01/04/2014

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Marquis Sightseers Tour (part three)

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Alice Lowe's Tina with the Pencil Museum big scribbler

Read part one of this Caravan magazine tour

Read part two of this Caravan magazine tour

Our Marquis Sightseers Tour draws to a close, with stunning surroundings and a great tow taking on the Kirkstone Pass!

Also read: Part one Part two Caravanning advice Caravans for sale

Our final day of the Marquis Sightseers Tour is going to be a busy one. We’re a little behind schedule and have to explore the Lake District, visit a stone circle and the Keswick Pencil Museum today, before returning the Majestic 504 van to Northampton!

We’re also slacking on the homicide front. In Sightseers, Chris and Tina had bumped off four people by now. We’re floundering on zero. There’s still time.

Check out our Sightseers Tour video to see exactly what we got up to!

We cook breakfast as the sun rises to reveal the most perfect winter’s day you could think of. Only the resident murder of crows breaks the silence. How apt. We’re getting pretty nifty at decamping and hitching up, so within 10 minutes we’re on the road.

Caravan magazine's Sightseers Tour

Our first stop is Castlerigg Stone Circle. It was here that Chris dispatched a self-righteous walker who dared to complain about a rogue ‘deposit’ that Tina’s dog-napped hound Banjo had left.

Banjo the dog from Sightseers

In reality, the standing stones at Castlerigg have a rather eerie feel to them, and you can only imagine the mystical and perhaps macabre shenanigans that have gone on here over the millennia. You also wonder at the man and brainpower required to erect these massive rocks, 3000 years BC, and, more importantly, almost 5000 years before the JCB. The biggest rock weighs 16 tons!

English Heritage manages the site and entry is free, at any ‘reasonable’ time, according to the website. Try counting the stones. Tradition has it that this feat is impossible and you’ll end up with a different number each time. Officially, there are 40 stones. No, 42. Hang on, 38…

Dogs are allowed, on leads. Just make sure you clean up after them!

Get scribbling

We’re soon back in the outfit and heading down to the Pencil Museum in Keswick.

I’ll be honest, I don’t have high expectations for an hour or so spent looking at pencils, but the displays prove surprisingly compelling.

For starters, you see how pencils were originally made, with graphite being mined by hand in claustrophobic mine shafts.

My favourite exhibit was the ‘spy pencils’ carried by bomber crews in WWII. These were carefully hollowed out and capped with a standard metal ferrule and rubber which could be removed to reveal a map, drawn on silk, inside. Downed aircrews used the maps to escape back to Britain or to
a nearby neutral country.

There are dozens of other interesting displays before you arrive at the ubiquitous museum shop and café. It’s here that we spot the famed ‘Big Scribbler’ – a leviathan, four-foot-long pencil that Tina buys in the movie to write a letter to Chris after a fall-out. We consider making an identical purchase, but chicken out when we picture our MD reading the expenses claim for a £24 pencil.

Incredible scenery

We decide that a scenic route through the Lakes with caravan in tow beats a lorry-filled tedious trawl down the M6 any day, so we tow west towards Penrith on the A66 then jump onto the A592 and head south.

Caravan magazine at the Lake District

The A592 follows the west shore of Ullswater down to Glenridding and Patterdale. From here, it begins to narrow and climb, past Hartsop and up onto the Kirkstone Pass. Watch the route on Caravan TV.

The scenery to each side is stunning and dramatic, but this road is not designed for caravans and each time we pass another vehicle the dry stone wall on our left comes within inches of impersonating a can opener, scything through the side of the Majestic!

It’s butt-cheek-clenching stuff. Ben is driving brilliantly, but when we have to stop on the steep incline for a milk wagon to pass, the VW feels the brunt of the restart. The pungent aroma of lightly-flambéd clutch fills the car, as Hackers balances accelerator, brake and gearbox with a one-in-six-incline and a 1.5-tonne caravan. Sometimes you really wish you had an auto box!

As we crest the hill, a vast panorama opens up before us, which makes all the tasty footwork worth the effort. This is Britain at its brilliant best.

In a lone car, this route would be a doddle, but don’t do it with a caravan, especially not in high season. I doubt if a manual clutch would survive a lot of stop/starting on the steep slopes.

We drop down past Troutbeck to Windermere. It’s been an exhilarating 10 miles or so, for many reasons, but Hackney has managed to keep our gleaming van perfectly intact. Phew!

We cut back to the M6 on the A591, and stop for lunch and to refuel. The sun is still strong as we head south and reflect on an amazing four days in the Peaks, Pennines and Lakes.

I can’t imagine the Sightseers’ team – Steve Oram who plays Chris, and Alice Lowe who is Tina, wrote the screenplay – ever dreamed that their murderous route would one day be retraced by a couple of caravanning journos. Don’t worry, we won’t spoil the end of the film for you.

In our case, towing 600 miles of the Sightseers route in four days should have been murder, but the sensational scenery and attractions and majestic Marquis caravan have made this a route to die for. Just not literally.

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01/04/2014 Share this story

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