It was a wet day. The kind of thoroughly wet grey day when it hardly seems to get light, the rain comes down steadily and relentlessly, running off trees and roofs, with great heavy wet drops splashing in the puddles, and every surface is alive with little streams. The sort of day when you know it isn't going to let up for hours, perhaps not at all, and the thought of a walk was not appealing. Instead we went to see the boats. Now for a lover of boats, or even anyone with a passing interest in them, Windermere Steamboat Museum is a treasure house. Steamers, motorboats and sailing dinghies; engines, propellers and oars; pictures of boats and models of boats, while during the summer the museum comes alive when visitors are taken out on Windermere. Captain John of the Swallow would perhaps not have approved, as motor boats were "for the people who did not know how to manage sails", but even he would have been impressed by Brankson. Admiring the teak and walnut, glistening new with the sheen of varnish, it seems incredible that she was constructed in 1896. Otto was built in the same year, and the two of them, berthed in the indoor harbour, are a delight. Even older is a steam launch built in 1850 and oldest of all is a sailing yacht of 1780, but the flat-bottomed little barge, which we expected to be told had been raised from the bottom of the lake and dated back to the Vikings, proved to be the boat in which Beatrix Potter rowed on Moss Eccles Tarn. Mostly undercover so good for a wet day.
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