisable from a thousand bad paranormal forums and websites with black background overuse of exclamation points and ‘dripping’ fonts. A smaller than expected white building almost slumped in the ground with an archway so swallowed by time that the top of it is nearly in the grass.

I am even more desperate for the toilet than to see proof that science and thus everything we know is wrong and hope there will also be ice cream. It doesn’t look like there is ice cream here. I suspect there are not pencils embossed with ‘I had a spooktacular time’ style puns here. I suspect that something is wrong.

There is no-one fleeing screaming down the driveway. There are no signs, no entrance charges, no people and err no entrance. I walk around bewildered but it is clear. I am at Chingle Hall. But I cannot get in. Well, at least without walking around the building but I can see I am as unwanted here as an exorcist at a spiritualist group. This is not a place for the esoteric day-tripper anymore. My partner points out yet again that the pub walk book is quite an old edition and asks yet again if I had phoned up to verify ‘Chingle Hall is open to the public between 10 and 5 pm.’

I reply somewhat testily but my whole world is crumbling away and not in the manner I had hoped. And I still really really need the toilet.

A last doleful look at Chingle Hall as we walk down the driveway to the main road just in case a White Lady pops sympathetically out of the shrubbery but nothing. My partner who is not a fellow delver into unknown realms but prefers technology, smugly shows me a page from the BBC website which states that ‘Chingle Hall is now a private residence and not even open for charity events’. (Chingle Hall used to kindly let spook hunters give them cash in return for a night of hopefully being scared shitless or photo an ‘orb’-even I scorn ‘orbs’)

I begin to get angry.  Why buy the most haunted house in England to then close it to the public? There are lots of ancient lovely old piles around-why pick one that is so famous and then shut it down? I wanted to see the priest holes nearly as much as a transparent monk. It is a piece of history and intrigue- now like its’ strange neighbours, fenced off and closed to those who can’t afford it. A part of heritage swamped in legend and stories the proles can now only read about in obsolete library guides. Meh. And I still need the toilet. A lot.

A stomp down the main road, we see a pub advertising real ales and the like and we enter, I order a hot chocolate and dash to the loo. My hot chocolate comes sans cream and with a stupid biscuit instead of a chocolate and such is my general anger that it makes me feel like dashing my head in on a mock beam. It is a normal historic (a fancy sign says so) pub that has been vampirised and made into fake history. Main courses at fifteen pounds but old unread books from an auction on a ledge to make you feel you are in the past despite the piped music and the cheery blackboards and the sachets of condiments, people with fake tans and white smiles talking loudly over expensive white wine. But it does sell butter pie, a pleasing and random find when boredly looking at the menu we can’t afford and there is also strangely a large selection of sweets for sale in the foyer.

And in a small village, there is a modern shop development opposite which features a modern trendy looking sweetshop which optimistically and so Englishly has chairs and tables outside cowering in the shade of June thunderclouds. A sign for ‘natural’ ice cream draws us within and I am surprised to find that Vimto is a ‘natural’ ice-cream flavour. We share an ‘Italian Eton Mess’ ice cream, which tastes a bit aniseedy and I do not like it. I do not like anything today and am cross. I wanted the paranormal, ancient history and oil paintings with tragic stories attached to them and I all I got was a hot chocolate with no cream and a weird tasting ice cream.

I buy a ‘lucky bag’ from the strange sweet shop for 50p looking around me at all the lovely handmade fudge and chocolates. I get a bag of gelatine filled sweets, which was to be fair all one can expect for 50p but I am a vegetarian, and in a bad mood. A really bad mood which even animal bones and colourings moulded into the shape of a mouth and teeth can’t alleviate.

We decide to leave Goosnargh.

We sit in the car and are sad. The early promise of summer besmirched by rain, high fencing and privacy, all such English diseases.

A silent journey and then a sign, which states Barton Grange-its attractions, are garden centre, restaurant, café and farm shop. So desperate am I to salvage something from the remains of the day, we perform a dangerous u-turn as I pretend to need bread, thinking of meandering though an antiquated artisan farm shop but instead we enter a 4×4 bedecked car park with colour coded parking areas. My boyfriend has a panic attack and a life crisis as we enter the Pink Zone but I feel curiously young and attractive as I look at all the other denizens of the Barton Grange Experience.

There is something called along the lines of a ‘tasty cabin’ but more alliterative as we enter. This sells small chocolate lollipops in the shape of footballers for £1.75 and other small expensive chocolate novelty items along with gourmet jellybeans, inertia and despair.

The entrance to the ‘farm shop’ has farmyard implements embossed impractically into a fake wall. Trowels and hay forks are haphazardously swirlingly embedded into the wall of a modern purpose built block on a major A road. Within the ‘farm shop’, a big airy modern shed are rustic plastic displays of wheelbarrows with over spilling unseasonal fruit, chickens, more trowels, all a glorious cacophony of what used to be on this land before it was paved over to assemble a farm shop selling overpriced luxury crisps, jam and dry cake to antiquarian idiots. There is a queue at the till. It is a day out.

