Hunting
Ruins in the UK
I had originally thought about adding York to an Elderhostel trip to Wales, but an English friend suggested driving instead. My first question was: "ME?" but she said she and her husband hadn't had a holiday for a while and would take care of the driving. Not only that, but she met me at Heathrow when I arrived, after one of the subjectively shortest overseas flights I've made(It was actually an hour shorter AND I managed to sleep for a while.) She took me home with her, and we actually did some local sightseeing that afternoon.
| My notes for the first couple days are extremely sketchy, the result of a combination of jet lag and little opportunity to write, so this section is really dependent on the fotos I took. When I got back and sorted the books, cards, and folders I'd collected, I had a church I remembered but couldn't place chronologically until I went through the fotos. It was our first stop after we set out the next morning, St. Mary's church at Aldworth. I remembered the "giants", but not when and where I'd seen them. The folder I'd picked up there reminded me. The oldest part of the church is Norman, from about 1200, but the site is probably much older. The "giants", nine oversized stone effigies of members of the de la Beche family, date from the half century 1300-1350 and are unique in the country. It was a peculiarly appropriate first stop, because we were going to be seeing more giants, though not of the same sort, on this trip. |
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 | Then we set off to see the Uffington Horse, the first of our Neolithic stops. This was the beginning of our continuing adventures with misleading signs and roads that vanished from beneath our wheels. After a bit of confusion, we drove past it, and the two of us who didn't know what it looked like couldn't see it at all. We circled back and found a road leading up fairly far to a parking lot, where we got out. My friend pointed out a hill below called Dragon Hill, which has a good view of the horse. Then we climbed up to the ancient hill fort on top of the hill. It was REALLY windy! We sat down inside it on the bank out of the wind for our picnic lunch. Back outside again, we walked over to the horse. My friend's husband asked where it was and she informed him he was standing on its eye! I took fotos of parts of it, but only a postcard shows all of it at once. We could see for miles.
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Next it was--more or less--off to Avebury and standing stones, with a pause at Silbury Hill(left below), the largest man-made hill in the country. We started off from the parking lot via an ice-cream truck(they turn up in the oddest places at times, as I learned later in the middle of nowhere). We were eating soft-serve cones as we headed for the standing stones. The plain concrete markers indicate spots where stones were broken up and carried off to use for building. Unlike Stonehenge, you can walk around inside by the stones, or even water them, as a dog was doing. The only way to see the whole circle is from above.
 | On the way to Bath, we visited a lovely little town named Lacock. It has a notable abbey, which I only took fotos of, and it's about to be the backdrop for a TV movie/series/whatever, so they're adding a false front to some of the buildings to fit the story. On an untouched street we almost passed a bakery, but I went in and bought a piece of nougat that looked like a slice of odd cake and soon we had some more goodies and the three of us went to a bench and sat there and ate them. I had to wait for a big white van to go away to take a shot of the street, and then while we were still sitting there, along came a woman on a horse, which made an even better picture. |
After that we went on to Bath, but I never got to see the Roman baths, which disappointed my friend, who wanted me to see them, because there was not a single parking spot anywhere in that part of town except one large one with a motorcycle smack in the middle of it, which really bothered her husband, who was driving. I pointed that since I didn't get to see them, I didn't know what I might have missed anyway. We went on to Bristol and stayed with their daughter and son-in-law that night and the next morning we headed for Wales and castles.
 | There's a little matter of the Severn estuary in the way, however, so first we had to cross a long bridge to reach Wales. It wasn't long before we reached the first castle, Chepstow, where we also got the Cadw passes that let us into all the castles free and got us discounts in a couple other places as well as on all the books I kept buying. I bought a really thick one for Chepstow, which is enormous and has enough of its walls to really get a good idea of what it was like. This was obviously a big game hunt; I'd never visited such a huge castle that was still this intact but not "modernized"(aka Victorianized) almost out of recognition as a castle. It was also a lovely sunny day, to make it even better.It goes back to the time of William I and belonged to various people who added to it over the centuries. |  |
 | From there we went on to Tintern Abbey with its Wordsworth echoes, which also has a Chepstow connection; one of its patrons was lord of Chepstow. Far from wandering lonely as a cloud, it was hard to find a parking spot. After exploring it a bit, we sat on a wall by the river and ate our lunch before continuing on to Raglan Castle.
