WagtailMarch 2019 � The parish magazine ofWhittington, Arkholme and Gressingham

Friday 1 March 7.30pmGressingham Fellowship

Wonderful World of Batswith Gail Armstrong batlady.co.uk

as a precursor to a plannedbat walk later in the summer

Gressingham Old School Room

Saturday 2 March10am to 12noonBook Swap

Bring some books you’ve read(or abandoned) and swap them for some

you haven’t, and make a donationto Fair Trade. Plus tea, coffee, and

biscuits, and a Fair Trade stall.Arkholme Methodist Church

Saturday 2 MarchGressingham and Eskrigge

Litter Pick10am start at the Old School Room.

Bags, pickers, and hi-vis vests provided,but bring your own if you have them.

Tuesday 5 MarchPancake Party

6pm to 7.30pmWhittington Village Hallfree entry – donationsto Whittington church

Wednesday 13 MarchLunch Club

Arkholme Village Hall1pm three-course lunch £7

book by Monday withCarole 22202 or Doreen 22023

Sunday 17 March 2.30pm to 4.30pmBook Sale

plus tea and cakeGressingham Old School Room

for Lancaster Homeless Action ServiceFood box donations also welcome

Sunday 17 March 5.30pmDivers Voyces presents

‘Twilight’sacred and secular choral

music for the evening – ‘Draw onSweet Night’ – Rachmaninoff, Lassus,

Dowland, Rogers, Rusby and moreSaint Margaret’s Church, Hornby

for Sarcoma UK and Dementia UK

Friday 22 March 7.30pmGressingham

in the ’30s and ’40swith William Howson, who lived at

Gressingham Hall from 1932 to 1948,sharing his vivid memories of people andlife in the village, including the arrivals ofelectricity, mains water, and evacuees...

Gressingham Old School Room

Saturday 23 MarchWhittington Litter Pick

9.15am start at Whittington Village Hall‘Exercise, good company, andrefreshments when we finish.’

Tools and hi-vis vests provided,but bring your own if you have them.

Sunday 31 March 9.30amMothering Sunday

Whittington Churchinformal half-hour service

everybody welcome

more events on the back cover...

This edition sponsored by

Kirkby Lonsdale Golf Club015242 76365

Two days out organised by Hornby Probus, all welcome

Wednesday 10 AprilMad hatters - from Ritz to BlitzA guided tour through the history of Stockport’s once thriving hatting industry. Visit a recreated hat factory with twenty fully-restored working Victorian machines and other displays. Includes lunch in an Art Deco restaurant and a tour of the sandstone cliff air-raid shelters. Roger Carter 22283

Saturday 15 June‘Saturday night at the movies’ with Royal Liverpool Philharmonic OrchestraFrom Steven Spielberg to John Williams, music from some of the greatest films of the past five decades. Vasily Petrenko conducts the orchestra, with cinematic visuals and spectacular, specially-devised lighting and digital effects. Local coach. Afternoon free-time in Liverpool for sightseeing or shopping, then evening concert. Dave Collins 21853

Classified adsPets

Docker Park Kennels & CatteryNo ordinary kennels – your dogs join us around the farm and house, and they love it! We also offer day care. John and Lisa Tamlin 07876 562380www.docker-park-kennels.co.uk

Boarding Kennels and dog day-care Aughton Road, Gressingham LA2 8LShelen.burrow@hotmail.com 07766 446272 www.aughtonroadkennels.co.uk

Pre-school and out-of-school

Hornby Day Nursery – a family run nursery with a traditional friendly atmosphere. 30 hours free childcare foreligible 3 & 4 year olds, 15 hours free childcare for eligible 2 year olds. Holidayclub for ages 4 to 11 during all school holidays. Looking for childcare? 015242 22288 info@hornbydaynursery.co.uk

