Lancelot Slee

We’ve had a fairly quiet day today, doing a few household chores, with a very pleasant interlude at lunchtime when we strolled across the road to a small slate building tucked on the side of the steep road over to Grasmere. For many years we knew it as an abandoned building known as “The Wayside Pulpit” but last August it was renovated and re-fitted and opened as a ‘saloon bar’ named Lanty Slee’s.

Lancelot (“Lanty”) Lee was famous in the 19th century for supplying Langdale with his illicit liquor, working as a quarryman by day and a bootlegger by night. Fast forward to the 21st century, and the Lanty Slee Liquor Company was founded in 2022, their distillery creating their own (legal!) brands of whisky, vodka, gin and rum. They subsequently opened the Wayside Pulpit as a ‘saloon bar’ where they serve breakfasts and then, from midday to 9pm, delicious varieties of tapas are served. We were greeted warmly and had a wonderful (non-alcoholic) lunch and I have no doubt we will be back again before we go home. (A couple of photos in Extras.)

https://lantyslee.com/the-saloon-bar/

I make no apologies for accompanying my blip with a poem for two days in a row. It’s no surprise to me that many poets, artists and thinkers have found creative inspiration up here in the Lake District over the years – there’s something about its timeless beauty that absolutely tugs at the soul. I took this photo of the Great Langdale Beck from our bedroom balcony first thing this morning, and what better way to describe it than to read Simon Armitage’s amazing poem, which speaks of the beck far better than I ever could.


Beck

It is all one chase.
Trace it back: the source
might be nothing more
than a teardrop
squeezed from a curlew’s eye,
then follow it down
to the full-throated roar
at its mouth:
a dipper strolls the river
dressed for dinner
in a white bib.
The unbroken thread
of the beck
with its nose for the sea,
all flux and flex,
soft-soaping a pebble
for thousands of years
or here
after hard rain
sawing the hillside in half
with its chain.
Or here,
where water unbinds
and hangs
at the waterfall’s face,
and just for that one
stretched white moment
becomes lace.

Simon Armitage
Poet Laureate