Pencils

On a recent trip to the Lake District in England, we used a rainy day as an excuse to visit one of the few indoor attractions in Keswick, the Derwent Pencil Museum.

Before I talk about the museum, though, a bit of quick history – Writing instruments of all sorts have been in use for thousands of years, but a sort of proto pencil was a lead-based stylus used since the time of the Romans (which is why we still call them “lead pencils” even though lead hasn’t been used in pencils in hundreds of years).

The modern version of the pencil dates back to the 16th century with the discovery of a large deposit of graphite near Keswick in the Borrowdale Valley. The story says that it was found by accident by a group of shepherds who, on finding that it wouldn’t burn like coal, used the mineral to mark their sheep. But they soon discovered it left marks on their hands and other things that were hard to remove.

People soon discovered that the mineral was too soft to use by itself, but stuffed into a wooden tube, it made an easy-to-use writing instrument.

The World's Largest Pencil

By the early 18th century a cottage industry creating pencils had grown up in Keswick and the surrounding area. In 1916 the Derwent Cumberland Pencil Company or sometimes just called The Cumberland Pencil Company was formed to manufacture pencils. The first Derwent color pencil was produced in 1938. The Derwent brand is still recognized for produced some of the finest artist’s pencils in the world.

The factory has since moved, but the museum remains in Keswick. It’s a fascinating place. In addition to displays showing the history of the pencil, there are numerous historical items, a look at the manufacturing process, the varieties of pencil and art supplies now available, and a couple of fascinating, related stories. It also features the world's biggest pencil, as certified by the Guiness Book of World Records.

During World War II, Brittain’s secret service operatives worked with the company to develop ways to incorporate various bits of miniaturized technology into the pencils. They were also used as a method for passing secret messages. None of this has ever been officially confirmed, of course!
The museum gave us each a plain Derwent pencil with our entrance ticket. I was glad to get one.

Personally I use pencils quite a bit. Although all my books are written on the computer, I do a lot of preliminary work and planning using a pencil and paper. I like a pencil that writes fairly dark and has a nice sharp point. There’s something about the physical act of holding a pencil over a blank piece of paper that gives opens the spigot and gives the ideas a channel to emerge and begin to grow.

The Lake District in England

by Karen McCullough

For years I’ve wanted to visit the Lake Country in England. The historical association with the romantic poets and the cultural connection to Beatrix Potter influenced that but the real decider for me is all the stories I’ve heard about the remarkable beauty of the area.


The region has been a go-to vacation spot for many English families for years, including my son’s in-laws, who are avid mountain-climbers.


I recently got the chance to visit when we arranged to spend a week in Keswick, one of the largest towns in the District. We shared a vacation cottage with our son, daughter-in-law, and their two children. The journey to the place was a fairly easy but rather long car ride from their home in Hythe, Kent.


For us, getting there meant taking planes from our home in Greensboro to Atlanta, from Atlanta to JFK in New York, and from New York to Glasgow. After a couple of days stop-over in Glasgow, we took a train to Penrith and then a bus from Penrith to Keswick.


Was it worth all the travel? From the purely personal perspective, a chance to visit my grandchildren is worth any amount of effort. But the countryside offered a lot of rewards as well.


The Lake District is actually an area of mountains, valleys, and rivers as well as many lakes. The scenery ranges from gorgeous to breathtaking. Mild weather and frequent rain ensure that the place is very green. It’s a playground for lovers of nature and the outdoors.


Although there are other entertainments, including a theater by the lake in Keswick, the place attracts mostly hikers, mountain climbers, bikers, boaters, and other water sports enthusiasts. The entire area is a warren of narrow roads, trails, and walking paths.


We had a beautiful view of a nearby mountain from the large window of our house and the deck overlooked a river. On our first full day we took what was billed as an easy hike to the Castlerigg Stone Circle, an ancient stone circle that lacks the size and grandeur of Stonehenge, but is more accessible and intriguing. The day was unusually sunny and hot, making the mostly uphill hike there more strenuous than expected. Still we managed it and an even longer downhill hike back to town.