We did a little circling to get there, and I took some shots of the road and the scenery along the way. Raglan's not as big as Chepstow, but quite different, with a moat around the keep I got into several shots. The castle as it stands today dates mostly from the 15th century, but there was something on the site before that.
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Then we really started wandering through back roads, not necessarily the ones we wanted, and at one point ended up next to a reservoir where there was an ice cream truck and the lady in it gave us some directions I didn't understand. Abergavenny kept appearing on signs, though we didn't really want to go there. We ended up there anyway, trying to find the right road to Builth Wells, where we also didn't want to go, but that road led us to where the road to our B&B diverged. Road? The website describes it as a "track", but even that is an exaggeration of its state. It began as a track and deteriorated rapidly. Finally we reached our B&B,
Hafod y Garreg ,
the oldest farmhouse in Wales(so certified by dendrochronological analysis of the huge beam over the fireplace) and met the young couple who were our hosts. We had tea outdoors where we could watch the chickens and recuperate for a while. It's a lovely setting. Celia had arranged for dinner there on the evening of our arrival when she reserved the family suite for us. I'm not sure what any of us expected; the experience wiped out any preconceptions! We were fed a three-course gourmet meal better than any I've had in my European travels. Other B&B's would be easier to reach, but we'd never eat better than we did here. It would have been a wonderful area to hike in if I hadn't kept exhausting myself before we got back there each day.
 uphill at Hay's castle |
We left Hafod-Y-Garreg the next morning heading first for Hay-on-Wye and its bookstores, which would be open even on a Sunday morning. Even the castle in Wye is a second-hand-book store, like many others lining the streets. I browsed but refrained; I was already collecting castle books! And then it began to rain. Crossing the mountains again, I shot out the car window. Well, "shot out the car window" sounds rather drastic. I rolled it down to take fotos of the mountains. Back down in winding country lanes we saw sheep not only in the fields but sometimes in the road. |  downhill from the castle |
On the way north the day before we had passed somewhere near White Castle, one of a triangle of three castles established by the Normans to protect the routes of communications between Herefordshire and Wales, but couldn't find its road and went on. Today we were really trying to find it, but no road seemed to lead to it. We even saw it on a hill to our left, but no road went that way. We made an enormous circle trying to get there and had about given up when a sign pointing to it suddenly appeared! It's a lovely castle, and the rain had given up trying to discourage us, so I could take the usual too many fotos. I took one of the outer bailey wall as we approached. It had picnic tables, so we could have had a picnic there, but we weren't equipped for one this day. The keep with its moat and massive ruined gate towers is really impressive, and again different from other castles we'd visited. The original castle would have been of timber; the stone version was a later development.
| Today was museum day and it rained off and on much of it, but not hard. St. Fagans Museum of Welsh Life is the kind of place I could easily spend a whole day in, but we didn't have that much time for it, so we only saw part of it. We found some different roads than we were supposed to be on, but we got there without actually circling this time. Even though I had bought the guide when we went in, I still took fotos as well, of course. I began by following signs pointing me to a castle. It's St. Fagans Castle, on its original site, built in 1580, as it turned out. I looked at the stairs I'd need to climb to reach the other side of the water and stayed on the far side, wandering along parallel to my friends on the other side. |  Celtic village |
We variously split up and rejoined each other at different points, including the bakery where we found some food and tea, but my friend wanted us to visit the museum in Blaenavon and we were going to eat at Hafod y Garreg again in the evening, so we had to move on, even though we'd really only sampled this museum. Getting there got involved, but this time the circling began in the town, trying to find a post office, an ATM, and an info place. We finally found a parking lot, then an ATM, then a post office, but she didn't have the things that needed mailing! We were supposed to head for the museum while she took the car keys and went back to the car to get them. As we started up the long hill towards the museum, we met a man walking a dog and he told us how to get there and how far it really was--too far! We started back to get her, but he can walk much faster than I can, so I waited on a corner while he hurried back. It took a while because she had gone to a different parking lot to look for the car! They picked me up and we got to the museum about half an hour before it closed. It was an iron works museum, and I took several fotos of the worker's homes. Then we headed back to Hafod y Garreg for our last night there and another fabulous meal.
