Travels in Teesdale

We set off on Friday morning for a long weekend visit to Teesdale and were joined on Saturday morning by other members of our local Natural History Society. We stayed in the Teesdale Hotel in Middleton in Teesdale, where we had the most magnificent breakfasts! We had our evening meal there on Friday too. Not bad on the whole but Himself appeared to have a portion of Rice Pudding with his curry! I use twice the volume of water to rice, add a little salt or lemon juice according to preference, bring to the boil, stir and then turn down the heat, cover the pan and set the timer for 10 minutes. Then, without raising the pan lid or stirring again, I take the pan from the heat and give it another 10 minutes. Water all absorbed, rice fluffy. No excuse for pudding.

On Saturday night we all ate together (some were in a local B&B and some in the Youth Hostel) at the Langdon Beck hotel.


This plant is one of my favourites from the weekend. The Wood cranesbill is usually this pinky purple but here it was growing with a white form. The plant is often to be seen in the Lake District too.

One wall we walked along was totally edged with Good King Henry. It must have been planted. To be honest, if you were short of garden room this kind of Guerrilla planting in the local lane would be ideal.

Globe flower. The season was fairly late - we even saw a few of the famous Spring Gentians which are normally finished by the end of May. However, it was so miserably overcast on Sunday morning that though they were visible, they weren't open.

Mountain pansies. They exhibit such a fabulous range of colours and forms. This is all purple. We also saw all yellow, almost all white, so many combinations of these colours.

This looked like a diminutive garden pansy with the little face type markings.

This was my favourite. I tended to refer to it as Bunny Ears for obvious reasons, and we saw about 3 patches with this form. They are all only about the size of a 10p piece or less.

This is the Bird's Eye Primrose. This was beginning to go over. We also saw Mountain Everlasting - a singularly unpretty plant! Alpine bistort was another of the finds of the weekend. Altogether it was a botanist's delight!

And my personal delight - when fossicking in a second-hand book shop in Barnard Castle (how can you NOT check out every second hand book shop?) I found a Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food pamphlet from 1956 on ... PEAS! It is largely written to be of use to the farmer but it's interesting to see that Alderman, Onward, Meteor and one or two other familiar names appear in the list.