Health and wellbeing

Physiotherapy Marie Colyer MCSP HCPCBentham 62216 benthamphysio.co.uk

Lune Valley PhysiotherapyLeah Dalby MCSP HCPC – Maximise potential after surgery, accidents, illness including cancer – Melling 07934 785797www.leahthephysio.co.uk

Home and Garden

Darren Jones Plumbing General plumbing and bathroom installations, Oil and Gas boilers installed and serviced, renewable energy options available – 07738 379328

Logs Direct Ltd – local specialists in Winter Fuel. Kiln-dried logs, smokeless fuel, house coal, kindling, firelighters, briquettes and pellets. Also top soil, compost & bark. Collect from us or delivered to your door. www.logsdirect.co.uk 01524 812476

Calluna Furnishings, Quernmore creating unique interior upholstery and soft furnishings, made-to-measure curtains, cushions, re-upholstery, Roman blinds, upholstery, alterations and many more. Free consultation and collection service. 01524 805504 www.callunafurnishings.co.uk info@callunafurnishings.co.uk

Gardener – regular or one-off – mowing, strimming, weeding, hedges, leaves, painting, jet-washing, felling of small trees, Jane Birbeck 07484 705012

Miscellaneous

Funeral Services B&W Funerals (J G Macdonald) – 24 hour Service, Private Chapel of Rest. Covering the LuneValley and the Dales. 39 Main Street, Ingleton LA6 3EH. Office 41293, Home 61390, Mobile 07758 002260, email jmfunerals@gmail.com

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WagtailWelcome to the March edition.

The next edition is the April edition. The deadline for items for inclusion is 19 March.Please submit all items to editor@wagtail.org.uk

You can advertise in Wagtail from just £1 per line per edition. The print-run is 475 copies, distributed to every home in Whittington, Newton, Arkholme, Docker, Gressingham, Eskrigge and Aughton. Contact ads@wagtail.org.uk.

Wagtail is also available online at www.wagtail.org.uk

Many thanks as always to all our contributors and distributors.

Michael Hampson

DirectoryArkholme Post Office Arkholme Village Hall Mondays and Thursdays 2pm to 4pm

Whittington Post Office Whittington Village Hall Thursdays 1.30pm to 3.30pm

Arkholme Baby and Toddler group Emily 07824 348276

Arkholme School Headteacher Joy Ingram arkholme.lancs.sch.uk 21418

Arkholme Village Hall 07716 122940 arkholme-village-hall.co.ukfacebook.com/arkholmevillagehall

Arkholme Methodist ChurchRev Steve Charman 01524 33327

Arts Society judieclegg@gmail.com

Beekeepers If you get a swarm of honey bees in your garden call Fred Ayres 01524 811978 who will happily remove and re-home them at no cost

Book Club Simon Acomb 07710 721108

Bowling Club Arkholme Monday evenings David Smith 03330 119 303

Drama Group hornbydrama.org.ukNeil Read 21339 realneed@hotmail.com

Hornby Singers Tuesdays 7pm to 9pmat Hornby Institute Pat 21449

Hornby Swimming Pool 01524 805666

Kirkby Lonsdale Voluntary Car Scheme Car and volunteer driver, 45p per mile measured from driver’s house back to driver’s house 07788 522511

Lunch Club Carole Webb 22202 or Doreen Airey 22023 for retired residents of the three villages – second Wednesdayof the month from October to May

Police PC3511 James Hodgson phone 101morecambept@lancashire.pnn.police.uk

Sewing Group Sue 71677

Whittington Village Hall Karan Metcalfe facebook.com/WhittingtonVillageHallCoffee Mornings first & third Wednesday of the month, 10.30am to 12noon 71287

Women’s Institute Janice McIlveen 21693

Vicar Revd Michael Hampson vicar@these4parishes.co.uk 21712

Arkholme and Whittington Parish Council Clerk Gillian Newton 14 Marton Drive, Morecambe LA4 6RB 07773678608