Day two featured a boat trip around Derwentwater, one of the many lakes in the area, followed by some time in town, followed by lunch in a pub and poking around the town of Keswick. Day three also featured beautiful weather. While my daughter-in-law and oldest granddaughter climbed Catbells (a “beginner” mountain I wasn’t ready to tackle) the rest of us walked a mostly level trail along a lovely, winding river.


It’s worth noting that the landscape is also dotted with numerous small pubs and cafes. Most walks included breaks for refreshment at a café and ended with a meal in a pub.

Unfortunately during the last couple of days of our stay the weather deteriorated sharply. Rain isn’t unusual in the area. Our first few days, which featured sunny warm weather, were more of an anomaly. But the solid deluge and heavy wind of our final days were not the norm. On one of those final rainy days we all visited one of the most interesting non-outdoor activities in the area, the Derwent Pencil Museum. The pencil as we know it had its origin in the area and Derwent still makes some of the best quality pencils around.


The last day we stayed inside and played with the grandchildren. And that was good too. All things considered the trip was well worth all the travel involved.

It’s the Little Things

by Karen McCullough

Detail can make all the difference.

One of the reasons I like to visit the places I use as  background for my stories is the need to get the details right. It’s not always necessary, and I confess that I’ve set parts of stories in places I haven’t been to, but not often. Sometimes, if the place isn’t the main setting, I can get what I need from Google Maps, Wikipedeia, travel and tourism websites, and Google Earth.

But settings are an integral part of most stories and I really try to get it right as much as possible. The setting for my current mystery series is a market center in Washington, D.C. that is the site of various exhibitions and trade shows. Because I’ve had family living in the D.C. metro area for a long time and have visited often, I’m comfortable writing about the geographic area. During my ten years working for various trade publications, I attended numerous trade shows and got to see a lot of what goes on. I’ve also spent time talking to some of the people who work behind the scenes to get a feel for what they do.

When I come to writing something I don’t know about, I try to do as much research as I can to get things right. What I often find is that almost everything is more complicated than one suspects and there may not be any cut-and-dried right answers. Different people, different places, and different organizations do things in different ways. But there are usually some definitely wrong answers, and I try to avoid those as much as possible.

But like most people I don’t always know what I don’t know, which is why I need editors and beta readers. I first wrote Hunter’s Quest a few years ago, but published it only last year. One of the editors who read the book pointed out that I had my hero and heroine toodling around in a car with a front bench seat, although no American cars have been built with bench seats for years. Why didn’t I know that? I haven’t owned a car with anything but bucket seats in front for many years.

A couple of books I’ve read lately also reminded me of how easy it is to slip up on things you don’t know. I was beta-reading a Regency Romance not too long ago, where the American author didn’t understand how the English nobility worked. She had a character in her book, Sir Somebody, being a knight who talked about passing his title onto his son. I pointed out to her that a knighthood was not a title that could be passed on, and she probably wanted to make him a baronet (also addressed as Sir Somebody but that title can be inherited).

A different author, for whom I was doing a beta read of an otherwise very good story jolted me out of it when she described her English hero’s house as having a wrap-around porch. Because my son lives in England and I’ve spent time there, I know that a porch  means something slightly different in England than it does here. (It’s a small, usually covered, and sometimes fully enclosed entryway to the house, not a broad, elevated platform in front of the house.) I’ve never seen an English house with anything similar to an American wrap-around porch. They just don’t build houses that way. Outdoor sitting areas are pretty much always in the back of the house. And by the way, don’t call it the back yard. It’s the garden.

The first picture below is my son and his daughter heading out for a walk in the neighborhood where they live in Kent. The house directly behind has just a small porch entryway. The one in the upper left-hand corner has a small enclosed porch in front of the door. It's very common.

An English country manor with an entrance porch.

