Celebrated in Manchester for his murals in the Town Hall, which were painted in the 1880s in the last years of his life, Brown was a big influence on the Pre-Raphaelites and can now be properly seen as a significant British 19th century artist with a strong social commitment obvious in his work.

He is best known perhaps for his painting Work, (opposite) created between 1852-1863 and based on a street scene in Hampstead in London where the road is being dug up by navvies, who are surrounded by a cast of Victorian city dwellers – flower sellers, drunks, bonneted young women, horse riders, porters as well as social reformer, Thomas Carlyle.

An excellent guide to the exhibition was available free to visitors, but it failed to note a significant date. Work was bought by Manchester’s City Art Galleries in 1885, the very same year in which they acquired another major painting, Hard Times, by the social realist and Bavarian born artist, Sir Hubert von Herkomer (see detail below).

This shows an unemployed navvy with his tools, accompanied by his nursing wife and exhausted son as they rest during their tramp through the country lanes in search of work.

1885-1886 were two years of high unemployment in Manchester, with demonstrations and rioting, mirroring similar unrest in London’s Trafalgar Square. This was causing panic in high circles with Joseph Chamberlain, President of the Local Government Board exclaiming on 26 March 1886 at a dinner party with Albert Grey, Arthur Balfour, MP and Lord Rothschild: “the look-out is alarming … if this goes on for three more years we may find ourselves en pleine revolution.”

The Manchester City councillors were similarly exercised. They wished to show they were in touch, that their collections strategy involved the purchase of paintings, which reflected the problems affecting the working classes. This was an issue of concern to Brown as well, who personally supported a bureau for helping the unemployed in the city.

My favourite painting in the exhibition is Brown’s The Last of England, painted between 1852-55 and now in the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery collection. It’s a moving and colourful picture of a husband and wife with their children. Windswept and staring ahead, they are seated on the deck of a ship. They have just set set sail for Australia, a foreign land, where they are looking to find work.

Painted about the time that the crofters were forced to leave their lands in the Scottish clearances, the picture reminded me of the deserted crofts at Calgary on the Isle of Mull, which are shown on our Rooftop Buildings of the World photo gallery. The crofters too had been forced to leave their homes and land to seek a new future in America.

On Sunday I thought there must be a solution and contacted our website developer Leanda Ryan to ask if she could find out what was wrong.

Monday afternoon she was back with the answer – Fishers had changed their website and the code for accessing the webcam. And now she had fixed it. The first picture I got yesterday (see opposite) was the clearest I had ever seen and a real come-on to get up there in the snow!

It’s a really useful facility, which gives you an up to date picture of weather conditions in the Derwent Valley and on the Skiddaw massif from a distance, whether you’re in Edinburgh, Tyneside or Leeds. Combine this with the BBC weather forecasts, also accessible from our home page and you’ve got a fairly good idea of what weather to expect over the next 8 -12 hours.

This is good news and all thanks to a very efficient Leanda for getting things done within a busy schedule. If you want some smart design, website creation or digital development work done yourself, contact her at www.leandaryan.com

And while we are about it, thanks to Fishers Outdoors shop in Keswick for allowing access to their webcam.

Antique? Well not quite but old, pre stainless steel certainly and quick to rust, if not dried after use.

But the decision made us also think about how best to store all the knives for easy retrieval. So this last Sunday after a lunch time discussion of alternatives, we decided on a magnetic knife holder.

They work like magic. I’d always fancied one but we’d never had the right space for it.

So log on to Amazon – yes we could have one and at 3.32 pm an email confirmed the 40 cms long rack had been dispatched with free next day delivery.

As promised, the van drew up a little after 2.00 pm on Monday and the parcel was handed over and signed off.

Amazon had got the rack selected, packed and delivered to a country area in under 24 hours from a Sunday start. Impressive.

No complaints there. This is online shopping at its best and saved me a lot of time.

But the box (opposite) was a different matter!

Slitting it open I wondered first if there was anything there. Loads of brown scrumpled up paper tumbled out, but no sign of the rack.

Finally I found it at the bottom, well packed in its own box. It measured 2 x 5 x 47 cms, so it didn’t take long to work out the Amazon delivery box (11 x 35 x 55 cms) would have held easily 34 of the racks – if I had wanted that many!

And that scrumpled up paper? On inspection it turned into a long seamless sausage-like creation, which flattened out into one continuous length of paper over five metres long by 38 cms wide.

For just one knife rack they had needed, because of the over large box, a length of packing paper that stretched from the eaves of the cottage to the flower bed – as you can see in the photo at the top of the page.