We do not enter the garden centre. In my head the flowers will be plastic and all the same shade of pink. We do not enter an adjoining shop, which has a bright array of expensive bolshy umbrellas, and foul jaunty or understated clothing. People who seek a fake idyll of Britishness swarm here, who romance a hideous past but instead of looking for a ghost, buy a Victorian chutney for three quid and thus feel a faint faint sense of immortality before getting into their Peugeots and driving back home back to the same old boring boring present.

I hope whoever owns Chingle Hall absolutely pisses themselves every time there is a faint thump in the background as we the hideous poor public drift like ghosts in search of a past we can never find, but can only attempt to purchase ourselves, where the real past is hidden and a fake sanitised past given to us to overspend on as we drift between past, present and a future that we don’t want to think about thank you very much because it won’t be picturesque and pretty so best to bury our heads in cheese with an oldie name when we have a ‘free’ weekend, to rhapsodise with starry eyes over others deaths a pleasing century away and try like hell to not think of the horrors that await for the alive.

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I am jealous but have no reason to be. Again. Several years ago I did a joint degree in Creative writing and English. Some of my fellow students have now had novels published and I am bitter and jealous despite not having even attempted to write a novel.

And now I am looking around artist’s studios and inwardly screaming with bitter envy and resentment despite the fact I got a D in GCSE Art and my last attempt at drawing made my sleeping baby look like a mutant potato with a face like when people send photos to Take A Break magazine of a crisp which looks a bit like Cheryl Cole.

We are at the Spring Fling in Dumfries and Galloway – an annual event when artists open their studios and houses to showcase their work and people come to talk about the creative process with fellow artists, buy original art or stare balefully at boho kitchens with handmade tiles then remember to look at the actual art, decide they can actually do better or at least as good, then realise that drawing a tree is actually fucking hard.

I suspect that is not the purpose of the Spring Fling.

I suspect I am a shallow monster who true Art shuns.

I am already envious of people who live in Dumfries and Galloway-an understated Nirvana, which makes Devon resemble Hackney. It is so unspoilt and empty that all signposts point to each other due to the winding intermingling roads and small farms are highlighted on the atlas.  And it is absolutely beautiful. There are mountains, forests, lochs, sea and moor, standing stones, beaches, crofts and places where you can buy feta stuffed olives.

Anyway, the Spring Fling. An enchanted place becomes even more annoyingly enchanted because of the realisation that artists live there, millions of artists who all know each other and have a jolly bohemian time together without you unlike in Devon say where ‘artists’ reside in houses that cost half a million pounds and you know you could never afford to be their friend.

Then again these artists are not struggling. I want them to be, it’s so romantic but then I clock their Aga. Although to be fair some of the artists have studios in purpose built blocks so hopefully they live in desperate garrets where you only have a glimpse of the sea and their oven is a cheap white Beko.

The art itself is diverse veering between spectacular and ‘how the hell can they pretend that’s art?’ Looking at art and then seeing its cost makes you look at it in a purely financial sense-a painting you would admire in a gallery has you peeping at the label and then comparing it against another piece of art as you flit between picturesque studios as you fly down narrow winding roads following haphazard signage, as you chitchat politely and snaffle free cake and envy and admire and peep.

I saw amazing things. I saw Jacobs Ladder in mosaic, I saw vases featuring guns, I saw oil paintings of empty assembly halls, and I saw wicker mermaids and pearl necklaces. Self-portraits of moody tattooed men and watercolours of pretty churches, cows and fields. In a cottage in the middle of nowhere, a precocious child showed me her mother’s studio and made me a free badge. I saw luminescent self-portraits and bad abstracts, studies of the sea, pretty watercolours and angry splatters. Clay, pearls and wool. And I saw and I envied and I admired.

And as those who can’t do, teach, I wrote about it.

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I have always had a strong interest in ghosts and witches. Unlike with most people however, it did not stop when I was nine.

It is an interest on the periphery of my life, I do not spend vast sums of money on occult paraphernalia or obsess over ‘orbs’ which are clearly dust but I like the thought of ghosts existing. It is pleasing. I also like witches.  I believe in witches less than ghosts and feel faintly guilty being interested in them at all as I think a lot of slightly eccentric women who loved cats and had an interest in herbs died very nastily as a result of people believing in witches.

The Pendle Witches have made the victimisation, persecution and murder of women a tourist trail featuring a witch on a broomstick.  I have though always wanted to visit Pendle hill, scene of their alleged naughtiness because of the way it glowers over East Lancashire, always in the distance, always dark and long and strange, it being not a hill as such but a long looming landmass.

