They're flocking to Kendal

The county show, a torchlit carnival and the Tour of Britain make this the perfect month to visit Kendal.

- Mike Glover

FOR CENTURIES, September has been the month when the market town of Kendal puts on its best bib and tucker to celebrate. And this year there are more reasons than ever to mark the changing of the seasons in a community one national survey claims to be the second best place in the UK in which to live.

The repairs following the devastating floods of December, 2015, finally near completion and businesses are all geared up for a Rediscover Kendal promotion blitz.

The importance of September goes back to the South Lakeland town’s agricultural heritage. The town’s affluence was built on wool – as shown by the town council’s motto: Wool is Our Bread – and September was, and is, the time of sheep sales and livestock movement from summer to winter pastures.

The natural cycle means this is the time of harvesting wool and breeding sheep. But it is also when the people meet to socialise, celebrating the summer gone and prepare for the winter to come.

Probably the best attended event of a packed month will be West morland County Show, whose links with Kendal go back more than 200 years.

Kendal and District Agricultural Society was formed in 1799, as a way of driving up standards among farmers and landowners. Its first show was at Beast Banks in the middle of town.

It had various homes but moved around 1900 to the site now occupied by Morrison’s retail park between Shap Road and Appleby Road. Even that site wasn’t big enough for its aspirations, so in 1991 it moved seven miles out of town to Crooklands.

The Westmorland Agricultural Society now owns 160 acres, most of which will be used for the 2016 County Show, now one of the biggest one-day shows in the country. More than 30,000 visitors have attended on each of the last three years.