“We’ve come on holiday,” Richard E Grant’s character sneers in what has to be one of my favourite lines from the hit 1980s comedy Withnail & I, “by mistake.”
The place he is being so disparaging about, as any good film historian will tell you, is Penrith, in Cumbria. More precisely Bampton, a village just the other side of the M6 from the town.
Which I find a little sad. Although there are quite a few places that with hindsight, I would say I had mistakenly gone to on holiday, the area around Penrith is certainly not one of them.
I can see that it might not have appealed to a couple of out-of-work, doped-up characters coming from London in the 1960s. But as a place to visit for a weekend getaway in the 21st century, where you won’t spend a huge amount of annoying time winding down roads from the motorway to your chosen destination, it’s hard to beat. Or so I discovered in May this year.
In fact, the caravan park I was heading to was so close to the M6 – a turn-off at junction 40, a couple of roundabouts and a half-mile drive along a woodland road, which included a brief moment when I wrongly thought we weren’t going to get under a bridge – you could still just about hear the motorway in the background.
Still, Lowther
