The Lake District, Chester, and North Wales
Part 2: Scotland to North Wales along Hadrian’s Wall
This is Part 2 of our UK journey with Tauck. Part 1 kept us in and around Edinburgh. Additionally, this stretch took us south out of Scotland. We traveled down through the Lake District, into Chester, and across the border into North Wales. Five days, none were ordinary.
This leg included a Roman frontier and a working manor house.
We had lunch with the lady of the estate, saw Wordsworth’s cottage, and watched a sheepdog demonstration.
We also saw two of the mightiest castles Edward I ever built.
There is so much history packed into these miles, Hadrian’s Wall, that it is hard to know where to start.
We will start at the wall.
🏺 Hadrian’s Wall: The Edge of the Roman Empire
We left Edinburgh heading south. Our first stop was the wall, which for nearly 300 years marked the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire. Furthermore, to put that in perspective, our own country has only existed for 250 years. Hadrian ordered the wall built starting in AD 122. It ran 73 miles coast to coast across the narrow neck of Britain. There were 16 forts along its length, a mile castle every Roman mile, and a ditch in front. It was not just a wall. It was a militarized border and a loud statement about where Rome ended.
Our stop was at Chesters Roman Fort, near Hexham, where a local guide met us and told us how these ruins came to be visible at all. The credit goes to John Clayton, a lawyer who inherited the Chesters estate in 1832 and found a Roman fort buried under his own parkland. He became obsessed. From 1843 until his death in 1890 he excavated here nearly every Monday, and as farmers and builders quarried the wall for stone, he started buying the land to stop them. By the end he owned almost 20 miles of Hadrian’s Wall and five Roman forts. He is still known as the man who saved the wall.
What he uncovered is remarkable. Chesters was a cavalry fort for about 500 mounted troops and their horses, and you can walk through all four gates, the headquarters building, the barracks, and the commanding officer’s house. The star is the bathhouse down by the North Tyne, which still stands above head height and is the most complete set of Roman baths in Britain. Standing in it, with that clear river running past, we could easily picture soldiers coming off the wall for a hot room, a cold plunge, and a good gossip. The small building full of artifacts is the John Clayton Museum, opened in 1896 and still in its original cases, holding a selection of the 11,000 objects his team pulled out of the ground.
🏡 A Warm Welcome and Lunch at Castletown House
After the wall we continued southwest toward the Lake District, and our lunch stop turned out to be one of the loveliest surprises of the whole trip. We pulled into the drive at Castletown House, near the village of Rockcliffe in Cumbria, where our hostess Clemie of the Mounsey-Heysham family was waiting for us.
The setting is picturesque in the way only an English country estate can be. The house sits in parkland above the marshes where the River Eden runs out into the Solway Firth. The estate was bought in 1802 by Robert Mounsey, a Carlisle lawyer, and the house was finished for him in 1811. It has never left the family. Seven generations on, it is a working cattle and sheep farm as well as a stately home.
The current residents are a young couple, the seventh generation. A few years back they swapped houses with his parents, who wanted to step back from the day-to-day work of running a large estate. For the past 30 years Tauck has had an exclusive arrangement to bring guests here two or three times a week during the season for lunch and a walk around the gardens.
We were on a schedule, so all 22 of us were seated in the main dining room fairly quickly for coronation chicken with a rice salad, followed by apple crumble. Clemie sat down with us and answered every question we could think of about what it is actually like to run a manor house, a farm, and a hospitality business all at once. They employ 18 people, most of them working with the cattle, the sheep, and the grounds, and her mother-in-law still tends the gardens with help from a full-time gardener. On top of all that, Clemie has three children between 3 and 10. Busy does not begin to cover it. We found her down to earth, warm, and very easy to talk with.
After lunch we went out onto the great lawn that runs down toward the Eden, met the family dogs, and strolled through the gardens and past the pool house. The stop was only about two hours, but it was packed with real conversation and gave us a genuine picture of life on a historic working estate. It is the kind of thing you simply cannot book on your own.
