Fanny Street

We have just spent the weekend exploring the Yorkshire Dales. Some of it was by design, other bits were forced upon us by the great British motorway system.

Our main objective was to travel to Whixley near York to visit the latest art exhibition by Neil Simone, a surrealist artist we both like. We have a couple of his prints and thought an original oil might be a good idea. We left Liverpool in good time, knowing the gallery shut at about 4pm. A quick detour to Knutsford allowed us to drop Maxines engagement ring into a jewellers to get repaired, and then off the the M62 for the majority of the trip. Wrong.

J24 -J23 near Huddersfield were closed, so a quick(sic) detour ensued. We went to Harrogate via Halifax, Bradford and other quaint sounding Yorkshire villages, driving across the Penine Way en route. If I hadknown Brentford were playing Bradford we might have taken a break there, but as it was, we crawled along a number of A and B roads along with everybody else who had been diverted off.

We got to the gallery just after 4pm but luckily Neil and his wife were still there and were very welcoming, providing tea and coffee to ease us into the viewing. Sadly for them, we did not see anything we wanted to purchase, but it did give us a few ideas about the pictures we already have, and how the newly positioned piano may be made more an integral part of the furnishings.

Luckily SWMBO had suggested we stay over in Harrogate, so that we did. We had a room overlooking the Styne, a large public space, which had a free firework display. We could enjoy it from the comfort of our hotel room while deciding on which attractions of Harrogate we should enjoy.

A pub full of women dressed as GI Jane, and a very pleasant french restaurant filled the evening and an (average) full English set us up for a cruise back home.

It was quite a coincidence that the Leeds-Liverpool canal seemed to plot a path for us to follow. We picked it up at Skipton after passing close to the Menwith Hill listening station and seeing the beginnings of the new wind farm on the other side of the valley. It is a real shame that high, exposed moorland needs to be exploited by such monstrous structures, simply because height and exposure is their key to successful operation.

Anyway, we enjoyed exploring the basin of the canal around Skipton, and then moved on to pick the canal up again at Saltaire, the philanthropic development of Titus Salt, who built the village to house his mill workers, in the same way as Lord Levelhulme built Port Sunlight on the Wirral to house his factory workers. Salts Mill is now a gallery specialising in David Hockney works as well as home design shopping and an antiques fair. Salt himself was a god fearing man so built his village on strict Presbyterian lines. It does bring a smile to the face to see the local bistro and bar named "Don't tell Titus".

We lost the canal after going from Shipley to the M62, which thankfully was open this time, but picked it up again on the outskirts of Liverpool in Crosby and Waterloo. This is the part of the canal which I used to run along when we lived close by. It looked a bit too obstructed to be navigable now, although plans to open the Western end of the canal to the Albert Dock and the River Mersey may see all that change.

With Tesco now delivering to their major supermarkets in London via the Thames, who knows what the Leeds-Liverpool has awaiting it?