 | It was time to move on to the coast, but first we had to visit another castle on the way--that is, once the sheep got out of the road. We came around a curve to find the road totally blocked! It was raining and really windy as we made our way up to Carrig Cennen Castle, but it seemed appropriate. It was very atmospheric. It has a cave that was part of the castle defenses which we variously explored. |  |
OK, there were the stairs. Then more stairs. And since it had been raining for some time, even though it stopped when we got up to the castle, they were wet stairs, with puddles.But I went down them. And down them. And after almost cracking my head on the roof despite my friend's warning, I stayed at the bottom by the dovecote holes, she went further in before stopping, and her husband went on with our borrowed flashlight until he encountered a deep pit partly filled with rubble. I said to the man in the shop at the bottom of Carrig Cennen's hill that it would make a wonderful setting for a historical novel and he told me one had been written, but I stupidly didn't write it down and a web search without at least a hint at the title or author has been fruitless. We had more of the fruit bread I like so well, Bara brith, before getting back on to the roads west.
Finding Haverford West wasn't too bad. We got directions to Barley Villa, our next B&B, and bought some groceries. It has a castle I took a foto of from the shopping area, but not one to compete with some we've been visiting lately.
Unfortunately, the correct road slid out from under our wheels yet again and we found the sea at Broad Haven in front of us without finding the road we were supposed to turn on to. We went on to Little Haven in search of a road that would lead us back in the right direction and found a huge truck on an impossibly tiny(even for Wales) road with a driver asking directions. We made our way past the intersection and followed another wrong road. Then we went past a sign to a place that, according to the map, DID connect with the road we needed, so we turned back to find it. On the way we found the spot where the truck driver had lost his tail light on a sharp turn and before long we were following the same truck down the road and could see debris on it from its scrape. It was hard to believe it could have turned around in Little Haven, but it had managed it somehow.
Finally we got on to the RIGHT road and found our B&B, Barley Villa, where we were warmly welcomed with tea and cakes. The address said "Walwyn Castle" and that was a place on the map, but we never did figure out what it referred to.
The next day we set off for St. David's to see the cathedral and the ruins of the bishop's palace. It was so pretty where we parked and on the way up that I took pictures before we even reached the buildings.
We had no castle, but there was not only a big ruin(the bishop's palace), but St. David's has been a place of pilgrimage for almost a millenium and a half, even before the cathedral was built 800 years ago. We visited the cathedral, found out when evensong was, I took fotos and bought some cards and books, and then we went off to Caer Fai to have our picnic and hike along the cliffs to St. Non's Chapel and a holy well. The picnic went well, and so did the hike, although I got closer to the edge of the cliff than I liked at one point and moved up to a higher path. The sea and cliffs were lovely, as were the flowers along the way. I had to stop to admire them and take fotos, so I was soon lagging well behind.
 | |  |  St. Non's chapel is in this foto |
Around the point the path began to go downhill and got steeper as it did. The path I was on was rocky and looked rather unsafe for clumsy me, but there was a gentler one a bit to my right. I started to step across, lost my balance, and fell dramatically flat on my face on the grass between the paths with my head somewhat downhill so I wasn't sure whether I could get up without making matters worse. My friends and a strange hiker came rushing over to see how badly I was hurt. Well, it was rather dramatic, even if I was parallel to the cliff. I was more shaken and embarrassed than injured. My left wrist had taken more than its share of my weight, but didn't hurt too much at the moment. I got up with help and followed my friend very cautiously up the hill and toward the road while her husband went back to get the car and bring it around to the road(this had been in the original plan). No one got a foto because I was lying on the only camera present (but when I told her about it, our hostess at the B&B said we could have gotten 250 pounds for a videotape!).
My friend went off to the holy well and brought back water to pour on my wrist and to drink(It was nice and cold) while her husband and I sat on a grassy bank and tried in vain to figure out where we were on one of the detailed maps she had brought along(the wrong one, it turned out).
