Day 58: Eskerdalemuir, Lockabie and Barrow-in-Furness

Guess where I am?

 

Looks like Tibet doesn’t it?
Close. It’s Kagyu Samye Ling the Tibetan Monastery and Buddhist centre at Eskerdale in Dumfries. Brian told me about it as I left this morning. My friend Vin Rendle at Horne Farm spiritual Centre in Tunbridge Wells, has a connection to it too. It’s only about 25 miles from Dumfries so I went to see it for myself.

Unfortunately I could not go inside the temple as it was occupied by a private group on retreat, but normally visitors are welcome to visit and can walk round the peace garden at any time. There is also a small cafe and a shop. Again both the cafe and the shop were closed when I was visiting. So was reception and administration.

There are 45 prayer wheels containing millions of prayers that are gently turning day and night so that the prayers go out into the world 24/7 365 days of the year.

Set up in 1967 Samye Ling was the first Tibetan Buddhist centre to be established in the West. It' s currently under the guidance of Abbot Yeshe. They offer retreats and seminars, meditation and training in the Karma Kagya lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. It is also a centre for the preservation of Tibetan medicine, art and architecture.

 

I walked round the gardens and then since everything was closed went just down the road to the tiny village of Eskerdalemuir where there is The Old School Hub.

Housed in the Old School building and totally modernised, the building comprises a great community space including very good cafe where I had a roasted vegetable lasagne.

It can seat 80 for films, plays lectures or family parties, it can offer consulting rooms for complementary therapists and its open 52 weeks of the year.

Shame some of the other derelict buildings I have seen on my travels don’t take a leaf out of Eskerdalemuir’s book and get together, attract some lottery funding and do something similar. It must be a boom to local people when their nearest town is fifty miles away as it so often is in Scotland.

On the subject of nearby towns Lockerbie is on the way back to Dumfries so I drove there to get petrol but also to briefly visit the Memorial.

On December 21^st 1988 a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to Detroit was blown up by a terrorist bomb killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew. It came down over the town of Lockerbie killing 11 residents on the ground. Although Colonel Gaddafi of Libya claimed responsibility for the attack, only one man was ever imprisoned – Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. He died of cancer in May 2012 still protesting his innocence.

What to see and do in Dumfries?

The camera Obscura...

According to the website this was closed on Mondays. The website was partially right. The museum was open but the obscurer was not available because of poor weather conditions! That was a shame as it is the world’s oldest working Camera Obscura on the top floor of this windmill tower at Dumfries Museum.

So what is a camera obscurer? I think it uses mirrors to offer a complete 360 degree view of the surrounding landscape – in this case Dumfries – by projecting the images onto a focussing table. Its probably not dissimilar to using your ipad to project a photographic image onto your canvas so you can paint it accurately.

Talking of cameras, artists and accuracy, meet Stewart Morrison.

I met him on the bridge at Dumfries. I was scattering some of my mum’s ashes there as she loved having a go at painting and loved painting willow trees in particular. Stewart and I chatted about art and murals and painting in the rain,  and about the public who come up and chat to you about painting and art, and offering their often uninvited opinion on your work when you are working outside. I have painted lots of murals on the sides of buildings and stage sets. Neither of us has so far used a camera obscura or an ipad to create art.

If you are going to use a camera perhaps you should be a photographer rather than an artist? But that’s just my uninvited opinion. Lots of photos are art in their own right. 

Robert Burns has not quite finished with me it seems – nor JM Barrie whose birthplace I visited in Kirriemuir weeks ago near Falkirk. Both men are linked by having mothers who sang to them and told them stories throughout their childhoods in front of the fire in tiny cottages.

Both men lived in Dumfries.

This is the house where Robert Burns wrote some of his most famous works and eventually where he died at the young age of just 37, three days after drinking the waters in Brow Well in the hopes of curing his illness. He seems to have died of some kind of rheumatic heart condition unlikely to have been cured by “taking the water” no matter from where it came.

He left a widow and six children. Robert and his wife Jean are buried in Dumfries in a mausoleum St. Michael’s churchyard nearby.

How very odd that I knew absolutely nothing about Burns except that he was a Scottish writer until yesterday, and now I have seen where he was born, where he learnt to dance and speak and drink, where he lived, and where he died. In 24 hours I know enough about him to write a short book about the man or deliver a 90 minute lecture.

I did know a bit more about JM Barrie. The quote that has reverberated in my mind since visiting his birthplace, and hearing the story of his brother’s death from drowning as a young teenager, was when just after his brother had died, his mother grieving in her bedroom heard James coming past her door.

“Is that you?” she asked hopefully.

“No mother” replied James sorrowfully thinking she was referring to his dead brother. “It’s only me.”

How very sad.

His house Moat Brae is in George Street and it is suggested that the garden behind the house inspired his story of Peter Pan – not discounting the death of his brother – the boy who lived in Never Never land and would therefore never have to grow up.

There are ambitious plans afoot to turn Moat Brae into a magical house of children's’ literature. The trust involved has already raised £5.3 million of the £5.8 million they need to make the project a reality. You can read about it if you are interested on www.peterpanmoatbrae.org

Freya, beloved number two daughter, you need to get in touch with them for your ‘you know what’ in time for their opening celebrations! Look them up. Maybe you can work with Joanna Lumley as the number two. It would be ‘absolutely fab darling.’

Running out of time to get to Barrow in Furness which is another hundred miles away – and that’s on the motorway. So this is one time I have got it wrong and will have to come off the coast for a bit. The scenery through the Lake district was very similar to Scotland except that the white washed towns were now muted unadorned stone in grey and taupe.

At Kendal I stopped for a break and found Low Sizergh Barn, a farm shop complex that has got itself well sorted for visitors young and old. There are farm trails and  produce gardens . There is a raw milk machine

The owners have turned a wonderful three story barn into a marvellous delicatessen shop with food and gifts and a cafe with a whole wall viewing window into the milking shed so you can watch the cows being milked. They may be a part of nearby Sizergh Castle.

Even the seats in the cafe have cow cushions

When I eventually reached Barrow in Furness I was a little jarred as the red sandstone houses there were assertively red in comparison to those I have been looking at for the past fifteen days.

Some are Victorian and quite impressive.

Barrow has been a heavily industrial town, the centre of the ship building industry and iron and steel in the past. Today it is the home of BAE systems, a massive company that build nuclear submarines. 

My host Conrad was a delightful man who has converted a disused community centre into a really lovely contemporary single storey house. 

After a G and T and a heated debate about Brexit we were as comfortable as old friends.