North Yorkshire

We had three nights at the Lady Anne, and had planned one day driving around the area, and one day to leave the car parked and just explore York. We decided that Tuesday, our first full day in Yorkshire, we’d drive.

Navigating our way out of York, back more or the less the way we came in, we skipped onto the A64 toward Scarborough, the ancient seacoast town and site of Henry II’s famous castle (oh yeah, and the namesake for an old English ballad, popularized by Simon and Garfunkel). More roundabouts – it was early in the trip and I still hated them. Cut a lady off in one due to a bad entrance-lane decision (sorry about that, ma’am), but otherwise kept it together.

We needed gas, finally. The spunky little VW had gotten us halfway up the country, but it was time. We pulled into a petrol station and did a couple of weird three-point turns, not knowing which side the gas door was on. Then, staring at the pump, I realized I had no idea what grade to choose (yeah, that’s all different, too), so I went inside the station and asked the lady behind the counter, my clueless-Yank routine now fairly well polished. We filled up, tried to pay by credit card, but her handheld swiper would have none of it, so I got Sharon to come in and do the cash thing. Gas is extortionately priced in England, but somehow paying for it with unfamiliar currency, by the liter, seemed to mask the effect. We budgeted for gas, and having planned an ambitious driving tour around the country, the cost of gas wasn’t going to trouble me – the VW got something like 40 MPG on the highway, anyway.  The locals have been paying dearly for it for so long, they don’t even notice.

Getting around in Scarborough immediately recalled my two-way-traffic, inhale-while-being-passed experience in Louth the day before, but we managed to make it to the car park down the hill from the castle. It was an absolutely beautiful day – sunny and warm – and the town was busy with locals and tourists, so if I had taken a minute to consider, it would have seemed suspicious that there were several open parking spaces in close proximity to the castle entrance, while the parking further down the steep hill was completely packed. And there was a sign, saying something about two hour blue-dot parking. Sharon looked at it, said it was all ok, and we went up to the castle.

The nice gentleman at the ticket office suggested, when he learned we were at the front end of an historic-site tour of England, that we buy a 12 day pass, which would gain us free (or greatly reduced) admission price to all the other English Heritage sites in the country. One of the best decisions we made on the fly over there – the pass paid for itself by the third day out.

The castle is largely ruined, in part by time (being 800 years old, and on a steep hill over the ocean – the mind reels at the ferocity that winter weather must deliver up there), in part by a siege it endured during the 17^th century English Civil War, and in part by German shelling in WW1. Much of the keep remains, and long sections of the south-facing curtain wall and its various rooms are relatively intact, but the interior sections are marked only by floor stones or roughly outlined depressions in the grassy soil. 

The rough remains of a Roman signal tower near the cliff edge and a Saxon chapel nearby belie the site’s pre-Norman history. 

Below the cliffs, we saw fishing boats and sailboats heading out onto the North Sea, seagulls trailing many of them in search of an easy lunch.

After an hour and a half, we headed back down and visited St Mary’s Chapel, just below the suspiciously un-crowded parking area where we had left the car. 

 The church has a long history as well, pre-dating the castle, and is also known as the final resting place for Anne Bronte.

Outside the church we caught what we believe to be the oldest headstone we saw outside anywhere in England, dating to 1563. 

The lady at the concession booth inside the church gave us a recitation of the church’s history and burial practices – like most of the folks we met at the historic sites, she was warm, knowledgeable and very friendly.

When we got back to the car, my suspicions about the parking area were finally confirmed. The ‘blue dot’ thing was a reference to a special parking permit issued by the town (available from local merchants, evidently), and of course, we didn’t get one. So, they slipped a parking ticket under our wiper. Twenty five pounds, which we paid online that night. As it turns out, even if we had gotten one, we’d have gotten a ticket anyway, as we were there close to three hours. Oh well.

Next stop was Whitby Abbey, a huge Cistercian ruin (c. 1135) on a hill above the seacoast town of the same name. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula while living in Whitby, and the famous steps in the novel are still there in town. But we were there for the Abbey.

Coming up the road, we both caught a glimpse of the place, stark and solitary on rise not far from the cliffs descending to the beach below. For me, it was like a punch in the chest. 

We parked the car, got our tickets (thank you, Heritage Pass) and made our way up the path through the long grass to the Abbey ruins.

Whitby was the first of several Norman-era monastic sites we visited, and for me (probably because it was the first) the most evocative. Elegant lines and arches, grand in scale, skeletal in its presence but deeply powerful in its summoning of ancient English religious life. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it – and at the risk of conjuring a flat triviality, pictures just don’t convey the immensity or psychical gravity of the place. Several weeks later, on a certain level, we still haven’t shaken the place.

The light was terrific so we spent longer than we probably should have taking pictures and chatting with some locals. I had it in my mind that we’d head off next to Rievaulx Abbey, another huge Cistercian ruin west of Whitby, about an hour’s drive. Sharon agreed, reluctantly, and we took off. 

But in what was probably our only real scheduling error, we hadn't counted on the fact that these huge outdoor sites closed their entrance doors 30 minutes or more before the site closing, and on the way we got stuck in some unexpected traffic backed up behind farm equipment, arriving at Rievaulx too late to get in. But we did see the place, much larger than Whitby, from the tiny, narrow lane leading to the site entrance. We made friends with a curious, pasturing horse in the field before the abbey, chatted briefly with a young German family along the lane who had also gotten there too late to get in, and at least got to see it. Sharon said we had to return on our next travel day, I agreed and we headed back to York.

Along the way back to York, we stopped off at St Everilda’s Church in the tiny hamlet of Nether Poppleton, shot some pictures in the churchyard (the church was locked), and headed back to the hotel.