🌳 Levens Hall and the Oldest Topiary Garden in the World
Another hour down the road brought us to our third stop of the day, Levens Hall, near Kendal in Cumbria. This one is a treasure, and the gardens alone are worth the trip.
Levens began around 1350 as a peel tower, one of the squat fortified keeps families built along this border to survive the cattle raids of the Border Reivers. Livestock went on the ground floor, the family upstairs, and everyone waited out the trouble. The Bellingham family transformed it around 1580 from a defensive tower into an elegant Elizabethan residence, and it is still one of the finest surviving Elizabethan homes in Cumbria.
In 1688 the estate passed to Colonel James Grahame, who had held two comfortable positions at the court of James II. When the king was swept off the throne, Grahame lost his place at court and needed somewhere to land. He bought Levens, and he brought a gardener with him.
🌿 A Garden Frozen in Time
That gardener was Guillaume Beaumont, French trained and previously employed on the grounds at Hampton Court. He arrived in 1694 and spent the next two decades laying out formal topiary, clipped hedges, and symmetrical flower beds. What makes Levens extraordinary is what happened next, which is essentially nothing. No later owner ever decided to modernize it. Grahame’s daughter flatly refused to save money by tearing out the parterre, insisting that every detail of her childhood be kept exactly as it was. Three centuries later, Beaumont’s design is still there, which makes Levens the oldest topiary garden in the world.
That same devotion runs through the gardeners. Only a handful of head gardeners have looked after this place over the centuries, because once they sign on they tend to stay for life.
🎨 Inside Levens Hall
Inside, you can read the centuries in layers. The house eventually passed to the Bagot family, who have cared for it since the 1880s. There is richly carved dark paneling, ornate plasterwork, and historic furnishings throughout. Our highlights were the tooled leather wall coverings in the dining room, which glow when the light hits them, and a genuinely unsettling piece of furniture: the bleeding chair, where physicians once strapped patients in and bled them to cure whatever ailed them.
🌲 The Topiary Gardens
The gardens are the real star for most of us, and we had a guided walk through the whole complex. There are more than 100 pieces of topiary in box and yew, some of them thirty feet tall, shaped into spirals, bells, chess pieces, pyramids, and forms that defy description after 300 years of growing into themselves. We happened to visit during the annual cutting, so some were freshly clipped with sharp decisive edges while their neighbors still looked pleasantly fuzzy. It took us well over 40 minutes to wander through, with our guide pointing out the pieces that have earned names over the years, like the Queen’s Mother.
We walked back out through the outer gardens, past a croquet lawn, an orchard, herb and rose gardens, and beautiful flower borders, right up to the ha-ha. A ha-ha is a sunken ditch with a retaining wall, dug so livestock and deer cannot get into the garden while the view from the house runs uninterrupted out to the park. No fence to spoil the sight line. The one at Levens dates to the 1690s and many believe it was the first in England.
🌄 Into the Lake District and the Swan Hotel
From Levens we dropped down into the Lake District proper. It is England’s largest national park, about 900 square miles of glacier-carved valleys, ribbon lakes, and fells, and it holds England’s highest mountain and its largest lake. In 2017 UNESCO named the whole park a World Heritage Site, and here is the part that surprised us: it was listed not purely for the scenery but as a cultural landscape, because the shape of it was made by centuries of hill farming, dry stone walls, and grazing sheep. That detail turned out to matter a lot on our next day.
Our base was the Swan Hotel and Spa at Newby Bridge, at the southern tip of Windermere where the lake empties into the River Leven. It started life as a coaching inn back in the 1600s and has been beautifully refurbished, with a lovely spa, indoor and outdoor pools, and a riverside setting that made coming back at the end of the day a pleasure. We spent two nights here.
📝 Wordsworth’s Grasmere and Dove Cottage
I was fighting a cold and decided to stay back at the hotel for the day, so this one comes secondhand from Bob, who came home with rave reviews.
🏠 Dove Cottage
The day centered on Dove Cottage in Grasmere, the small stone house where William Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy from 1799 to 1808. The building dates to around 1617 and spent 170 years as an inn called the Dove and Olive before William, then 29 and largely unknown, moved in.
