Memories of the 'knotted trees' at Arnside Knott (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Memories of the 'knotted trees' at Arnside Knott

3:00pm Thursday 12th January 2012 in Nostalgia

John Caldwell, aged 85, a member of Cartmel Fell and District Local History Society, who lives near Bowland Bridge, recalls school days at Arnside in the 1930s

ON SCHOOL-DAY mornings, around 80 years ago, along with my two youngest sisters aged five and six, I would board the Dallam bus in Milnthorpe Square to go to school in Arnside.

Donny Arkwright was our favourite bus conductor; always cheerful and helpful to us youngsters (I was only four) and to our friend Raymond Bowman, who joined the bus from The Dixies at Sandside.

At Arnside the four of us got off near the post office and trudged up the steep lane to ‘Lishy’s’ — a nursery school run by Miss Lishman, at the Educational Institute, where we had a good grounding in the three Rs.

After Lishy’s I went to another Arnside school — Earnseat — for six years.

We lived in a large house on the Promenade — now ‘Heron Syke’ — and had our lessons and playtime at Ashmeadow at the far end of the Promenade.

These were happy days, despite — or perhaps because of — the very strict school discipline.

Good memories include walks up on to Arnside Knott, where near the top of the hill, a large stony area we called ‘Bunnyvilla’, was a favourite place to stop.

Lower down the Knott, overlooking a small golf course, now long disused, stood the two ‘knotted trees’.

Someone, years before, must have twisted two pairs of saplings into two knots; so the trees grew up into the special shapes, good for climbing, which many old Knott (or Knot) lovers still remember.

And tree-climbing by schoolboys on Arnside Knott, mercifully was not ‘risk assessed’ in those happy days long ago!