It wasn't all that late, so we got back into the car and went to the harbor of a little town elsewhere on the coast with the remains of an enormous brickworks, Porthgain, and had some ice cream. Then we returned to the cathedral for Evensong, an entirely sung service with an all-girl choir including one very tiny one and a lovely organ. Very interesting.
What followed was also interesting. We went off along the coast again, including up a REALLY dead end road which required turning around in such boggy ground I thought we might be there forever! Finally we found a pub that had fish and chips. We had a glass of cider while they were fried and then ended up eating them in the car because I was the only one who didn't agree it was too cold to sit at a picnic table. Really yummy!
 | Despite all the drama, it had been a day with no castles, even if we'd done a pilgrimage of sorts, which omission had to be rectified the next day. After discussing castles at length in the St. David's parking lot while we waited to attend Evensong, Kidwelly won despite its relative distance. We had another lovely sunny day for our expedition. I took the audio guide this time, as well as buying the castle guide, and I had to keep making it skip sections because it insisted I was climbing stairs and seeing things from above. I was not up there, except once early on when I went up into the constable's quarters in the gate tower. Before it did that, however, it sent me to the outside and told me some of the history of this castle begun in the 12th century to control the Welsh. The Welsh had also controlled it part of the time, too. When Princess Gwenllian tried to repulse a Norman counter-attack in her husband's absence in 1136, she was defeated and killed. |  |
Kidwelly sits on a ridge, with the outer defenses in a half circle with its flat side facing the river Gwendraeth below. Both it and the priory church we also visited date from the early 12th century.
It was still a lovely day and we had time to go visit the area around Manorbier Castle, which is privately owned, which my friend liked because it was once the home of Geraldus Cambriensus, writer of a medieval travelogue of Wales, so we set off in that direction next. I looked up at the hill Manorbier was on, thought about the fact that our Cadw passes wouldn't get us in free, saw that it was a much smaller castle than Kidwelly and others we'd been visiting. . . Well, we ate lunch and somewhere along the line my friend's husband disappeared. Had he gone down to the beach? We went down there. There was a nice stream running into the bay and I conjectured that it would be great fun to dig channels to divert it here and there.
 Manorbier Castle |
She said her children had done that when they were young. I took pictures. We started back to the parking lot. Now the car was gone, too. She saw someone up at the church that looked like him even from that distance, however.
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She was right. By the time we were back to where the car had been, he returned and said he'd been scouting the church for us. We went up there by car, but I couldn't get a good shot of the church because there were workmen doing some renovating, so I took a couple more shots of the castle from the hill above the church and settled for a postcard of the church itself.
It was Friday and time to head north for Caernarfon, leaving the luxury of having someone else prepare and feed us an enormous breakfast each morning to start feeding ourselves--probably not altogether a bad thing--for a few days, to stay in Bath Tower, a Landmark Trust building, an actual tower in Caernarfon's city wall.
After breakfast we started north, but before long we made a side trip, to what looked like the middle of nowhere until we got into the field, and there was something much older than any castle. The Pentre Ifan burial chamber is the remains of a chambered tomb for the communal burial of the dead erected in the Neolithic Age, perhaps as early as 3500 B. C.
Then we began going along, away from, and back toward the coast, up and down mountains as we made our way north. Wales has deep, wide-mouthed river valleys that were in our way as we made our way north to one of Ed I's most famous castles.
 |  | Following the death of the Welsh prince, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, in 1282, this castle, Harlech, was one of a series of castles established by the English king to secure the newly conquered principality. | |
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Harlech, inside, outside, and a view from the castle.
 Bath Tower from the promenade side | We actually arrived in Caernarfon at the time we had planned and found our unmarked mystery door. The housekeeper's husband arrived with keys, let us in, and showed us the way in. We had to go through a secret passage between houses, around a corner, up some steps that turned more corners, and then into the main floor. There were actually four floors, we discovered, plus an in-between one for the downstairs toilet. A regular stairs led to the upstairs bedroom(with its own battlemented terrace) that was going to be mine, and a spiral stair led down to the downstairs bedroom (for my friends with better knees). Downstairs from that room was yet another room reminiscent of a feast hall with a door that led out on to the promenade along the sea outside the city wall, which our tower was part of. |  |
It had been a long day with all the up and down the mountains and our two stops, but we wanted to explore the town a bit. In the process we found a fish and chips place and brought our dinner back to eat sitting on the promenade outside the wall near our new home. Inside again, we could see Caernarfon Castle out our living room window.