Those eight years were the most productive of his life, a period the Wordsworths themselves described as plain living and high thinking. Here he wrote “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” and much of The Prelude. Dorothy kept her Grasmere journals, which are wonderful in their own right and fed straight into his poetry. It was Dorothy who first described the daffodils along Ullswater that became her brother’s most famous poem. William married Mary Hutchinson in 1802, three children arrived in four years, and by 1808 the cottage was simply too small.
If you visit, expect a small, low-ceilinged, dim little house with slate floors and limewashed walls, dressed from the family’s own letters and journals so it looks lived in rather than curated. Tours are guided and run on timed slots. Next door, the Wordsworth Museum holds handwritten manuscripts, letters, and personal items. Behind the cottage is the restored garden-orchard the Wordsworths planted themselves, and above it a viewing station looking out over the vale he called paradise. Allow a good two hours.
🚂 A Storyteller, a Boat, and a Steam Train
Lunch was at Tweedies in Grasmere, and it came with a wonderful surprise: Taffy Thomas, one of the best-loved storytellers in Britain. He was named the United Kingdom’s first Laureate for Storytelling, was made an MBE for services to storytelling and charity, and carries a repertoire of more than 300 traditional tales collected mostly by ear. He has lived in Grasmere for decades.
His signature is a silk coat embroidered with characters from his stories. You point at an image and he tells you that tale. Bob said the whole room was captivated. It is exactly the sort of experience you cannot plan for and never forget.
After lunch the group was taken out on a lake cruise and then rode a steam train back toward the hotel. Rain came down hard most of the day with high winds, which dampened things a little, though everyone still came home smiling. I was quietly glad to be tucked up in our room listening to it hammer the windows.
🐑 Lakeland Farm Visitor Centre: Sheep, Bulls, and Very Good Dogs
Day 5 opened with beautiful countryside, lush green rolling hills dotted with black and white sheep and cattle. By now we had realized that every day of this tour was going to hold a surprise, and this one was the Lakeland Farm Visitor Centre, run by Kerrie and Isaac Benson between Windermere and Staveley.
The Bensons are third-generation tenant farmers on National Trust land, known for their award-winning Herdwick sheep and a herd of beef cattle. Their story is really about how a traditional hill farm survives now. They have kept the farming, but they also do their own slaughtering and butchering and sell their beef and lamb on the premises, cutting out the middleman, and they have built a visitor center so people can come and see what the work actually involves. It has kept the farm in the family for another generation.
The facility they have built includes:
- A demonstration arena seating around 100, with a central pen and a barn attached so livestock can be brought in
- A gift shop
- A snack bar and small restaurant, staffed by the family
- Their own butcher shop
We were walked through the gift shop and into the arena, where we climbed three rows of bench seating around a solid ring of metal fencing and plexiglass.
🐏 The Sheep
Isaac disappeared through a barn door and came back with two sheep: an older Herdwick, the hardy native breed, and a recently sheared young ram whose entire job in life is to service as many ewes as possible. In season the ewes are split into groups of about 50, with one ram assigned to each group. Which makes for one very happy ram.
The Herdwick is worth knowing about. Norse settlers are thought to have brought the breed to these fells more than a thousand years ago, and it is the breed that made this landscape. Their real trick is hefting: a flock learns its own patch of open fell and passes that knowledge from ewe to lamb, so they stay put without fences. Beatrix Potter was one of the breed’s great champions, buying up farms and flocks with her book royalties and leaving 15 farms to the National Trust on the condition that they keep grazing Herdwicks. That bequest is a direct ancestor of the arrangement the Bensons farm under today.
Isaac told us how the breeds work different altitudes, some on the high fells and others on the lower land, and he was emphatic that without well-trained sheepdogs none of it would be possible. The young shorn ram, meanwhile, kept nudging him for love and attention like a large woolly dog.
