Clarke Chronicler's Resurrection

 Julie had booked a weekend away at Green View Lodges, Welton  so I presented Simon with some  options  and he selected filming some nearby trigs. The footage will  appear here  in  due  course. We  went  into  Wigton  for  lunch at  La  Barista  restaurant. In the afternoon, we covered another  trig  and  also a  pele tower near Mealsgate.  The footage will  appear here in due course. We  returned to a  footpath near our first trig because I realised I'd left my walking pole there. I did manage to retrieve it. We went into Dalston to do some shopping before returning to the lodge.

 We  were a bit  constrained by other commitments on this weekend so Simon picked a visit to nearby Helmshore  Textile Museum. I had been before but I think they'd spruced up the displays on the ground floor since then. We started looking  round those before joining a tour.  This showed a pre-industrial household engaged in textiles. This is  Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning jenny.  This is what one looked like. This is Samuel Crompton, inventor of the spinning mule. Here's a Luddite at work and a soldier out to stop him. We joined the tour of the spinning  chamber (preserved since last use in the1970s )  led by an ehtnusiastic guide who briefly arranged to turn the spinning mules on for us. After that we had a look in the manager's office.   We  then crossed over to the second mill building. That had an old fire engine. We  then went to the very reasonably priced tea room for a drink and cake, Then we drove hom...

 For  our  next weekend away, we chose the Campanile Hotel, Runcorn.  Warnings of a storm over the weekend overshadowed it. The  journey there was uneventful and we found the hotel without too much trouble. Simon had some chips and I had some ice cream in the restaurant before we turned in for the night.  In the morning the weather was pretty wild and we ran across to the main building for breakfast. After that we raced across to the station for a train to Chester. Ours was one of the few  trains still running. We  huddled in the waiting room until the last minute. By the time got to Chester, the weather had calmed down considerably and there were no delays to our train to Rhyl. We caught the bus to Rhuddlan but when we got to the castle it had been closed due to the weather conditions. this seemed like a disaster but I had noted the bus was going on to Denbigh. I found a number for the castle there and got confirmation it was still open so we mov...