I’m a fan of online shopping because it can save on ‘travel to search’ time and costs. But the calculations from this example about use of resources are pretty scary. Just a hundred similar Amazon deliveries would use up 500 metres of the packing paper, which would either be thrown away or recycled at best. How many trees do you need for this and for the over large packaging?

The knives look great now and I had them installed on the new rack by 3.30 pm on Monday. That’s good going – a 24 hour turn round for job completion is fast. But isn’t it time Amazon looked at its wasteful packaging policies? No gold stars here for good environmental practice.

Yesterday we walked up from Millbeck on the south facing side of the Derwent Valley, for a brief afternoon walk and found a new track down from Slade Beck we hadn’t used before.

There’s lots of water running off the fells – and in the beck, which the ‘cragsure’ Herdwick sheep had little difficulty in leaping across. On our descent through the woods, we passed this magnificent waterfall (photo opposite), which was all of 30-35 feet in height.

A surprise? Yes, but it shouldn’t have been because when I got back I found it marked on the 1:25000 map. (For a route up Slade Beck which takes you up to Carlside and Skiddaw top see our Walks section).

Back at The Larches we’ve been clearing and manuring the vegetable plot, a job I have been putting off for too long. It meant though that we could have the delicious remains of the parsnips – very succulent but they were not as large as I had hoped!

We’ve been delighted to see that the snowdrops are well out already in the garden and on the lane running up to the cottage. These ‘harbingers of Spring’ as Wordsworth called them – have come really early this year and there are even daffodils appearing in the road to Thornthwaite off the A66.

We’ve not seen the red squirrel this time but this morning had a large pheasant strutting around the garden and terraces like a lord of the manor! They’ve been seen much more in the locality in recent months and appear to have escaped from Lord Rochdale’s estate. There are often large numbers of them in the fields near Swinside on the road to Catbells.

It’s an easy walk to this ‘away from it all’ spot, with a footpath down from Pen Cottage at the Swan House apartments (formerly the Swan Inn), below Barf. I had never found this before and it takes you down through the old cottages at Powter How to the subway beneath the A66.

I knew the light was fading, but the latched gate to a path heading south down the lake drew my eye. “Why not explore a little further? It must lead to something” I thought and picked my way past two more gates and a ‘No dogs” notice.

Then I saw it – a low dark shape through the waterlogged trees. A plank with railing drew me on and I climbed the few steps. “Just slide the door” stated the notice.

Now I was inside this darkened capacious hide, with large illustrations of 33 different bird species, typical of lakes and marshland. Stools and a bench with four separate 12cms x 40 cms hinged observation flaps completed these wonderful facilities for bird watchers. Only the tea and kettle were missing!

This is part of the Bassenthwaite National Nature Reserve, where there are over 70 species of resident birds (See notice below). We owe a thanks for these free facilities to the Lake District Planning Board and other bodies like the RSPB, whose members support the programme and upkeep.

Well here’s the larger photo which should now tell you where that new mountain is, which I posted a blog about last month! Taken from Booth’s car park looking north on a very misty day, it shows Carsleddam 518 metres, a lovely peak which is overshadowed by Carlside and Little Man in the Skiddaw massif.

Two of our favourite local tops for a short stroll are Catbells (451m) and Barrow (455m) but they are both a fair bit smaller than Carsleddam; and Wainwright does not even mention it. Location as they say is all, but perhaps you’ll find now some time to take a look at this shapely treasure. A stunning picture of it reclining in the evening sun can be seen below.

You can access Carsleddam via Millbeck but the normal approaches to Carlside take you to the west of Carsleddam or up Slades Beck on the east side.

The nearest answer to my blog question came from Mark Brookman, who correctly indicated its position but did not give a name. The pot of best 2012 Tango marmalade will go to him. Congratulations Mark!

The Larches has been full of people and fun over the festive period and though the weather hasn’t been brilliant, there’s been plenty of good walking and good company. The picture above taken on Boxing Day from the route up Cat Bells – a favourite of ours – shows just how intriguing the views in the Lakes can be, whatever the season.

We are always surprised how quiet the Lake District is in the first three months of the new year. Just a few people know about the area’s treasures and attractions in winter, so don’t spread the word too widely!

There may be snow on occasions on high ground – to try out your crampons and ice axe techniques if you wish – and you have the fells to yourself for much of the time, quite often with sun and blue skies.

As the weeks go by after darkest December 21st, the daylight hours expand rapidly, gaining an extra 2¼ hours by mid February. So why not get your friends to join you for an early break at low season rates?

