The Grown Up Gapper: ENGLAND

I have now relocated to Carlisle, having travelled up here from Yorkshire via the very scenic Settle and Carlisle railway line. The Pennine scenery was superb as we came up, across the Ribblehead Viaduct and stopped at England's highest railway station - Dent. However, the plan I had to jump out at one of the stations en route for a couple of hours was scuppered by the very heavy rain for almost the whole journey.

Today though we are back to blue skies and I have ventured out on another very scenic railway, the Cumbrian Coast Line. Whilst there is very limited rail access to the Lake District National Park, there is a line that follows the coast from Carlisle all the way to Barrow-in-Furness. Its one of those lines that seems to cling on - quite literally on some coast hugging sections - with freight and commuting to the Sellafield Nuclear Facility providing extra revenue to safeguard its future.

My first alighting point travelling south was St Bees, a seaside village that marks the start of the Coast to Coast walk. It is also famous for St Bees Man - the extremely well preserved body of a 600 year old man discovered in the grounds of St Bees Priory during an archaeological dig in 1981. The body has since been reinterred but the shroud that wrapped the body is on display in the church and has the imprint of the mans face on it, like that in Turin.

St Bees Priory - look at that blue sky!

St Bees Head

St Bees beach looking towards Nethertown

From St Bees its an easy walk along a lane running along the cliff top to the lonely windswept halt that is Nethertown station. It doesn't see many passengers (only 254 per year on the last set of stats) and is a request stop where you have to stick your arm out and flag down the train.

Such is the sparsity of the train service stopping there, that even though I wanted to head south, I had to flag down a train travelling north to return to St Bees to get a train back that went through non stop! This was fairly easy to do as St Bees is a passing place on the single track line so both trains meet.

Back at St Bees changing trains

The railway continued to hug the coast with the views out to sea far better than those inland across the industrial expanse of Sellafield and I got out again further down the coast at Ravenglass which is where you can catch the Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway. This is a 15 inch gauge steam railway that runs 7 miles through Eskdale. I had forgotten that it was half term here (a week earlier than at home) so hadn't realised the railway was operating this week. I therefore managed to do a round trip on the last train of the day.