Gressingham Parish Council Clerkgressinghampc@gmail.com 21918

Details of all three parish councils, and full minutes for Whittington and Arkholme, are online at committeeadmin.lancaster.gov.uk/mgParishCouncilDetailsList.aspx

Gressingham Parish Council agendas and minutes are available online at www.hornbyvillage.org.uk/organisations/gressingham-parish-council

Details of all planning applications are online at lancaster.gov.uk/planning

Local problems can be reported to www.FixMyStreet.com

Local churches and community groups can be listed here for free. Please send additions, updates and corrections to editor@wagtail.org.uk

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Sunday ServicesWhittington* Arkholme Gressingham

3 March 9.30am 9.30am 9.30am10 March 9.30am 9.30am 8am17 March 9.30am 9.30am -24 March - - 9.30am31 March 9.30am - -

* boiler repair permitting (awaiting spare parts), otherwise in Arkholme

Hornby 10.45am HC every Sunday plus 8am HC 3 & 17 MarchYouth-led service 10.45am Hornby, first Sunday of every month (3 March, 7 April)

Midweek communion every Wednesday at 10am in Saint Margaret’s,Hornby – a quiet service running for about 20 minutes

Vicar: Revd Michael Hampson ‧ vicar@these4parishes.co.uk ‧ 015242 21712Curate: Sister Judith OCMM ‧ sisterjudithocmm@gmail.com 03330 119563‧

Weekly bulletin and more online: www.these4parishes.co.uk

The Women’s World Day of Prayer this year is on Friday 1 March, with the mainlocal event in Saint Margaret’s, Hornby at 2pm. Years 5 and 6 from Hornby school

will be attending. All are welcome, men included.

Saint Joseph’s House of Prayer has a quiet day (with lunch) ‘Praying with Icons’,10am to 4pm on Saturday 30 March. Book with Sister Judith (contact details above).

Also an open day from 2pm on Saturday 9 March, no booking required, with tea,coffee and cake, and the option to stay for vespers if you wish at 5pm.

Next to the church at the end of Church Lane, Tunstall LA6 2RQ

Be a member!This is the year – one year in six – when everyone has to sign up again

to be on the Church of England Electoral Roll for their local parish.

The Church of England covers every square foot of the country‘a Christian presence in every community’, and there’s an active

branch in every village – several in most towns.

You are a member by self-declaration – you are a member because you say you are –and you can choose to go on the Electoral Roll (a sort of membership roll) in the parishwhere you live and in the parish where you worship (if that’s somewhere else), if youare baptised and at least 16 years of age (or 15-going-on-16, effective as you turn 16).

The new roll is now being prepared. To enrol, just sign the list at the back of church.

Why not do it after a Sunday service – taking this opportunity to say, ‘I want to be onthe roll, and I want to take part as well’. We’re here every Sunday, the active local

branch of the national church – the church that says you belong the moment you sayyou want to belong. The service times are above: 40 minutes to set you up for the week.

Come and see – come and be a part of it.

Michael Hampson (vicar of the four parishes)

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Lent Book 2019Our Lent Book for 2019 is an introduction to the New Testament from the Oxford University Press ‘Very Short Introductions’ series

Available now at the back of church price £5 (or call 21712 if sold out)

Two Lent Groups will work through the book across five weeks, one meeting at 3 Montbegon in Hornby at 4pm on Monday afternoons starting 11 March, and the other meeting at Station House in Arkholmeat 7.30pm on Wednesday evenings starting 13 March. All welcome.

Pearson Trust Working GroupMarch update

As previously mentioned in Wagtail, the Pearson Trust Working Group approached Gressingham Parish Council to see if it would be willing to submit the necessary paperwork to Lancaster City Council for the Community Right to Build Order (like planning permission), for the conversion of the Old School Room into a residential flat. The idea was the Parish Council would be enabling the village to express its views on the over-all project by means of the referendum that forms part of the CRTBO process, without having to become any more heavily involved in the project than that. An extraordinary Parish Council meeting had been called to discuss whether they should take on this role. However, the Parish Council discovered that if it submitted the paperwork, it would become the ‘corporate entity’ that would have to manage the project thereafter. This would have been a drain on Parish Council time and resources that it could not afford to give to the project, and it would have created all sorts of legaland logistical complexities with the Gressingham Village Trust (the new name for the School Room Trustees) as custodian of the Old School Room. For these reasons, the Pearson Trust Working Group decided to withdraw its request for the Parish Council to submit the CRTBO, and the extraordinary Parish Council meeting to consider the request was cancelled.

