After a rather dull and grey Christmas holiday, my first day back at work saw us receive a six inch dump of snow, which hung around for several days before finally melting nearly a week later. Being somewhat unaccustomed to snowy weather we were a little anxious about our planned visit to the Forest of Bowland, which required us to traverse the Pennines and a few minor roads to reach our destination. As the days rolled on with the snow disappearing little by little we decided to brave it, and set off on the Friday afternoon to make the journey over to the red rose county.
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We very much liked the Forest of Bowland on both of our previous visits to the area. It’s extremely quiet, frequently bypassed in favour of other more famous beauty spots like the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales. Miles of windswept upland coupled with chocolate box villages and rolling lowland pasture makes for a beautiful outdoor adventure playground. After a break from running since summer, Sam had entered into a shorter ultra marathon in the area to ease himself into his 2025 running plans. Unfortunately, an ankle knock from last year still hadn’t quite resolved itself in time for the race, but we decided to head over anyway as we had the accommodation booked and we could re-purpose the weekend as a ‘back to work consolation weekend away’.
The drive over was actually really not that bad: hats off to the council gritting teams who’d done a great job clearing nearly all the roads we travelled on. We only really encountered ice on the lane leading to our cottage (and fair enough, being a very minor road), which was dicey enough that we decided to spend the next two days at the cottage without using the car. Luckily, the cottage was in an excellent location which meant we didn’t need to drive anywhere.
Acre Hill Cottage
We stayed at Acre Hill Cottage, a cosy one bedroom barn conversion next to a farmhouse on the quiet lane between Bolton-by-Bowland and Slaidburn. It was the perfect spot for a winter weekend away, with a log burner which we kept merrily crackling away for almost the full weekend – it got down to -8 degrees Celsius on the Saturday night!
We really liked Acre Hill Cottage. Small but well laid out, there was plenty of space for both us and the dogs – who were welcome free of charge when we booked via cottages.com. Acre Hill welcomes up to 2 medium-large sized dogs, or 4(!) small dogs. The cottage has a good sized, securely enclosed garden looking out over the AONB – we could just about see Pendle Hill poking out from behind one of the nearer hills. The dogs absolutely loved playing in the snow and were quite happily exhausted from a few garden playtimes on the Saturday!
A snowy Saturday
Originally our plan had been to sample a few local pubs for tea, but not wanting to chance the roads in the car, Sam walked down into Slaidburn to pick up a few bits and pieces for tea from the well stocked local shop – it’s just under 3.5 miles each way which, as I pointed out to him, was significantly shorter than the ultra marathon we’d originally come over for.
When he got back we took the dogs out for a short walk down the lane to have a look at the state of the road and local footpaths – there were plenty of options, but not many that weren’t covered in a fairly deep blanket of untouched snow. I did however spot a nice, big, empty field just a minute or so’s walk away from the cottage, which I earmarked to return to the next day to play with my new toy: a drone.
Drone piloting: more practice needed
I’ve wanted a drone for absolutely ages, but never let myself buy one in case it just ended up being an impulse buy. After Christmas I finally cracked, reasoning that I’d wanted one for well over a year and so it definitely wasn’t an impulse. I’d originally wanted a DJI Mini, but for a first drone it was just so expensive and so I instead went for the Potensic Atom SE after watching a few YouTube videos.
Having finally been able to try it out, I’m really glad I went for the Potensic drone. It was easy to use (although I definitely need more practice to fly more steadily!), and I got it all set up in no time at all (having remembered to charge the batteries and controller before we left home). I ended up purchasing the fly more combo kit just because it was such good value for money, with three batteries, a charging hub, spare propellers, all the cables you could possibly need and a handy bag to carry it all around in. The only extra I needed to buy was a memory card to slot into the drone: I got a cheap SanDisk microSDXC card which is small enough to fit in the drone, and comes with an adapter for when you want to get stuff off it.
You slot your phone into the remote controller to give you a live view of what the drone camera is capturing, and the user interface is really straightforward. (Hint: if you’re wanting to trim your footage down to portrait later on, switch on the grid lines on the camera view so you can aim better). Unfortunately I got a bit over-excited and forgot to take any photos before I got cold and went back inside: I’ll try and remember to take some for a future blog!
The thaw
Finally, on Sunday afternoon, the temperature managed to get up to (and stay) above freezing: a balmy 2 degrees Celsius. This did mean that our drive back looked much less sketchy than our arrival, and rather than heading straight home we decided to head out for a short walk and lunch in a pub before setting off properly.
Before the trip I’d really fancied a long winter walk up on the moor, however with the rapidly melting snow we knew we were likely facing a mud bath and opted to keep the walk shorter in the hopes of damage limitation (i.e. not getting the car full of mud).
We planned our walk around our lunch, fancying a meal at the Spread Eagle Inn to finish off our trip. The pub has published a leaflet (which we found a copy of in our cottage) with three walks starting from their car park: we did the shortest, which was just under 3 miles and took us about 90 minutes.
The walk mostly uses field riverside paths, with one short road section (pavement) at the end and a lot of stiles. Happily, both of our dogs are pretty athletic, so we didn’t get totally covered in mud lifting them over! Leads need to be on throughout the walk as there are sheep in almost every field. The route passes (and crosses) a pretty packhorse bridge and returns past Sawley Abbey, which is free to visit if you fancy a poke around.
By the time we got back to the car we were all ready for lunch (the Spread Eagle is dog friendly, and even has a doggy menu). We ended up having both starters and mains, which were all delicious, and thoroughly enjoyed our visit. The pub has a great vibe and is run by the same group which runs one of our favourite Lake District pubs, the Queen’s Head.
Dog friendly rating: 5/5. This rating only really applies to the cottage, as we didn’t get out much for the rest of the trip (although I’d say the walk we did around Sawley isn’t that dog friendly due to the number of stiles and livestock). The enclosed garden is always a massive tick in the box, and both of our dogs spent the whole weekend passed out in front of the log burner. Just look out for the farm cats who like to hang out in the hedge in the back garden!
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