Monday in Rivington

Kate and I both had today off work, so we decided to have an adventure. We met at Oxford Road station, and took the train to Black Rod, near Chorley. After walking through Horwich, we broke off the path and into the woods to try to find a waterfall. Making our the way up the stream, we leapt, stepping stoned, and slipped across the brook, until we came to this:


As we clambered down the steep sides of the valley to get a closer look, Kate came across the top part of a ring box. Someone had taken their partner here and proposed, we thought. How romantic! We raced small boats down the white water, and tried to take photos as they plummeted over the edge to their doom. None of my photos came out very well.

The climb to the tower at Rivington Pike was short, but bracing. A foal played in a field as we passed. We could see forever when we looked south. The low autumn sun reflected on distant lakes and pools that shined like puddles of gold. We ate cheese and chutney sandwiches in the shelter of the tower, attracting the attention of wet, waggy dogs.





The Pigeon Tower was Kate’s favourite part of the day, a tall finger of a building that looked like Lemony Snicket’s house. I wish we could have gone inside. We made our way back down the hill through the ornamental terraced gardens of Lever Park. In eighty-odd years of neglect, they’d fallen into disrepair. Parts of the viewing platforms and pavilions had been fenced off to keep the public safe.



At the bottom of the hill, we came to Lever Castle. "[It] wasn't begun until 1912. Only a small number of stonemasons and labourers worked on the site, and the build, slow in progress, was abandoned in 1925 after Lord Leverhulme's death. Lever Castle appears to have been conceived as a ruin of the imagination, a soft-focus Gothic set-piece on the edge of the estate that heavily romanticised it's version of Liverpool Castle which had lain since 1599 in utter ruin."







If you look up in the background of this picture, you can see Rivington Pike Tower in the far distance. Hide-and-seek doesn't work very well on a station platform like Black Rod - there's nowhere to hide.

Afterwards, we made toad in the hole. Glorious!