While this was all happening, the Charity Commission completed the registration of Gressingham Village Trust, under the Charity Commission’s new ‘Charitable Incorporated Organisation’ (CIO) model constitution, several months earlier than expected. The new CIO status means that GVT is eligible to apply for the CRTBO in its own name. GVT has now called a meeting to consider if it should take on this role. As the trustee body for the Old School Room, GVT is arguably the natural entity to make the CRTBO application, and the only reason the Pearson Trust Working Group did not approach them in the first place was that until registration with the Charity Commission as a CIO, the School Room Trustees did not meet the eligibility requirements for doing so, and the necessary registration was not expected to come through until the middle of the year. GVT now hopes to make a decision about whetherto submit the CRTBO, and enable the referendum, by the end of February. The CRTBO process takes about six months to get to the referendum stage, so if GVT takes on the role of enabling the CRTBO, the referendum should take place in late summer.

Next month: update on the CRTBO, and the latest on project funding.

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The weather in ArkholmeRobin McIlveen

January Weather in Arkholme17 Slightly Wet Days (less than 5mm) together adding up to 21.8mm 3 Decidedly Wet Days (from 5mm to just under 25mm) adding up to a further 39.0mm20 Rain Days altogether adding up to 60.8mm (2.4 inches) – leaving 11 dry daysWettest Day 26th-27th with 18.3mm

2019 began in cool, dryish mode, with a couple of cold spells, the second of which ran from 17 January right through to 5 February, and included four dawn minima below -5°C (23°F) in my apple tree, which probably corresponded to -8°C or so on exposed grass and road surfaces.

Such a cold snap was being mooted by seasonal forecasts made toward the end of 2018, but whether this was good luck or judgement isn’t obvious, since such longer range forecasts depend on a very different forecasting technique which is still under development. Among other things it uses satellite-borne infra-red measurements of sea surface temperatures over vast swathes of ocean. When I was learning the meteorological ropes in Imperial College in the 1960s, such important sea surface temperatures were still being measured by scooping a bucket of sea-water onto a moving ship and measuring its temperature before it had time to warm or cool. On anyone day in those times there might have been 100 such measurements by approved merchant ships in the whole North Atlantic. Assuming a surface resolution of 100m by 100m, current satellites now do the work of about 5 billion buckets per satellite sweep. It’s as well we did not have such a blizzard of data in those days, since calculations were done by manual slide rule, and the solitary Imperial College computer had a memory thousands of times smaller than the cheapest laptop now, even though it cooked a large room with thousands of glowing thermionic valves.

It’s too early to say anything useful about the year ahead, except that globally it is almost certainly going to be another warm year, and the atmospheric carbon dioxide will rise to a record-breaking maximum in May before the growth burst of the northern hemisphere Spring pulls it down temporarily by 2%, before it rises to an even higher peak in May 2020. If our 2019 rainfall matches 2018, we can expect 130 dry days, and 240 rain days, 60 of which will exceed 5mm per day. Actually this is likely to be an underestimate since 2018 was unusually dry, as you know. Always look on the damp side of life.

Robin McIlveen

Village Hall Draws. Whittington, February: £20 Elsie Fishwick, £10 Michael Sheilds, £5 Lois Clarkson. Arkholme, March: £20 Mr and Mrs Collingwood, £10 Mr and Mrs Fell, £10 Mr and Mrs Spooner, £10 Mr and Mrs Wood.