For us it’s also a time for clearing up in the garden and removing stacks of leaves, dead bracken and of course old Christmas trees (see photo opposite of ours being trimmed down for more effective composting).

This year we’ve bought a new ceramic sculpture, High Point, by Gordon Cooke, (see below) which now sits on its plinth below the Belvedere, displayed against the background of an ancient slate gate post, found in the garden.

The two small holes at the gate’s top mimic the larger holes of the stoop stone we have beside the breakfast terrace (photo above). High Point is already starting to look a natural part of the environment and will encourage us to keep the long grass and ferns down over the summer. Its lava flow form reminds us of our daughter Chloe’s time researching the eruptions and pyroclastic flows of the Soufrière Hills on the island of Montserrat.

It has brightened up the town, but the view of shopkeepers and others has been more gloomy. Trade and visitors have been down on last year, despite the mild weather with none of the deep freeze conditions of December 2010, when even Derwentwater froze over for days.

With job cuts and wage freezes, an economy in recession and now a euro zone crisis affecting Europe and wider, it’s hardly surprising that Cumbria is taking some battering.

But there are other signs councils and planners need to take account of. Britain’s high streets and shopping practices are changing – and changing fast. An Ofcom report (December 2010) showed we are leading the way in Europe in moving over to online shopping.

79% of us buy goods online compared with Germany (73%), France (70%) and Italy (27%) and it showed in our streets. There’s been an army of delivery vans and drivers knocking on doors up to Christmas. No longer is the Royal Mail the only show in town.

More than 30 national companies like UPS and DFS offer national parcel services. A driver I spoke to had to make 80-90 drops a day. The scale of this change over the last decade is startling and rapid.

No wonder Mary Portas in her recent report for the Government (Daily Telegraph, 12 December 2011) has warned that the high street could disappear for ever unless we take action now. Some areas already have almost 40% of empty shops and Keswick is not immune to this. There are too many competing cut price sports shops in the town, with Blacks announcing on Christmas Eve that it was likely to go into receivership in early 2012. Others could follow.

Keswick has a wider base of shops than some areas with stalls on market days too, but it should not rest content. The council must explore with others what more needs to be done to ensure that the town remains a vibrant and exciting place for visitors and shoppers beyond 2012.

But last week in Keswick in broad daylight I saw something different – a shapely new mountain – which completely threw me. A keen wind was blowing and thick clouds covered the high fell tops. Mountains surround the town, so I am used to seeing them from different angles as they poke out above the rooftops. But this time there was a hilltop profile – almost that of an isosceles triangle – I couldn’t immediately identify.

It took me a while to crack the mystery, but a group of local residents failed in the task when I asked them at the weekend. So now it’s over to our readers! The first to send me the right answer – the name of this mountain – gets a pot of our best 2012 Tango marmalade. The correct answer will be published in the New Year. Just email me (ian@lakelandbelvedere.com) a message with ‘Mystery Mountain’ in the Subject box and the answer below.

HINT: If you are a keen reader of this website and of the walking section, you will find a hint about the answer!

The wind has been very strong and temperatures near freezing for most of the week, so we postponed another high level walk too. It’s reminded me just how important it is for walkers to have good up to date information of the conditions on the fell tops – a service which earlier in the year looked like it would be discontinued because of budget cuts.

The good news this last month is that the up to date service, dependent upon daily climbs to the top of Helvellyn, has now been sponsored and the two men, Jon Bennett from Ambleside and Jason Taylor will this winter continue to undertake this formidable 950m climb in all conditions – at the princely rate of £8.40 per hour.

I met Jon last year in the car park by Thirlmere, when I had been up all day in snowy conditions above Grasmere. I recognised then his commitment as he described climbing through chest deep snow drifts to make the summit. We all have much to thank Jon and Jason for, as conditions on the high fell tops need to be assessed with care.

Accurate information allows choice of the right gear and clothing or a decision to stay at a lower level, if your fitness or level of experience is more limited. I’ve seen walkers in thin gym shoes without ice axes climbing icy snow steps on the route from Catstycam to Helvellyn. Accidents waiting to happen.

Reading Jon and Jason’s reports would hopefully next time make them think again! Yesterday they reported: “Owing to the strength of the wind, the Fell Top Assessor turned back at 710m after measuring a gust of 72mph in a relatively sheltered spot!”

The detailed reports can be found at http://www.lakedistrictweatherline.co.uk/

POSTSCRIPT: Click here for three other photos taken from the Belvedere, which show the changing seasons and light patterns from this great vantage point above the Derwent valley.