🐂 The Cattle
Next came three cattle: two Highland cattle, including a big male named Coco, and the prize of the farm, a one-ton Limousin bull called Maestro. As Isaac talked about the challenges of running a livestock farm in modern times, you could see how bonded these animals were to him. He kept a hand on Maestro the whole time, scratching him, and the bull was clearly delighted about it.
🐕 The Dogs
Then out came the sheepdogs, one older and well trained, the other only eight months old and, in Isaac’s words, the village idiot: toddler age, full of energy, not a lot of brains yet.
He walked us up to a fence overlooking a grazing area with 50 or so sheep on the hill above. The dogs knew exactly what was coming and could barely contain themselves. One hand gesture and one word, and they were off, tearing up the slope. They gathered most of the flock and brought them down quickly, though a few escaped into a wooded area and had to be fetched. It was not all perfect. Isaac had to whistle and call several corrections and was clearly frustrated by the inefficiency, but we all thought they did great. They even went back out for the very last holdout and walked him into the pen right in front of us.
It was educational and genuinely entertaining, and it gave us a much better feel for what farming in the fells really asks of a family. Isaac’s sons were working in the butcher shop, and his wife and daughter were running the gift shop and the coffee and tea bar, where they treated us to free drinks. A few of us found something to take home. It was a delightful start to the day, and we all left with smiles on our faces.
🏬 Chester: Romans, Rows, and a Cathedral That Surprised Us
Our next stop was the unique town of Chester, and it is unlike anywhere else we have been in England.
Chester began as Deva Victrix, a Roman legionary fortress founded around AD 79 on the River Dee, and it was the largest in Britain. After the Romans came the Saxons and the Normans, and Chester grew into a wealthy medieval port trading with Ireland, until the river silted up and the trade moved to Liverpool.
Two things make it special today. First, the city walls: two miles of them, more complete than any other city walls in Britain, and you can walk the whole circuit on top. Second, the Rows, a medieval arrangement found nowhere else in the world, where the buildings along the four main streets carry a second tier of shops set back behind a continuous covered walkway above street level. Shopping on two levels since the 1200s.
Most of the center is pedestrian only, so we left Mic and the bus outside and Andre walked us in, down the main street past centuries-old Tudor-style buildings with shops on both sides. The landmark is the Eastgate Clock, an ornate ironwork clock perched on the gate that stands exactly where the Roman fortress entrance once stood. It was added in 1899 to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and it is said to be the most photographed clock in England after Big Ben.
⛪ Chester Cathedral
Andre walked us up over the gate to the cathedral, gave us an overview, and then set us loose for about 90 minutes to explore and find lunch. Bob and I headed straight into the cathedral, which seemed a little underwhelming at first and then delivered a proper “oh wow” the moment we stepped into the main chamber.
It began as a Benedictine abbey founded in 1092, and the monks built and rebuilt it over four centuries. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the abbey church was spared and made a cathedral in 1541, which is why it survives at all. The medieval choir stalls, carved around 1380, are worth seeking out, and so are the cloisters.
The church is massive, with one long central nave and side areas used for smaller services and overflow. The organ is enormous and was being played when we arrived, which lifted the whole space. It took us well over 30 minutes to get through, and I am sure we did not see it all.
🍕 Lunch and a Chance Encounter
Back on the main street we found a nice little Italian restaurant and ducked in to share a pizza. We sat down next to another couple, and when we had all finished, the woman asked if we were American. She was from Houston, her husband was English, and they had both spent decades in the Houston oil industry. Now retired, they split the year, May to October in England and back to Houston for the winter. And they do the English half living aboard a 45-foot boat, cruising around and stopping wherever they please.
This is a perfect example of why traveling is so amazing. You never know who you will meet along the way.
🍷 Into Wales: Welsh Plates and Argentine Wine
We returned to the bus for the final leg of the day, crossing into North Wales to the Quay Hotel in Conwy, and that evening turned into one of the most memorable meals of the trip.
