A wintry morning along the Trough of Bowland

With the weather being so relentlessly awful over the last few weeks, we haven’t been outdoors very much. Cabin fever had definitely set in!

After an appointment in Lancaster this morning, we took the opportunity to head out from there towards Quernmore and the Trough of Bowland. Snow had fallen overnight last night and so it was pretty as a picture today, albeit a tad on the wet side on the roads. At one point we hit a ‘should we/shouldn’t we’ patch of fairly deep water on the Trough road, and with perfect timing a farmer came along on his quad and offered to go through in front of us to test the depth. It wasn’t shallow, but we got through ok.

We stopped a couple of times to snap a few pics of the very swollen streams and to mess about in the snow, before driving further on to have a pot of tea at Puddleducks cafe in Dunsop Bridge. Chatting to a lovely chap who lived next door to the cafe, he advised us that it probably wasn’t worth driving on towards Whitewell and that we would be better off heading back the way we had driven in.

We were thinking that the deep patch of water that we had followed the farmer through earlier would now be even trickier to negotiate, given that there was more rain coming off the fells and the snow was melting at quite a rate. However, when we got there it had all but disappeared. Odd! Must Google that one.

If we had been dressed more appropriately for the weather, it wouldn’t actually have been a bad day at all for a walk. We just did a 20 minute stroll up to have a look at the start of Langden Brook Valley.

Home now, feeling glad to have breathed in some of that Bowland air, and with a red wine in hand whilst the curry slow cooks.