Lancashire

Last weekend (23-25 March) I went up to Lancashire for Ben Sloman's (one of the guys I know from the Worcester Christian Union) 21st birthday party. I travelled up with a group of other Oxford CU members. We arrived in Barton, Lancashire just before the party started. It included a céilidh, (traditional Gaelic folk dancing which was lots of fun). We had someone instructing us on the sequence of steps before each dance so we knew what we were doing. As it went on we got familiar with some of the terminology: dosey doe (do si do), promenade etc. They were mainly progressive dances so you were switching partners a lot, which was fun. There was nice variety between them too. Some were in squares of four pairs, others in a circle. The one was in groups of three (in a kind of spoke formation). We did dancing both before and after supper, with a break halfway through each so, we had time to recover as it was quite exhausting. I was reminded how unfit I am :-P

Many of the Oxford people and a few of Ben's other friends stayed Friday and Saturday night (they had to use the church hall for the guys on Friday cause there were so many of us. On Saturday morning we took a short walk around Ben's neighbourhood village. We saw the remains of an old castle called Greenhalgh.

     

Building near Ben's House    

    

Greenhalgh Castle 

    

Walk through the village     

Village Centre  

 

In the afternoon we drove to Lancaster and did a scavenger hunt in two teams. This involved us walking around the town taking photos of landmarks and/or us doing silly things. My team won because we invented some of the things we couldn't find (e.g. one of the fun things was "on a boat" so we made a paper boat and stuck our fingers in it finger-puppet style, another was a "giant axe", so we made one out of a stick and paper and had a mock execution). We got to see a (still whole) castle and an old Roman bath house (which was really just an excavated ruin). 

 

Ashton Memorial 

 

Queen Vic Statue  

 

My team behind a market stall  

Roman Bath House  

Improvised Axe  

That evening we went to the coastal town of Morecambe and had fish and chips on the beach. It's the first time I've seen a British beach and I found it exceptionally weird. The tide was so far out we couldn't see it. The beach itself had a bit of shallow water which looked deeper than it was in the late afternoon light, but you could tell that it was shallow because it wasn't moving. Being used to Durban's beach it was really strange as our tides are never that differentiated. I didn't realise that the nearer you get to the poles the stronger the tides (although I found out afterwards that this beach has particularly high tide differences, even for this part of the world). We spent the evening playing a board game called Ticket to Ride which is a little bit like Risk but involves building train-lines between cities rather than conquering other countries.

Millennium Bridge, Lancaster

Morecambe Beach

Morecambe Beach

Ticket to Ride

Anyway, it was a good weekend and I feel more knowledgeable about the more northern parts of England. For the Easter weekend I'm travelling down south so  by the end of the holiday I should be well travelled :-P