Rambling around the Lake District
IT WAS TIME for a proper road trip in the Austin-Healey – so why not a 400-mile journey from Margate in the south-east corner of England to Buttermere in the Lake District, at the top of the north-west corner? We planned to tour the Lakes in 1960s style, visiting both the Bluebird display in Coniston and the Windermere Jetty Museum before heading to Corsham in Wiltshire to attend Nick Mason’s open-garden day.
Top-down, we drove north on the A1 in Bank Holiday traffic, the big six-cylinder purring in overdrive quite happily as we kept pace with modern cars. After 250 miles we filled up with Supergrade petrol: the car runs best on it and it has the advantage of containing only 5% ethanol, making it more classic-car friendly. After breaking our journey with a night in Castleford, West Yorkshire, we continued north. As we then crossed the Yorkshire Dales on the A684 in a column of tourist traffic I detected a slight misfire but it quickly cleared after a blast up a steep hill; I suspected the twin SU carburettors were running rich.
Beyond Hawes we turned onto the deserted B6259 and then the A66 before crossing the Cumbrian Mountains via little more than a goat track, the Newlands Hause pass, into the Lake District and Buttermere. Here I took a wrong turn and drove along the shore of Crummock Water but the unexpected detour resulted in a great photo-op for the ’Healey, parked overlooking the lake.
Our second day involved gentle hiking around the shore of Buttermere so it wasn’t until Wednesday that we got back to the road trip, taking on the Honister Pass en route to the Windermere Jetty Museum. There was very little traffic on the pass but I was pleased to be driving a left-hand-drive car – my ’Healey was imported from Texas in the 1980s – as modern SUVs and motorhomes are very wide and progress can be slow and risky later in the day.
The Jetty Museum is a modern building housing a fine display of historic lake vessels, and we rounded off our visit with a lake excursion on the stylish Penelope, a 1931 wooden launch, sailing within the 11.5mph lake speed limit. However, in the 1950s and ’60s Windermere was used by high-speed hydroplanes such as Miss Windermere IV, powered by nothing less than a Jaguar D-type engine, which hit 114mph.
Back on shore, it was an hour’s drive to Coniston for lunch at the Bluebird Café, situated by the slipway from which Donald Campbell launched his water speed record endeavours, followed by a visit to the Bluebird exhibit at the Ruskin Museum in the town centre.
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