The Bridge House

Straddling the Stock Beck in Ambleside is a house for a mouse, or so it seems from the size. This is The Bridge House.

I reeeeeeeaaaaaalllllllly had to wait my turn here to photograph this bijoux building, as people from all corners of every continent were queueing up to have a snap on the steps left, right and centre!

The Bridge House was a mastermind idea from a prestigious Cumbrian family, known as the Braithwaites, who were influential landowners in Ambleside and needed ready access to their land on either side of the stream to tend their orchards.

Keen to keep pennies in their own pockets rather than line those of the parish officials, in the 17th century, the Braithwaites designed and built The Bridge House over the beck as a means of avoiding paying land tax. Strictly speaking, the house wasn't on land but bestride the beck. This ingenious idea gave them a place to store apples from their orchards and a means to traverse from one side of the water to the other with ease. Step aside Jimmy Carr, Gary Barlow, and James Dyson, the Braithwaites were dodging taxes before you were an apple in your parents' eye!

This tiny house is a real crowd pleaser for tourists who are keen to have a bite of the building's history.

It's literally a one up, one down abode with seven steps to the top floor and all made from slate, giving it its quintessential Lakes look.

Over the centuries, the building has employed all manner of uses.

Woollen and bobbin mills were prevalent in the region, feeding into the textile industries in Lancashire. Still standing is the old Idle Mill, the former fulling mill which would have used the ebb and flow of the Stock Beck to power hammers to bash and beat fabric to make it more dense and durable.

Subsequently, it was used as a counting house for the Rattle Ghyll mills, where all the accounts were kept and the wages paid. Then it switched into the hands of John Rigg, a weaver, where he lived with his wife and six children, making a living from making baskets and rush seats. Then it transferred to a chairmaker's workshop and finally in 1905, a cobbler worked from the ground floor, keeping his pigeons in the upper floor.

A little space for a lot of productivity.

I loved the minuscule measurements of this house. It's hard to see how anyone could swing a cat in here let alone raise a family of six! Its higgledy piggledy nature reminded me of the old woman who lived in a shoe!

Slicing down the High Street, the beck cuts a bend just before the tiny bridge that carries the house. I wondered what came first, the bridge, or was it built with the house piggybacking onto the bridge from the start?

Hugging the bridge like the shell of a tortoise, it has all the trappings of a humble home. A slate bench to sit and while away the day, and a wooden window box where there's no room for a garden.

By the 1900s, the building began to show the knicks and knocks of all those feet up and down seven slate steps, and it began to feel a bit downtrodden.

By the 1920s children's author Beatrix Potter and her husband were living close by at Far Sawrey and enjoyed visiting Bridge House, but were concerned by its dilapidated state. Threatened with demolition, the people of Ambleside, including Potter's husband William Heelis, Edith Fletcher, the wife of the founder of The National Trust, and Gordon Wordsworth, grandson of the famous poet William Wordsworth, rallied to raise the brass to buy the building. By 1926, they had amassed funding of £1,244.00, the equivalent of just over £97,000 today, to buy The Bridge House. It had become an iconic symbol of life in this Lakeland haven, and people wanted to secure its future away from wrack and ruin.

The inspiration of artworks by artists like Turner and Ruskin, the tumbledown, crumble of The Bridge House was too significant to fall.

The people of Ambleside gifted Bridge House to The National Trust who turned it into an information and membership centre.

It still stands in homage to all those who crossed over it, stored their apples in it, worked in it and lived in it over the centuries. And is the backdrop to many a holiday snap for tourists visiting the Lakes.