Well, it's high time I finished this post - the trip was three and a half months ago! In early July I took a trip up to beautiful Yorkshire with my friend. We decided to spend two nights in York and two nights in Whitby, and get out into the North Yorkshire Moors National Park a bit. As usual, it's quite a long post, so I've split it into two - keep an eye out for the second one soon :)
Saturday 9th
After a mildly stressful start to the trip due to a missed train and the worry of being charged for being on a different train than specified on the ticket (thankfully we weren't charged), the journey up to York was a pleasant couple of hours from London. We arrived in York around 3:30pm, were greeted outside the train station by a knitted Viking perched atop a postbox, went straight to the B&B to check in and leave our heavy backpacking rucksacks, then went out into the hot, sunny afternoon to look around the city.
I immediately loved it. The B&B was just outside Bootham Bar - the large fortified gateways of the city walls are called bars - so we entered the old city on High Petergate - the streets are called 'gate' from Old Norse 'gata' - which led straight to the Minster. It's all winding cobbled streets and centuries-old buildings looming overhead, very pretty. The minster was gorgeous, and the gardens, though busy, were quiet.
On Goodramgate (''guthrum-gata" - Guthrum was a king) we found a little gelato shop and cafe called Roberto. I got passion fruit sorbet and my friend got lemon and basil sorbet; both were delicious and we resolved to go back again before the end of our trip. It was right next to Monk Bar, so we went up the steps and onto the walls to walk the 2-mile city walls circuit. (A large proportion of the walls are intact, but there are some sections missing, with a trail all the way around where they would have been.)
It's a nice thing to do, and free. The intact sections of wall and grassy ramparts are medieval - the latter concealing the earlier Roman, Viking, and Norman defences - but the walkway on top is Victorian; before it was built, anyone manning the walls would have stood on wooden platforms. On the parts of the route where the walls no longer exist you're just walking next to a busy road next to an industrial estate / retail park - which was once a large marshy wetland area that the king used for fishing or something - but a lot of it is nice and quiet, often lined on one side by trees and the other by the grassy ramparts and more trees. You can also make a short detour to see Dick Turpin's grave, which we did, and York Castle which now contains the York Castle Museum and the Crown Court, as well as the medieval keep of Clifford's Tower. There's a timeline of the city's history set into the ground in front of the Tower, and a memorial stone to the massacre of the city's Jews in 1190.
After a couple of hours at a leisurely pace we reached the riverbank by the Museum Gardens, and decided to sit and rest on a bench for a while in the shade of a tree. It was in a small park and I was sad to see that the grass had all been walked over so much that there was no grass left and it was just dry earth - stick to the paths, people! Anyway, my friend got out the sandwiches he had brought from home for lunch (which had instead been Hainanese chicken rice bought at a food market near King's Cross) and we ate those as a makeshift picnic dinner. Eventually we continued on our way and passed through Bootham Bar and began the last section back to Monk Bar. There are great views of the Minster from there, so we ended up stopping to linger in one place and just watched the light change on the Minster as the sun set. As the warm golden light on the ancient building turned to shadow, we started walking again, but just a little further on we noticed the moon rising above one of the towers and stopped to look at that. When we finally started to move on again, we were ushered back the way we had come by two wardens in hi-vis as the walls close at dusk. We would have to go back and finish that section another time.
It was nice just wandering around the town as it got darker and wonderfully cooler. There had obviously been some sort of event happening as most people were wearing formal outfits and out celebrating something. We stood for a few minutes amused by a large crowd of people gathered round a busker and singing along to Sweet Caroline and an Oasis hit. At one point a guy with a couple of his friends passed by and asked us if we were from York; when we replied in the negative he muttered something like oh that's why you're dressed boring and wandered off again. I found out the next morning it had been the York Races. We got a drink from a pizza place just off the Shambles Market and sat at an outdoor table to enjoy the summer evening before heading back to the B&B.
Sunday 10th
Breakfast at the B&B cost extra, so we went out to a nearby cafe where I had granola with yoghurt, and a disappointingly small number of berries. Then we made our way to Exhibition Square, opposite Bootham Bar, for a 10:30am guided group walking tour by the Association of Voluntary Guides.
