Bridge House
This is Bridge House in Ambleside, probably the most photographed building in the National Park, even JMW Turner has painted it, but I haven’t photographed it before so here we are.
The house sits on a humpbacked bridge over Stock Beck that may predate the house by several centuries. An influential family, the Braithwaites, built Bridge House in the 17th century to store apples from their orchards which surrounded this area. Over the decades, the house has had many practical uses, include being used as a counting house for the mills of Rattle Ghyll, a tea-room, a weaving shop, a cobbler's, a chair maker's and, at one time, a home to a family of eight! Bridge House once had doors opening onto each bank so people could pass directly through the house and cross over the beck below.
We may have the popular author Beatrix Potter, who lived at nearby Far Sawrey, to thank for the house’s survival. She visited Bridge House in the 1920s when the house was in a poor state of repair and was threatened with demolition. In 1926 a local group including Potter's husband William Heelis raised money to buy Bridge House and gave it to the recently-formed National Trust.
Bridge House
This is Bridge House in Ambleside, probably the most photographed building in the National Park, even JMW Turner has painted it, but I haven’t photographed it before so here we are.
The house sits on a humpbacked bridge over Stock Beck that may predate the house by several centuries. An influential family, the Braithwaites, built Bridge House in the 17th century to store apples from their orchards which surrounded this area. Over the decades, the house has had many practical uses, include being used as a counting house for the mills of Rattle Ghyll, a tea-room, a weaving shop, a cobbler's, a chair maker's and, at one time, a home to a family of eight! Bridge House once had doors opening onto each bank so people could pass directly through the house and cross over the beck below.
We may have the popular author Beatrix Potter, who lived at nearby Far Sawrey, to thank for the house’s survival. She visited Bridge House in the 1920s when the house was in a poor state of repair and was threatened with demolition. In 1926 a local group including Potter's husband William Heelis raised money to buy Bridge House and gave it to the recently-formed National Trust.