eric robson's coniston...

Dogs and divinity are going to be our companions in the Coniston area.

Of course John Ruskin's home at Brantwood is a must visit. But even if you're trying to cram a lot into the day take time to meander through the newly created Zig-zaggy garden there. It's based on a sketch made by Ruskin even though he never got round to laying it out.

It's a horticultural interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy - the climb out from hell to paradise. (Of course the views of the Coniston fells from the Brantwood gardens are about as close to paradise as you can get without the inconvenience of dying.)

If you're not a keen gardener skip this paragraph. One of the great things about the Zig-Zaggy is head gardener, Sally Beamish's choice of materials - charcoal and herdwick fleeces as mulch for example. That and the hottest of red hot plantings.

OK, it's safe for non gardeners to come back as we scamper on through Coniston village to the dog house. Honest. It stands on the Cumbria Way long distance footpath from Ulverston to Carlisle (but you don't have to do the whole 75 miles to visit it. Just take the footpath across from Coniston school and it's a walk of about 100 yards.

I bet it's the grandest kennel you've ever seen. Built for the Marshall family, wealthy flax merchants from Leeds, who bought the Monk Coniston estate in the 1830s and set about creating a fantastical landscape as their bolthole from the pandaemonium of the industrial revolution. (Tarn Hows, which you're bound to visit was the header reservoir for their estate sawmills and you'll never see a prettier reservoir.) But when they had to provide kennels for the Coniston foxhounds, no utilitarian kennel block for them. Instead they built a gothic folly from which a very lucky pack of pampered hounds could look out on one of the great northern landscapes.

A dog's life. You bet.