Kendal Oral History Group aims to compile a picture of earlier times through the recorded memories of the area’s older residents. Elsie Blenkarn was born in 1908 in Shap and interviewed in 1993.

We lived up at Hardendale during the summer when I was a child. It was really nice, you know, because there were loads of flowers – they were different to anywhere else that I’ve seen.

There were yellow globe flowers and there were Mealy Primroses – they’re like a little violet. The leaves are round and they eat insects.

Then there was Dothering Grass, which you don’t see now; cowslips, wild pansies growing up on that fell and heather, of course.

Then there was grouse, any amount of grouse and pheasant. Crows - there’d be plenty of crows and maybe sparrows but you never saw any of the other birds. There weren’t a lot of trees about though.

When we moved to Thrimby it was different altogether. There was a vast difference because in the flowers there were primroses, bluebells, Canterbury Bells; there was musk growing down by the river and violets you would find in the hedgerows along with Star of Bethlehem.

The birds were different as well. You got chaffinches and the blue tits, and yellowhammer, robins and suchlike. There was a corncrake used to come every year in a meadow just opposite us. You never saw it but we heard it.

Oh and I remember a wren making a nest in our garden.

We used to sit and watch some crickets. In the evening time we put a few crumbs down and they would come out. If a little one came out and couldn’t manage a big crumb it would seem to go back in and a bigger one came out. They were amusing to watch.

Then in August they used to fly and they did chirp you know – they rubbed their back legs together and chirped and sang.

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