I know those things from experience. But there are tons of things I don’t know, and I don’t always know what those things are. I try to check out anything I’m not sure about, but can easily miss things I think I know. Which is why I let other people read my book before I publish it, and why I’m always happy to hear from readers who point out where I made a mistake.  I’ll always investigate and update the book when and if I can!

The Delights of Walking Everywhere

by Karen McCullough

(I didn’t know today was Grandparents’ Day when I wrote the post a week or so ago, but it seems appropriate!)

Roses and other flowers blooming along

their driveway

My husband and I have just returned from a visit to our son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren in England. It was a wonderful trip, filled with good times with all of the family and a bit of sight-seeing in their area. We did a lot of walking and it enhanced the trip in so many ways.

They live in Hythe, Kent, an area known as England’s Garden, and with good reason. Nearly every house has extensive gardens filled with profusions of blooming roses, dahlias, fuchsia, butterfly bush, hollyhocks, hydrangeas, and many others. The picture shows the gorgeous row of flowers beside my son’s driveway.  Given how hard it is to keep anything alive, much less blooming, through the hot summer in our central North Carolina home, it’s safe to say I have garden envy.

Of course that’s mostly the result of a climate that stays moderate and rather rainy most of the time. Daytime temperatures over eighty are considered hot and several days in a row of those highs are a heat wave. We were there in August and day-time highs hovered in the upper sixties to low seventies, which they agreed was pretty much normal. We agreed it was pretty delightful. We were fortunate that it only rained on us a couple of times.

Looking out over Hythe from the hill. The English Channel is

 in the distance.

Hythe is just southeast of Dover and Folkestone along the Channel coast and it’s a lovely old town. The High Street is lined with an assortment of shops that cover most necessities and a lot of fun things. “Charity Shops” abound. (Think small versions of the Goodwill and Salvation Army stores.) There’s even a charity bookshop, where I found several interesting tomes I’d never seen in the U.S. There are a couple of restaurants and quite a few coffee shops. Sidewalks are narrow and crowded but for part of the day the road itself is closed off and turned into a pedestrian walkway.

One of the great benefits of this part of England is that you can walk almost everywhere, a great feature for us since we couldn’t all squeeze in my son’s car at one time. And walk, we did. We spent a couple of happy mornings wandering around the old town of Hythe, but we also walked with the family from their house, situated on a hill well above the town, down to the seashore, a distance of about a mile and a half. We also traveled on foot to shops, coffee houses, and even the grounds of the Hythe festival.

When we made treks to other places, like Rochester Castle, and Dungeness, we took the train, and then walked from the station to wherever we wanted to be. Generally it wasn’t a very long journey.

Because of the small children, we didn’t eat out as often as we might have. But there was a Sainsbury’s grocery store on the route from the town center of Hythe to my son’s house, so we frequently stopped there to get ready-made meals or ingredients for putting something together and schlepped them up the hill to their home.

We walked and talked and gazed and walked and talked some more. The pedometer app on my phone said I did about 14,000 steps most days, which added up to about 5 miles of walking per day.
Long strolls gave us plenty of opportunity to interact with each other, share stories, and compare notes on a wide variety of subjects. Walking let me stop to admire gorgeous views from the hillsides, glorious flowers everywhere, interesting and different birds, and the neatly compact houses that are hallmarks of English homes. We stopped frequently to pluck the blackberries growing in abundance all over and pop them in our mouths.

The scenery is beautiful and because the area is new to us, every corner and turn seemed to present something new and interesting. I blessed the new pair of sturdy walking shoes I’d bought shortly before we left because they supported me well through the many miles I put on them.

Back at home my husband and I walk most days, long marches through our neighborhood early in the morning in summer, to avoid the heat. It’s good for us and feels good, but it isn’t as pleasant as being able to walk to so many interesting and different places in Hythe, Kent.

And I miss the company and chatter of my son, daughter-in-law, and especially their two children, Freya (4), and James (2).