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Arkholme and District WIThe February meeting began with the speaker, Kevin Briggs who has beenstudying and recording ‘Life on The Lune’ since 1965. He, with colleagues,walks 5km sections of the river, and in this way they cover the lower 30km section of The Lune. His camera has caught pictures of an amazing variety of wildlife, from rare moths that look like wasps to big raptors such as ospreys which are regularly seen these days. The gravel banks are a constantly changing feature and the wild residents change with them. Such a long-term survey also highlights the decline and resurgence of species, sadly the decline is often the greater. The comments afterwards showed how much members’ interest had been heightened.

President Nicole Davison was delighted to congratulate the Arkholme and District team of four who won the area section of the Federation Quiz. Over-all winners will be announced at the Council meeting on 14 March (fingers crossed). Lancashire Federation celebrates its centenary in 2020 and WIs are asked to organise a community project, and to offer their recipes for a Centenary Cookbook. Funds allow for the award of a bursary this year: Jane Binney won the ballot and hopes to put it towards the cost of a course at the WI college at Denman. There was a bumper crop of entries in the competition for ‘Your Own Bird Poem’.The winning poet was Barbara Atkinson, with Marie Blackburn second.

The meeting on Monday 11 March will be at 7.30pm in Arkholme Village Hall when the speaker will be Joe Ashton from Lancaster Search and Rescue. New members and visitors will be welcome.

Gerald writes...At the annual charity dance held in January, £1,500 was raised, and divided equally between McMillan Nurses and Cancer Care – well done the dancers!

I mentioned the Church clock in last months Wagtail. The present clock was installedin the Church in 1875, and set going on 10 January 1876. It was manufactured by Gillet and Bland of Croydon, and is identical to one at Windsor Castle. The escapement system is quite unusual and is described as the double three-legged gravity escapement. It was invented by Lord Grimthorpe in 1860, and is identical to the one used in Big Ben.[You can find a working model on YouTube – ed.] It is usually used with a compensation pendulum in high quality clocks where accurate time keeping is required.

Once again there has been a lovely show of snowdrops both in the churchyard and in Moor Ghyll. Spring must be just around the corner.

The Arkholme and Kirkby Lonsdale Bowling Greens are opening again this month. You will be most welcome at either green if you fancy taking up the game. All you needis a pair of flat shoes as all the other equipment will be supplied.

The next dance in the Village Hall is on Saturday 2 March when Bill Johnson will be providing the music for the dancers. I would love to see you there.

Gerald Hodgson

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WagtailTuesday 12 March 7pm

Hornby PensionersRichard Scott – with his dog – for a talkabout Guide Dogs. Everybody welcome.

Plus dominoes and whist eveningsSaturdays 9 and 23 March 7pm.

Hornby Institute

Wednesday 13 Marchto Saturday 16 March

Hornby Occasionals present‘Pirates of Penzance’

tickets £12 Hornby Institute 22227facebook Hornby Occasionals 2019

Friday 15 March 7.45pmCountryside Society

Tanya and Edmund Hoare give anillustrated talk on Saving our Swifts

Hornby Institute

Saturday 16 March2.30pm to 4.30pm

Concert and Cakeswelcoming back the fabulous sopranoDaniella Sicari, with Olivia Dance on

piano. Songs by Poulenc, Liszt, Chopinand Vaughan Williams. All Saints

Church Burton in Lonsdale LA6 3JU.Free admission, retiring collection

concertandcakes@outlook.com

Thursday 21 March 7.30pmHornby Flower Club

Joan Bentley – ‘A Trip into Spring’Hornby Institute

Saturday 30 March 7.30pmPrize Bingo

good prizes – gammon, chicken,chocolates, wine, spirits, plus raffle and

free refreshments, in aid of AughtonChurch funds Aughton Village Hall

This edition of Wagtail sponsored by Kirkby Lonsdale Golf Club. For ads and sponsorship information see www.wagtail.org.uk

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