We finally have a car and it is my first destination, it previously being pretty much inaccessible via public transport from Lancaster, the scene of the witches’ sorry demise.  It is annoyingly a beautiful day. Even more annoyingly, the fact it is so beautiful thwarts us. I have a small baby, even more annoyingly a small ginger almost translucent baby and the sun beams unseasonably down and there is no shade whatsoever on the cold dead slopes of Pendle hill. Apparently people with a dark side climb Pendle hill on Halloween night. Maybe they are just ginger and freckle easily.

Reaching the no doubt impossibly eerie summit of Pendle hill is out (for now) but there is a Pendle Inn at nearby Barley featuring a pub sign of a witch on a broomstick. It’s practically dancing widdershins with Aleister Crowley except for the fact it sells tagliatelle for 9.95 and has self-catering cottages in the car park.  Oh, and was built in 1935.

The picnic area opposite is pleasing in that it looks like a poster in Nursery Times magazine celebrating diversity. There are saris and old men in shorts and sandals sitting in deckchairs.  Kids run around with nets on sticks, big scary looking men enjoy strawberry ice creams and don’t litter.

But I am still in search of the unknown and so we head to Newchurch in Pendle, home to Witches Galore. The name should perhaps have given away the fact there are no dark grimoires to be had here but esoterica lite, incense and car stickers that say ‘My other car’s a broomstick.’

And among the fluffy black cats, gemstones and wind chimes. a display of royal wedding memorabilia, Kate Middleton’s bland face next to some rune stones and books on walking in the northwest. It’s what Alice Nutter would have wanted.

We head to Burnley to a vegetarian café so meticulously researched on the net that we can’t find it and even of we had it would have been closed anyway.  The rest of Burnley looks to be honest, fucking awful so we head to Colne as the Internet says it has a ‘restaurant quarter’. A restaurant quarter must have some nice veggie inoffensive fare but we search the streets of Colne in vain. There are a surprising amount of butchers, deep stretching grey terraces than make Coronation Street look like Kensington but no restaurant quarter. Is Mr Chips the restaurant quarter?

We finally find an Italian restaurant offering three courses for ten pounds. It appears an oasis in the desert and I rhapsodise until the food arrives. I never learn the whole quantity versus quality thing. The ice-cream (third course) remains untouched and research on the net suggests that the restaurant we are in and the two closed ones nearby are in fact the restaurant quarter. I curse council press releases. And the meal costs with two drinks and the garlic bread thirty quid, which is actually more than we have ever paid in our lives for a meal. My partner leaves most of his and we bicker the whole way home about whose fault it was that we went there. We both admit we should have known from the plastic ivy. And in retrospect the angry people on the Internet who say they went to environmental health after a meal there. But first the toilet.

A new day beckons and the search for adventure and somewhere to take the taste of the oily orange pasta away beckons. First Sedburgh, a wonderful market town also nestled under hills but more benevolent hills-God seems to smile on Sedburgh, its higgledy piggledy quaintness, bookshops that still exist like their patrons have never heard of Amazon, a church and graveyard in the middle of the town and a charity shop where after chatting to the people within, you feel like sending them a Christmas card. We have 90p chips which are far pleasanter a dinner than the thirty quid horror we are still apportioning blame for.

We have a picnic today and yomp into the wilderness albeit with a printed map outside Kirkby Stephen (another almost too quaint market town which in Devon would be heaving with tourists with cameras but in Cumbria, just is) we walk along viaducts, past abandoned cottages, through moorland and woods and everything is utterly perfect. People say hello when we pass and it is all so utterly English and pleasant.

But even more excitingly in the car on the way back I see not only ghosts but also murder. In one of my guiltily read books about ghosts I read of a pub ensnared in Northern wilderness, perched amongst moorland and with a dark bloody history and with a name I instantly recall as being the name of the self same pub.

The car screams to a halt, we enter, I try to stop the baby shrieking. I sense no evil presence but to be fair it is a sunny bank holiday. And maybe the undead feel at unease where peach vinyl wallpaper still exists. Its one of those pubs where the décor may be stuck in the seventies but the prices are definitely Now. I always think of a tenner for a meal in a pub to mean it comes with coulis, foams and all the other things I read about in out of date Good Food magazines at the doctors. But I am clearly old, poverty struck and out of touch and an old skint vegetarian needs to bring her own picnic or suck it up.

But now lets’ look for atmosphere! I have no blue light to hold under my chin and the sun is still blazing, there are no bloodstains but I can envisage the ghastliness of the murder, the horror on the windswept night, the restless spirit still prowling. Then the baby starts crying and we have to go.

I am trying to convey the sacred terror of the place to my partner who sneers as he has seen the residents lounge enshrouded not in unearthly terror but in brown velour. I look it up on my phone to show him the true unearthly bloody history of the car park we now reside in. Then realise we are in the wrong pub.

I decide not to ghost hunt anymore.

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