The next morning my friend and I began by going to the library to catch up on and send some e-mail. I wrote a lovely long detailed trip report with all kinds of details and my horrible webmail program trashed it when I tried to back up a few spaces, leaving me with ten minutes to try to reconstruct half of it. Then I headed for, of course, Caernarfon Castle, while she went off to explore the town a bit.
Caernarfon Castle was built in the 13th century as another of Ed I's Welsh-controlling castles. Caernarfon itself, however, has been a site of strategic and symbolic importance since it was enshrined in the Mabinogion tale of Macsen Wledig and later as Roman Segontium.
When I came out and walked around the outside to get a shot of a gate I'd looked out from inside, my friend spotted me. (My travel hat not only shades my eyes, it separates me from other white heads in a crowd.) We went to the street market and bought some more food, then went back to Bath Tower to collapse for a while and eat. She and her husband, who soon turned up as well, had been exploring the town, which I had yet to do. He told me about a busking harper I decided to try to find in the afternoon while they went to see the castle. First I had to go back to the market and check out t-shirts he had also told me about. I found one with a lovely dragon, and had an interesting conversation with a Welshman who had taught not only in Wisconsin, but at UW Stout in Menomonie! I found the post office and mailed my postcard and wandered about for a while, found no harper, and headed back because my feet were hurting. I returned to our Landmark Trust tower, took off my boots, made myself some tea, and collapsed again.
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The wrist bandage was not only to support the wrist, but to remind me to spare it, since it only hurt when I used it too much. |
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This and the one to the left are opposite ends of the castle. |
 | There was another place in North Wales that particularly needed to be visited, Conwy Castle. There were others as well, but this was going to be the last one we could fit in before leaving Wales for York. It was Sunday, however, and my friends wanted to go to church first. While they were gone, I took one of the lawnchairs from the rack at the top of the stairs and went out on my terrace to sit there and read for a while. When they got back, we packed our lunch and headed for Conwy. Once there, we started up toward the gate, but this was not the gate to the castle; it was a gate in the city wall, which is remarkably complete. We had to walk along it for some distance and climb an impressive approach to reach the actual castle gate. |  |
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Conwy is another link in the ring of Ed I's castles. It's on a rocky point jutting into the river Conwy, and it and the walled town connected to it were eminently defensible. Town and castle were begun in May 1283 and all but complete by 1287.
Other than overshooting in Conwy and having to turn back, it was much too straightforward for one of our journeys, an oversight which was taken care of later in the day. We needed to eat lunch. They didn't want to eat in a parking lot. She directed us up a mountain road--the scariest one yet!! It was so steep in spots I kept expecting the car to simply flip over backwards on its top. Blacktop with grass growing down the middle is not reassuring. Nor was opening a couple gates to continue along this excuse for a road. |  |
Finally he backed the car off the road into a rocky spot facing a big drop and we ate our lunches. She disappeared down the road for some time. I thought we were finally going to turn back and go back through the gates we'd come through, but when she stayed out of sight for some time, we started out after her. We were committed to going further along this excuse for a road now, but I was still sure it was going to be a dead end. Eventually it was, near a reservoir or something, but other cars were parked there and there was room to turn around--barely. And then after going back along that stretch and through the gates, we had to go back down that slalom run pretending to be a road. I had a really nasty pain in my side, but it went away when we got back on a real road again: pure stress! He said he was going to check for a hole in the floorboard on my side. I didn't have the courage to take a foto on the really bad part, but this is one of the milder spots. |  |
That was the end of our Welsh adventures. We finally got moving around ten Monday morning and made much better speed than had been our habit because we were traveling along a motorway instead of our usual more scenic back roads, so we were getting close to York by mid-afternoon despite getting tangled up in a detour at one point. We stopped in Tadcaster to eat our lunch and I thought finding our B&B, Warrens Guest House, would be easy because its street crossed Tadcaster Road on my map.
