Wray

Flood memory and the village pub

On Main Street there is a semicircle of cobbles set into the ground, black pebbles and white ones and inset pieces of green slate, laid out to show water pouring across the village. It is a mosaic of a flood, and it sits on the spot where a terrace of riverside cottages used to be before the river took them.

The pub is the George and Dragon, a village local with two bar rooms of different sizes and a restaurant. It cooks six days a week. Friday is fish and chips, and the kitchen turns out Lamb Henry, scampi, roast beef and Sunday roasts, with chips that reviewers describe as piping hot. There are three changing beers rather than a fixed regular, an extensive beer garden with an aviary in it, and some unusual pub games. Dogs are welcome. Parking on the street is limited, which is true of most of Wray.

Tearooms, shops and early connections

For daytime there is Bridge House Farm Tearooms, in a converted stone barn with oak floors and a wood-burning stove, its tables looking over the river. The eggs are their own, freshly laid. You can have scones with clotted cream and homemade jam, steak pie, fish and chips, a Sunday roast. There is a garden centre attached, a gift shop and a play area for children. It draws cyclists and motorcyclists in numbers, and hosts bike nights and classic-car meets. Balloon flights have gone up from here.

The village shop is community-owned, and there is a second garden centre, Greenfoot. Wray was one of the first villages in the UK to have its own website, and it has fibre broadband to every home, run by B4RN. It is a small place — a little over 500 people — that got online early.

Walking from the water

The walking starts at the water. Wray sits where the River Roeburn meets the River Hindburn, inside the Forest of Bowland. The Roeburndale Circular runs about twelve and a half kilometres up a secluded valley through ancient woodland and open moor. Shorter routes follow the rivers, and one longer loop takes you down the Lune Valley to Loyn Bridge and back through Hornby. Hornby Castle is two miles off, a country house grown out of a medieval one, its gardens open only on set dates.

Church, trades and transport

Holy Trinity Church was built in 1839 by the Lancaster architect Edmund Sharpe, with later work by Paley and Austin. Before it existed, villagers walked three miles to Melling for services. The village once made hats and nails and processed silk, wool and flax in its mill; the hatters, working by hand, earned very good wages. All of it is gone now. So is the railway station, which opened in 1849 and closed after about six months. The number 81 bus still runs, Lancaster to Kirkby Lonsdale, through Hornby and on to Wennington.

The scarecrow tradition

The festival is the reason most outsiders know the name. In 1992 David Hartnup and other locals started it, after he and his wife saw a similar festival on holiday in France. It is now the longest-running scarecrow festival in the country, held the week before May Day, when the whole village fills up with them.