Crook o' Lune

It had three arches and was built of stone, but did not prove so durable as might have been hoped, for in 1880 it became clear that structural damage would make the building of a replacement necessary.

[17] Land has also been set aside for the creation of a wildflower meadow, along with native species of tree such as oak, wild cherry, hawthorn and holly.

[14] Bluebells and wild garlic can be seen in this district,[9] and also non-native plants such as the colourful Himalayan balsam and the highly invasive Japanese knotweed.

Local traditions have variously associated it with Edward I's wife, Eleanor of Castile[21] and with Mary, Queen of Scots, claiming that the latter rested there while journeying to or from Bolton Castle, one of her places of imprisonment.

[22] A third queen, Elizabeth I, is said locally to have visited the Crook o' Lune in the course of one of her royal progresses and to have declared that the view was one of the finest in her kingdom.

Here Ingleborough, behind a variety of lesser mountains, makes the back-ground of the prospect: on each hand of the middle distance, rise two sloping hills; the left clothed with thick woods, the right with variegated rock and herbage: between them, in the richest of valleys, the Lune serpentizes for many a mile, and comes forth ample and clear, through a well-wooded and richly pastured fore-ground.

He described the scene as An exceedingly rich cultivated Valley in which Villages & Gentlemen’s Seats are everywhere visible sufficiently to give the View an air of Population.

2 planted hills just not opposite to each other close the side near you & at the distance of 19 miles reposes Ingleborough, a complete background to the Picture, and the Interval the Mind fills up (if the Eye be not powerful enough to ascertain) with Ideas of pastoral riches, grandees and population.

[27]The topographical writer Thomas Dunham Whitaker believed that here the character of the vale of Lune, as one of the first of northern valleys, is instantly and incontrovertibly established.

[29][30] Around 1817 or 1818 J. M. W. Turner produced his watercolour Crook of Lune, looking towards Hornby Castle, capturing a view seen from the same "station" that Gray had used in the previous century but altering the topography of the scene for artistic effect.