WELL THEY DO SAY IT'S A SMALL WORLD !

After relaxing for three nights at the club site at Moffat, a lovely spot which is best described as a mini  Skipton and where I saw my first Osprey Thanks again Betty for the binoculars.  :-

         Today I have moved on and called in at the place I was born. Harrington in Cumberland. I haven't been back since the early nineteen fifties and like most places there's been many changes. It's basically one main street with two churches, two remaining pubs and a train station on the edge of the sea, but oh how the memories cane flooding back. Arriving at night at that very station on a steam train from Carlisle. The foot bridge is still there but gone are the lovely buildings and gas lights along the platforms.

I can only have been 5 or 6 but I was  right  back to that very night some sixty years ago. Electricity had not yet arrived in Harrington so and man with  a horse & cart used to call every week with a wet cell battery that you connected to the radio by the red & black screw terminals so you could keep in touch the world. Alas the House I was borne in is long gone as are the streets around it and the  harbour which once thriving is deserted. the shore where every one went to play is still there and I pickede up a stone and put in Leftie as a keepsake :-

One of the reasons for stopping by was to see could if I find  my fathers grave. No luck. though, I did  find my grandparents head stone. That's when the world got very small. As I past the time of day with a lady tending a grave and laying flowers she asked me if I'd come to visit a particular grave a or was I just passing through. I told had been trying to locate my my fathers grave but couldn't find it. I told I was taking a trip down memory lane and asked her if she had been in the village all her life. She had only been there since 1977 when she got married to a man who had lived in Harrington all his life and who's grave she was laying the flowers on. as we talked more it transpired that her husband had lived only 4 doors down the street from the house my father lived and must have known the family as back then everyone looked out for everyone else. At this point she called to man she obviously knew a little distance away and asked if his elder brother who had also lived on Christian street  would have have a photo of the street. as we talked a little more about surnames and the like I mentioned my father had a step brother who used to play football for Workington. He said his sister had married a lad that played football for that very team her name was Eileen Mageean.      O M G the very girl my uncle David had married. Being a man I had no pen or anything to write on. but put his phone number into my phone and will contact him in a week or so to see if his brother has any photos or memories to pass on.