Ooops! We came into York on a different route than the one on my map and couldn't find the street. We circled around until my friend spotted one of the streets on my map(which I'd given her a copy of as well) and we finally found it. It's not only a very nice one, but it also has a free computer for guests to use. I caught up with my e-mail, including letting another friend know we were in York, then we went for a short exploration, a bridge over the River Ouse, and a fish and chips shop we visited later.
 | The friend I had e-mailed called and we arranged a castle hunt for the next day. He and his wife arrived the next morning in a proper vehicle for mighty hunters, a Land Rover. Of course, Yorkshire is hardly darkest Africa, but we were going hunting something medieval: castles. |  |
parts of the outer bailey wall
 | the chapel from the motte
 | the motte |
After discussing some possibilities, we set off to hunt something I'd never seen a live specimen of: Pickering Castle, a beautiful example of a motte and bailey castle that still had both in good shape. The castles we'd been hunting in Wales were all too big and "recently(13th-15th century) improved" to show much in the way of motte and bailey structure, while the ones I'm familiar with in Germany tend to be built on pre-existing hills or ridges or else have moats, so when he told me this was going to be a good example of a motte and bailey castle, I only had pictures in books to go on. Like many others, this was thrown up in William I's time, when it had a wooden palisade and "castle". What surprised me was how BIG it was! I expected the later, stone shell keep(early 13th century) and outer wall, but I had really underestimated the sheer size of the hill that was thrown up.
| But it was past the middle of the day and about time to think about food as well, so before going to the castle itself, we stopped in town and bought food. We had fish(me) or sausage and chips and ate sitting on a memorial thing in the middle of the town square, explored slightly, and then went on to Helmsley Castle, which is a mixture of styles and periods. A brochure I found at the B&B says "Explore 900 years of life at Helmsley. Discover how a castle evolved from a mighty medieval fortress, via a luxurious Tudor mansion, to a Civil War stronghold and Victorian romantic ruin." It certainly had variety! There were no furnishings in the "mansion", but there were assorted displays. The arrowheads--for much fatter arrows than I use!--were interesting. |  |  |
Helmsley looks like a couple isolated buildings as you approach, but that's misleading. That tower is quite tall, and the hall complex is substantial. Once you get up there and then head down to the other gate complex, you find there's nothing small about it.
 | Wednesday morning it was time to begin exploring York proper. Since we could walk wherever we chose in York, the three of us went off in various directions in the morning, but agreed to meet at the York Castle Museum around 1:00. I started off for Jorvik so early that, even taking fotos here and there along the way and stopping to buy some postcards, I got there before it opened. Naturally I took one of part of the city wall, and after I crossed the bridge and started north, I immediately noticed the lovely motte with a shell keep on its top and decided Clifford's Tower was going to be a major stop when I came back this way! I also took one of the Ouse bridge and the York Boat I was thinking about taking a ride on later. |  |
 | The tableaus on the Jorvik "ride" were not bad, and I learned later the buildings on its streets are located in the places archaeologists found. It's not really Disneyfied, as I half feared. I had barely dented the morning and there was a Starbucks across the street, so I went over there and had a big (expensive) cup of real coffee. I like tea, too, and had been drinking tea the entire trip, figuring the English and Welsh would be much better at brewing tea than coffee, and I'd had good tea all trip, but I really enjoyed that coffee!
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It was still early, so the next order of business was obviously to head back down to explore that shell keep sitting up there on its motte. Clifford's Tower is now an empty shell keep, but it was built of wood in the early days of the Norman conquest. Naturally I bought its book, as I've done with all the castles I've visited on this trip, and I sat there on a bench reading it and eating the lunch I had in my backpack, enjoying myself hugely. There are many interior pictures in the book, so I only took one in there myself for a change, of one of the downstairs fireplaces.
