So we got there without Cloud spending too much of the train journey asleep, and walked out of the station to the main street along the beach to find the B&B, and it was all cute and quiet and we thought, yay, and then we put our stuff down in our room and went for a short walk and got absolutely drenched, because in Cumbria it always has to rain at least once. See that heavy grey sky? That's about to fall on us, that is.

You get off the northbound train at Ravenglass and it carries on towards Carlisle, over this bridge that crosses the estuary. And this is me mucking about on it.

Ravenglass sits on the estuary of three rivers (the Esk, the Mite and the Irt); at first it's quite hard to get it fixed in your head how they all link up and where the sea is and stuff. We crossed the railway bridge and this was the view back to the village. Our B&B is about four houses to the left of that boat.

So which way's the sea? This is looking sort of north-west again. Hello Cloudy!

And then if you turn the other way... there's the estuary behind you and hills in front. This was a striking feature of the train journey up there as well, along the edge of Morecambe Bay north of Lancaster, and again on the Cumbrian Coast Line between Barrow-in-Furness and Ravenglass. Never really seen that anywhere before.

There were half a dozen boats anchored in the estuary. At high tide they sat up on the water. At low tide they sat on the sand. Nobody ever went near them. Shame nobody runs boat journeys around the mouth of the river... but it's partly this lack of entrepreneurialism and slight air of neglect that gives Ravenglass its downbeat Zen-like charm.

Me, and the sun going down. The sun looks quite a bit brighter than me.