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On Monday Mara has to work until 3pm,
so I resolve to catch Northern train into York and walk around the
town, snapping photos as per my usual. This trip was really the
wild-card of my two-week tour. I'd hoped to see the Lake District, or
maybe to relax at an amusement park, or to just veg out at the
cinema. Somehow, I end up running around with my camera, finding old
buildings that are really restorations of old buildings (most of the
historical sites in England are), and today will prove to be no
different.
To get from Manchester to York via
train takes about one hour, and mine is pleasant enough. At the York
rail station, I eat a sausage hoagie with brown sauce (HP Sauce) and
start walking around, wondering what I'm going to see.
York is pretty small, about the physical size of Bath, and about the same in population. A medieval wall walk encircles the town and, if you were completely unmotivated to nativate, like I was (I had a map, but I wasn't really using it), you can follow it around the city to get your bearings, then jump into one of the many entertainments the city has to offer.
My first stop is in the Museum Gardens,
in what would have been the inner-side of the medieval town defenses.
Here I find a ruined abbey (unfortunately the abbey was also the site
of the York Mystery Plays, so it was difficult to photograph), some
Roman walls and Roman tower ("the multangular tower"), and
a beautiful garden fit for a king. I durdle in the garden, snapping
photos, debating paying seven pounds for the museum here on the
grounds (I don't), and trying to find a toilet (I do). After that, I
decide to just head for York's main attraction (and the main reason I
wanted to go): Yorkminster.
Yorkminster towers over the
cityscape of York, its tallest building. It's two tower
facade will be familiar to those who have seen it's sister-building,
Westminster Abbey, although Yorkminster has the added bonus of not
having random people's headstones moved
or placed in the abbey
just to inflate its celebrity. And while Yorkminster certainly has
famous dead people entombed under tumbles of stone, or forgotten in
the crypt, something about it seems less commercial, less well-known.
So I think as I queue to pay my seven pounds fifty entry fee.
Yorkminster is one of the jewels of
England. And if you ever get a chance to see it, I highly recommend
it (and you might as well do the tower tour). The craftsmanship of
the building itself is nothing short of astonishing. Its statuettes
of kings and bishops and noblemen must rank among the most gorgeous
in all of the UK.
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| I never get bored with photographing ceilings... |
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| The ceiling in the chapter house. |
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| This grave is of Prince William of Hatfield, d.1347. |
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| The tour guide said that they think this is what the whole of the choir and all of the woodwork in Yorkminster would have looked like. |
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| The tomb of Walter De Gray, 1215-1255 |
After I mosey around the minster, I take a tower tour. Here are some shots!
Guy Fawkes' Birth Home
Remember, remember, the fifth of
November, the gunpowder treason and plot
This was one of the pleasant random
surprises in York. Guy Fawkes' Birth Home is now an inn and pub, so
if you're interested in whetting your whistle, you could do worse
than get sloshed at the birth home of the infamous terrorist Guy
Fawkes. No, seriously, it's true! There's a small, blue circle with
all of what I just said on a window outside!
Some guy, playing a fiddle and making a puppet of a devil dance!
Vikings
Mara told me good things of Jorvik, an amusement site where you learn everything you can about Vikings in and around York (and in general). After the queue, you stand around televisions and watch presentations about all of the viking finds in England. THEN the fun begins. I get in a large roller-coaster-like cart, which takes me very slowly around a medieval viking town filled with viking mannequins and reproductions of what the town might've looked like. All the while the events of the town are narrated by a disembodied female voice behind my head. Very strange. It's a little creepy, what Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean would be if you talked to the pirates while they did remedial everyday tasks like whittling bowls, arguing over dinner, and haggling.
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| The queue. |
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| A viking. |
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| Another viking from the ride. I wasn't supposed to snap this. |
Clifford's Tower
Simply, skip it if you can. I've seen
it and it's sort of embarrassing inside, so just use my photos and
say you paid the four pound entry fee. You'll be glad you did.
Clifford's tower was the site of several other towers during the late
medieval period, some wood, some stone. All of them, excepting the
current specimen, was either burned down or destroyed. In _____,
several Jews in the area were pursued and holed up in a wooden tower
on this very hill. Instead of being killed by the approaching mob,
they set fire to the tower and killed themselves. The view from
Clifford's tower is good, but doesn't match the view from
Yorkminster.
The Train Home
The train ride to Manchester is less pleasant than the train to York. I am set next to a mother with her two loud children, one of whom can't stop kicking me under the table. Once back in Manchester, I meet Mara and Chris at the Friendship Inn, a pub just on the corner, two buildings from their apartment. We have sushi for my last night in Manchester, then spend the rest of the night chilling in their apartment, watching the Everton v. Man United game (all of us were cheering against United, and ecstatic when Everton wins 1-nil with Van Persie, their new multi-milion pound contract having done nothing after being put on in the last twenty minutes). Thanks to Mara and Chris for the hospitality and the good company! I had a great time in Manchester. Next stop: Edinburgh!
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