We gathered first in a private room, where the hotel’s assistant manager told us a little about himself, then about Welsh history, and then about something we had never heard of: the Welsh colony in Patagonia. As he talked, the chef came out to introduce each course of Welsh appetizers, and the assistant manager paired each one with an Argentine wine, weaving the story through the whole meal.
The story is true and remarkable. In the mid-1800s, Welsh speakers were under real pressure at home, and a preacher from Bala named Michael D. Jones argued that the only way to save the language was to found a colony somewhere far enough away that English could not reach it. He settled on Patagonia. The Argentine government, eager to establish a presence in a region it barely controlled, offered land along the Chubut River. On 28 July 1865, about 153 Welsh settlers landed from a converted tea clipper called the Mimosa.
What they found was not the fertile country they had been promised. It was arid, windswept, and nearly waterless. The colony very nearly failed in its first three years, and it survived largely because the indigenous Tehuelche people taught the settlers how to hunt and live in that landscape. Eventually the Welsh dug irrigation canals off the river, the valley began to produce, and towns took root.
More than 160 years later there are tens of thousands of Patagonians of Welsh descent in Chubut Province, thousands of them still speaking Welsh as a first language. They hold their own eisteddfod, the traditional Welsh festival of music and poetry, and the tea houses serve bara brith. The language survived exactly as Michael D. Jones hoped it would.
The entire presentation was excellent, and the assistant manager was charming and charismatic. Afterward we were invited downstairs for dinner in the main dining room. Pairing Welsh food with Argentine wine sounds like a gimmick until you hear the reason behind it.
🏰 A Morning of Castles: Conwy and Caernarfon
The next morning we headed into the old town of Conwy for a quick walk and a look at the walled town. We did not stay long, as we had a much bigger castle to see.
Conwy is a jewel all the same. Edward I built the castle and the town walls together between 1283 and 1287, and the walls are still almost entirely intact, three quarters of a mile of them with 21 towers and three original gateways wrapping the whole medieval town.
We arrived at Caernarfon Castle by 10 am and met our guide Susan, a local Welsh guide who lives and works inside the castle walls. She was funny and very knowledgeable, though we were all a little surprised at the animosity she showed toward both the English and her own kin in southern Wales. At first it seemed funny, and I compared it to football rivalries, but it felt like something more heartfelt than that. Her telling was one-sided in places, but she knew the castle inside out.
The history behind that feeling is real. Caernarfon was begun in 1283, right after Edward I’s conquest, on a site that had already been a Roman fort and the seat of the Welsh royal court. Edward ringed the north with an iron ring of castles to hold a country that did not want to be held, and Caernarfon was the grandest of them. Its banded stonework and polygonal towers were a deliberate echo of the walls of Constantinople, imperial theater aimed squarely at the Welsh. In 1294 the Welsh captured and burned it, which prompted the massive King’s Gate, a gatehouse with a drawbridge, multiple portcullises, a ninety-degree turn, and holes in the ceiling for dropping unpleasant things on anyone who got that far.
Then there is the legend. Edward I is said to have promised the Welsh a prince born in Wales who spoke no English, and then presented his infant son, born at Caernarfon in 1284. That boy became Edward II and the first English Prince of Wales. Historians think the story was invented later, but the tradition stuck, and Prince Charles was invested here in 1969 in front of a worldwide television audience. You can see why a Welsh guide standing in that courtyard might have complicated feelings about the place.
We met Andre outside and walked down to the Black Boy Inn for a round of beer and lunch. It is a wonderful old pub built around 1522, inside the medieval town walls and one of the oldest surviving inns in North Wales, with thick stone walls, low ceilings, and creaking floors.
After lunch it was back to the bus and on to Conway, where many of us hopped off at the walled town to take a nice walk back to the hotel in the beautiful afternoon sunshine. Dinner was on our own that night, and in the morning we would head east, back across the border into England.
🧳 Coming Up in Part 3
Five days, a Roman frontier, a working manor, a 330-year-old garden, a poet’s cottage, a hill farm, a Roman city, and two of Edward I’s great castles. So much history, and we were only halfway.
Part 3 takes us east into England. Follow the whole journey here as the posts go up.
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