 | We started with rooms representing different ages and then went down into the Victorian shopping district. It was great fun, though not in the way the museum staff might have appreciated, as she pointed out mistakes in the exhibits that had anything to do driving a horse-drawn carriage. Even looking down from above on the Victorian street scene, she could see that the hackney driver was holding his reins wrong, and when we got down there, she commented on the wrong size collar for the horse figure, the harness that was buckled wrong, the fact that only cellophane tape connected the traces, and the driver had no whip. Another horse and carriage display had as many but different things wrong with it, including a broken bit and again no whip. Some harness hanging on a wall was also grouped wrong, with unrelated pieces together and related ones separated. |
I found it hilarious; it reminded me of things I've noticed on guided tours in castles. Our tickets were good for two days, so we put off the rest of the museum for the time being. She hadn't had lunch yet, so she went off in search of same. I took a couple fotos of the buildings in what had once been its bailey(the York Castle Museum being one) and one last one of Clifford's Tower from its former bailey and decided to go hunt for a church that was not on the map in my little York booklet but WAS on my map of Owen Archer's 14th century York that had the same name as one that was on my modern map. To reach the area I had to cross the Ouse bridge, where I paused to take a foto. My body was suggesting a rest. I looked further along at the York Boat landing . . . and there it was! If I got down there before it left, I could take a little cruise and rest at the same time!
We saw people rowing, had a distant view of the Minster at one point, went through the old town, up past a pedestrian/bicycle suspension bridge held up by an arch off to the side rather than straight above, turned, and came back past the blue bridge over the Foss, the tributary that once made up part of the moat around the castle, back to the Ouse bridge again.
Rested and cooled off by my ride on the Ouse, I was ready to get back to my church hunt. The Holy Trinity Church on the 14th century map seemed to be somewhere along or near Mickelgate, so that's the street I began to walk along. Hmmmmmm old church. . . no name. . . take some fotos. But it's St. Martin's Lane. Go on. Sign leading me to another old church, also old enough to qualify. Find church. St. Mary's? Well, names change. . . and then along came another couple hunting for old churches, and with a better map, which listed addresses! Holy Trinity IS supposed to be on Mickelgate. And there it is, partly behind a more modern building: Holy Trinity Priory Church! And around the corner there was the side with the churchyard.
St. Martin's
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St. Mary's
 | Holy Trinity's tower
 | Holy Trinity's churchyard
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Note on streets named "gate": these are the really old ones, and they're not named for the gates; the gates are named "bar". Sounds to me like a remnant from Viking times, as "gata" or "gate" turns up in Scandinavian street names, cognate with German "Gasse"(alley). At any rate, at this point I went on down Mickelgate, through Mickelgate Bar, and along Nunnery Lane along the wall past Victoria Bar, both of which I took fotos of. <--Mickelgate Bar Victoria bar--> |  |
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We started out together on our last day in York. We walked to Mickelgate Bar and visited a little museum in it. This was the gate they hung heads outside once upon a time. Then we went walking along the wall in the general direction of the Minster, where I took the occasional foto while clinging to the side with a wall. Except where it passed over roads, there was no railing at all on the inside. Wide or not, this made me nervous. The wall ended at the Ouse, and we crossed the bridge to Yorkshire Garden and the Yorkshire Museum on the other side. |  |
The remains were discovered in the course of some building and rescued and reconstructed. It hides in a snickelway(?or something like that) behind more modern buildings. A public right of way goes right through the building. It is still being rebuilt and furnished to match the times of the tenant who lived in it the longest. There's a whole website about it with lots of pictures, so I won't add mine here.
My friend wanted to attend a noon church service in a church we had passed earlier, so she left before I did. When I did go, I went out the other end of the passageway and managed to lose my way rather efficiently. I wanted to find the other Holy Trinity Church, which had kept a lot of its old structure, but couldn't find it. When I found myself almost at the Minster, I knew I had gone too far to find Holy Trinity. |
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It was lunchtime and I had a lunch of sorts with me, but I couldn't find a place to sit; it seemed everyone was enjoying the fine weather and eating lunch outdoors. So I decided to go visit York Minster first. I could sit down and rest there. In fact, I updated my foto log and my trip diary while I sat there, possibly looking as if I might be, if not praying, at least meditating. It was nice and cool and quiet. After while I was rested enough to look around and try to find some of the things described in the guide book I bought when I went in.
