Isaac Holden is probably older than the ‘guysers’ and the bonfire on New Year’s Eve in Allendale’s Market Square, though he must have seen them during his last decade, but he’s maybe not quite as famous as Allendale’s Tar Bar’l…
Year: 2019
Pubs in transition
Sometimes the experience of living, and latterly working here for nigh-on thirty years, can convey a real sense of understanding of how local businesses work. It helps to have set up a new business, a new kind of café for…
Handbells make a cheerful sound
I’m not quite sure where or how Elizabeth Beardsley found the old bronze handbells, still in immaculate ringing condition, but she brought the seventeen in her collection north to form a distinctive organisation and to contribute a joyful sound to…
Curlews, lapwings — later black grouse, and more
[Sketches derived from apparently royalty-free images on the internet] So the large curlew is back on the Sparty Lea fellside, gliding through the air, and the lapwings have been skirling in the sky for some time now. Only after we’d…
Allenheads Inn . . .
We’ve seen a few landlords come and go at the Allenheads Inn, over the years. Since the bus service was curtailed several years ago now, we don’t ourselves get up there any longer, but some regulars are still very faithful,…
It’s snow, Jim . . .
It did snow up in Sparty Lea and beyond into the ‘heeds, on Sunday morning, as predicted, but at 1:00pm there was nobody staffing the rope pull at Ski-Allenheads, and my foray, on what was probably the last snow day…
Crowdsourcing impact . . .
Today’s, Sunday’s, diary entry is a somewhat longer-than-usual meditation on contemporary strategies towards raising funds for good causes . . . It’s intriguing, what people care about. Or what they say they care about. I had thought that the Dalek…
New Breadmakers made at Allendale Bakery
Today, Saturday the 9th of March, is the first of the season of breadmaking courses scheduled up at Allendale Bakery in Sparty Lea, if the snowfall stays wet and gentle. For over a decade, Carrie Winger has been baking bread…
Allendale Brewery, a local treasure
It was a rainy, drizzly afternoon, but nice and warm in Allendale Brewery‘s offices upstairs at the brewery, and I settled down to have a quiet chat with Tom Hick, Owner/Director, who founded the business with his father Jim well…
Motorhomes galore
They’re all around the village, motorhomes skulking in their owners’ drives, or tucked carefully away in unobtrusive corners, just waiting for an adventure throughout the country, over to Ireland, or east and with luck this year, anywhere on the continent….