You begin by walking past cottages on the northern side of the village street towards Askham Hall. This castellated manor house with its 14th-century Peel Tower is just visible if you peer over the stone wall on the way down to the bridge. Askham Hall is the current residence of the Earls of Lonsdale, who have long been associated with the village. Perhaps the most famous family member was Hugh Lowther, the 5th Earl (known as the Yellow Earl from his livery colour), who gave his name to Lonsdale Belts awarded to boxing champions and founded The AA (adopting yellow as their corporate colour).
A lane and bridleway lead you out of the village past Askham Hall into woodlands high above the River Lowther. There is a wide variety of trees here including oak, ash, beech, silver birch, and various conifers, alongside elderberries, blackberries, and wild raspberries in season, and massive rhododendron bushes producing stunning floral displays in spring.
On the northern side of Lowther Park, you cross Low Gardens Bridge over the river and turn into the park itself. The road turns uphill by a riverside field that hosts the annual Lowther Show (with a steep natural grandstand grass bank), beyond which you pass along an avenue of massive oaks.
The magnificent 420-foot-long (125 metres) facade of Lowther Castle dominates the view ahead: built of sombre iron-grey sandstone, it is now a roofless shell with empty window sockets, though a great square keep-like tower soars above everything and the formidable curtain wall around overgrown abandoned gardens remains intact.
In its time it was one of the great stately homes of England entertaining royalty and statesmen, but the Earls of Lonsdale left in 1936 and the roof and interior were demolished in 1957 (making it a magnificent yet rather sad sight).
At a T-junction you turn right to visit the Lowthers' family church, St Michael's Church (extensively rebuilt in 1686), full of family memorials and a Viking tombstone faintly depicting warriors arriving in Valhalla. In the churchyard atop a mound is the family mausoleum — a gargoyled extravaganza occupied by a larger-than-life alabaster effigy of William, the 2nd Earl of Lonsdale — with a stunning view down a steep green valley to the crenellations of Askham Hall rising above trees at the far end.
From the church you walk through to the eastern end of the park and the model village of Newtown (a street of fine, two-storey, flower-bedecked stone houses built by Sir John Lowther in 1682 to rehouse tenants when their hovels were destroyed to improve the castle view). Another avenue leads you across the park to the walled-up gatehouse and along curtain walls before plunging down the wooded slope to Askham Bridge, crossing the river, and walking past the parish church and up through the village back to the car park.
Acknowledgment: Text derived from the Out and Out Series; Discovering the Countryside on Foot. Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia.