By the time I left, there was an empty bench near a map of the area. I sat there, ate my lunch, and checked the map to find the location of the church I'd been looking for earlier, the other Holy Trinity.Its address was Goodramgate, which was the street I'd come up earlier. |
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I figured this snickelway was so narrow I'd probably missed it because there were some people between me and the opening. This time I stayed close to the buildings and found it. Once in, the church had lots of room back there. Those high boxed-in pews are 17th/18th century and people rented them; the church wasn't allowed to take collections very often and needed the money.
The booklet I got there points out that "the church of the Holy Trinity in Goodramgate in one of the rarest in the city in that it has retained so many of its original fittings unspoiled by later restorations." I also had another "small world" experience there: the young man who told me about the pews was from Wisconsin--Beloit!
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It's not just the passageways into hidden treasures in the middle of blocks of more modern buildkings that are narrow; so are some of the streets! I slowly headed back to the Castle Museum to see the second half I had skipped the day before(my ticket was good for two days), but I was really running out of steam again, and when I discovered the tea room, I first had tea to finish off the extra-rich scone and ice cream cone I had on the way over. I went through the military section and a bit more, but skipped the children's section and headed back toward the B&B.
I checked my e-mail once again and then moved into the breakfast room to update my foto record and trip diary, where I was offered a pot of tea which I very gratefully accepted. York is fascinating, but hard on old legs.
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Friday morning I was up and packed much too early(as usual). so I watched some news on TV before another great breakfast and Yorkshire tea, which I really like. We loaded up the car and while her husband was back inside writing in the guest book, my friend was consulting a map, but we still managed to leave on the wrong road and had to turn around. We stopped in Selby for groceries and he disappeared. He went to check out the abbey, which has an interesting history(he brought back a booklet). Then we were all right until Doncaster, but a wrong turn led to a maze of dead-end streets before we escaped. After that most of the way was fast and boring until a bit of confusion near the end of the trip. It could have been worse.
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On Saturday, my last full day, my friend and I went to Windsor, where we visited a railway station full of shops and I took a couple fotos of a fancy old engine, the closest I managed to a train ride this trip. Then we watched the guards marching in for the changing of the guard with full band. I took fotos of them and of the castle, which is quite definitely a castle on the outside. I also took a foto of the crooked house by the town hall.
After lunch my friend left to visit the horses and come back with Dusty and the pony cart. Long before I left she had promised me a ride and told(threatened?) me I could drive. This made my daughter and granddaughter jealous and me nervous. Now the moment of truth had arrived: she was back with Dusty and the pony cart. My fall on the coast suddenly became a useful crutch for my cowardice; my left wrist was still not up to real strain and that's the hand I'd have to use to hold the reins properly. I asked her husband to take a foto of me sitting up there, clumsily climbed up, and pretended to be holding the reins.
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Dusty was not impressed. He wanted to GO--preferably back to his pasture and his friend Rosie. After that I tried to take fotos as we bounced along. We didn't bounce because the cart had springs; it didn't. Dusty took care of the bouncing, since he always wanted to go faster and terrify me and my friend let him do it from time to time. At one point we were about to cross a bridge across a highway and a car came towards us. No cars were allowed on that road, but this one was not only there, the driver was too inept or too stupid to back up and WE had to manuever over to the side to let it through. As the track got worse, at leastshe kept Dusty to a walk, but in one place she warned me to duck as we went through between some bushes. I was wearing a borrowed helmet, but that wasn't going to protect the rest of my body if the bouncing threw me out. The trail got worse and worse until we finally went into a field where a startled fox didn't know what to make of us and did a double take before fleeing. We went around this field where there was once a medieval village at a walk, so now the bouncing wasn't so bad. We saw a couple horses in another field on the way in and one came over to the fence to say hello on the way back out. Once we were really headed back to his pasture and Rosie, Dusty REALLY wanted to hurry, but it was not a good road surface for trotting--he could slip. I was happier not trotting, Rosie was happy to see Dusty return.
All good things end eventually, and Sunday it was time to head back home again. I won't describe the experience of leaving from Heathrow except to suggest it was my penance for having had such a wonderful trip. And a truly wonderful trip it was!
You just THINK this page is long; my album of the trip is over 90 pages 8-) AND I have books/guides for every castle I visited, so if you want more details on any of them, e-mail me(link on home page) and ask. I can even tell you where to order your own guide for the Welsh castles via mail or internet.
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