"In York, the gates are called bars, the streets are called gates, and the bars are called pubs." - One of the first things our tour guide told us. After a brief introduction he led us through a little walkway out of the square past some of the old perimeter walls of St Mary's Abbey. In the Museum Gardens, a lovely park outside the Yorkshire Museum, a large section of one of the Abbey walls remains standing, which is cool to see. I can't remember a lot of the detail of what we were told over those two hours, but I did really like seeing the section of still-intact Roman wall and tower in the Museum Gardens. I mean how often do you get to see an intact Roman wall, 2000 years old?! Cool :) There's also a Roman column in the Minster Yard, which was found underneath it in the 1960s when, like Winchester Cathedral, it was discovered that the building was in danger of sinking/collapse and the foundations had to be reinforced.
We passed through the famous Shambles, which isn't named due to the shambolic appearance of the ancient buildings but because historically it was a street of butchers shops - the name comes from "shammels", the wooden shopfront shelves on which butchers displayed their products. Pretty and very quirky, the street is now a heaving tourist hotspot. The marketplace still has a daily market, and to one side there is still a row of old, low stalls with wooden shelves outside.
Leaving the Shambles, we came to an old side street next to the Treasurer's House and Garden, and our guide told us one of the city's most famous ghost stories, which I recognised and must have read somewhere once. In the 1950s, after the National Trust had taken over the Treasurer's House, a teenage apprentice plumber was working on the boiler in the cellar when he heard trumpet sounds, which gradually grew louder as if getting closer. Suddenly a soldier in armour and a plumed helmet emerged from the wall, blowing a trumpet, and was followed by a horse and a dozen or so more soldiers marching in pairs, all looking dirty and worn out. They were only visible from the knees up, their lower legs and feet were below the floor. Despite his terror, it seems he was able to mentally note and remember such detail about what the soldiers had been wearing that an expert in Roman history was able to identify them. Our tour guide said it was the 9th Legion, which is famous for vanishing without trace from the historical record in the second century AD - what happened to them is a mystery, and the last record of them in Britain was of a battle in northern England. Other online sources say the green tunics and round shields the plumber described were in later decades revealed by new evidence to be of local reserve soldiers who took over the garrison when regular soldiers began returning to Rome in the 5th century. Later excavations also revealed a Roman road 18 inches below the floor level of the cellar.
The tour was excellent, I do recommend it if you visit York. After a morning of walking and taking in information, even though it was a hot sunny day I could think of nothing better than a sandwich overflowing with roast pork, stuffing, apple sauce, and crackling, from The York Roast Co. My friend got the same and we went back to the Treasurer's Garden, a beautiful little walled oasis where we could sit in the shade, listen to a water fountain, and look at the lovely flower borders and tall trees and the Minster.
One of the things I definitely wanted to do while we were there was visit Jorvik Viking Centre, so we went there after lunch. It's located in Coppergate ('koppari-gata' - street of the cup-makers), right on the site where Viking-age houses, yards, and workshops were discovered and excavated by archaeologists in the late 1970s and early 80s. The centre houses a reconstruction of the 10th-century city, which you travel through on a ride that immerses you in the sounds and smells of the scenes, with narration piped through the headrests. Everything is highly detailed and based on what was found during the excavations, from the species of plants and animals, to the splashes of natural dyes in a backyard, to the games being played. Animatronic characters with facial features and clothing based on meticulous research show what a multicultural hub the city was, welcoming trade from all over the Viking world, and you can hear at least three different ancient languages being spoken on the way around (recognising them or telling them apart is another matter). The ride through the Viking streets takes about half an hour, and then there's a museum gallery. It's cool, and interesting, I enjoyed it.
Leaving Jorvik, we bought ice-creams and joined the crowd watching the Wimbledon final on the big screen set up outside the shopping centre. It wasn't too long before it finished, and we made our way back to the river to take a stroll along the bank. The path on the Museum side is named the Dame Judy Dench Walk. We continued maybe about a mile and crossed the bridge to come back along the other side; it's a nice walk, there are lots of lovely big weeping willows and poplar trees (along with quite a bit of invasive non-native Himalayan Balsam - friendly reminder to Check, Clean, Dry your footwear to help stop the spread of invasive species!). We sat down on the bank to just enjoy the evening and watch the numerous greylag geese.
Around 8pm we decided we'd better not leave it too much longer to go and find some dinner, so we stood up and headed to Little Italy, opposite Roberto on Goodramgate. It was hot and stuffy inside, but the food was good. Afterwards we went back to the riverbank to watch the finale of the York Proms - complete with fireworks - through the fence of the Museum Gardens. There was an exhibition of landscape photos by the Royal Photographic Society Landscape Group on panels along other parts of the fence, so we looked at those too.
