Yorkshire (Day3): Walter's First Big Project, Richard III's son, and cemetery sheep

Truth be told, I left Wharram Percy a little conflicted. The day, in some respects, had been a frustration; two locked churches, a confounding journey to the medieval village, shrieking kids running around and spiking my Keats-channeling vibe at the church.

Well, it's all part of being off the beaten path, I told myself - you get what you get, and if you want a controlled, predictable tourist experience, stick to the museums and the bus tours.

Kirkham Priory was next.

Kirkham Priory

Founded in 1130 by Walter l'Espec, according to wiki "a prominent military and judicial figure of the reign of Henry I of England...", Kirkham was the first of three religious missions credited to l'Espec, the others being Rievaulx Abbey further north in Yorkshire and Wardon Abbey in Bedfordshire. Kirkham was founded first, as an Augustinian monastery, while the somewhat grander mission at Rievaulx came a few years later, as l'Espec became enamored of the recently imported Cistercian order, and there was evidently a bit of tension between the two houses.

Abbeys were basically little corporations - they held land, produced food and goods, vied for favor from the royalty and nobility, and sustained themselves through local manpower and markets for their goods. Priories, for the sake of brevity, were their branch offices. As a whole, they were in all useful respects money makers. (When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 1530's, he first assumed control of all houses that were worth less than £200 per annum, which was actually a lot of money for the time, before coming to his senses and realizing that he could just take the rest too. Which he did.) Reivaulx' land holdings came uncomfortably close to Kirkham's, and the rise of the Cistercian order in Yorkshire must have made the Kirkham canons feeling a bit like l'Espec's first ex-wife.

Like virtually all the great monastic ruins in Britain, Kirkham is managed by English Heritage, and it was our first opportunity to buy our two week overseas visitor's pass. (Wharram Percy was also a Heritage site, but they don't charge admission.)

We were just about the only ones there, and the place was an elixir.

Kirkham Priory

Kirkham Priory

The warm afternoon sun followed us around the place, the great church arch peering down at the stubby remains of the nave.

There were a couple of in situ tombs, and some mason-graffiti.

Kirkham Priory- tombs

Kirkham Priory- tombs

Kirkham Priory - Mason's grafitti

Churchill visited this place during the planning for D-Day - they tested some of the landing craft here, for reasons unknown to either of us.

A second tier monastic ruin (if you count Rievaulx, Fountains and Glastonbury as the Top Three), Kirkham was exactly what our spirits needed, glowing with that intangible psychic gravity unique to ancient and ruined monastic sites. Our only regrets about the place were that we couldn't spend more time there, and that both of us were a bit worn down by all the walking we did at Wharram Percy. We spent a good twenty minutes chatting with Miss Jones in the admission office/gift shop, she gave us a couple of recommendations for old churches in the area, we bought the book, and we took off.

On the way out to the car, the sun was just positioning itself for a terrific side-light angle on the 13th century gatehouse. I actually made Sharon wait as the shadows doggedly crept their way across the sculptured renderings of St Philip, St Bartholomew

Gatehouse - Kirkham Priory

and, of course, St George slaying a dragon.

Fie, ye evile beaste ! - Kirkham Priory

It may the greatest medieval gatehouse we'd ever seen, which now that I think about it, is a pretty weird superlative.

The Day That Never Ended drew us next to Sheriff Hutton, a murmur of a village just north of York. We found this by mutual and oddly synchronous accident; Sharon was doing her little-towns-on-Google-maps church fishing thing, while I had found references to a privately held castle there, a walk-roundable ruin that looked sumptuously creepy. It was close enough to York

that we added the place, and Sharon had plotted the day so that we'd hit it on the way back to town.

Built around 1100, barely a generation after the Conquest, the church is dedicated to St Helen and the Holy Cross, and looks every bit its 900 year age, having undergone little of the Victorian restoration efforts so commonly found in ancient English churches. The place was surprisingly unlocked; dark and somber inside, almost airless.

St Helen and the Holy Cross, Sheriff Hutton

St Helen and the Holy Cross, Sheriff Hutton

St Helen and the Holy Cross, Sheriff Hutton

St Helen and the Holy Cross, Sheriff Hutton

At the northeastern corner, near the chancel, lay two effigy tombs; the smaller of the two allegedly contains the mortal remains of Edward, Prince of Wales, son of Richard III, who died at age 11 in 1484 at nearby Middleham Castle, Richard's Yorkshire stronghold and site of his own boyhood.

Edward, Prince of Wales (?) - St Helen and the Holy Cross, Sheriff Hutton

It is said that this is the only member of British royalty buried at a parish church in the entirety of Britain (his father, of course, was found just last year under a parking lot in Leicester).While elaborately carved, something about the tomb just didn't feel  like that of a prince, and there is some dispute over whether or not this is really Edward's tomb.

While there is no doubt that Richard's young son died in 1484, no one can be really certain if he ended up here - the monument itself is not engraved with a name.

It is said that Richard had planned a grander tomb for Edward at the Minster in York, but his defeat at the hands of Henry VII the following year left Edward at this tiny church, in a stately but temporary tomb, his royal bloodline effectively revoked with the rise of the Tudors, who undoubtedly had little interest in memorializing the despised and defeated Plantagenets. Wiki tells us that some historians now believe the effigy is that of a child of the local nobility.

Sir Edmund Thweng, d.1344 - St Helen and the Holy Cross, Sheriff Hutton

The other effigy, next to Edward (or whoever it is), is that of Sir Edmund Thweng, a highly esteemed baron of the 14th century, about who we wouldn't presume to say much.

These folks have some (somewhat dense) biographical information on the man. He died in 1344, making this effigy a century older than the child's. Suitably costumed for a nobleman in repose, Sir Edmund rests his feet upon his dog, who may or may not be in there with him. (In the interests of full disclosure, Sharon thinks it's a lion, in which case it is certainly NOT in there with Sir Edmund.)

Sir Edmund's dog (or a lion) - St Helen and Holy Cross, Sheriff Hutton

This place left us energized, almost breathless. Positively one of the best parish churches we've seen in the country. We shot the cemetery on our way back to the car, Sharon fired off a couple of shots of the castle on our way out of town.

Sheriff Hutton Castle

And lastly, in the fading evening light, we stopped off at Whenby and St Martin's Church (built circa 1400).

St Martin's Church - Wenby

One of a small handful of Churches Conservation Trust properties we hit on this trip, St Martin's sits atop a little hill, and as we approached the church door, a small herd of suddenly startled black-faced sheep rushed forward to the fence along the pathway, barking and bleating and cooing at us in agitated unison. (Yes, sheep bark, or at least these sheep did.)

'ello, lads ! - St Martin's Church, Wenby

The first thing I thought was, ok, this is a CCT property, it probably doesn't get many visitors and the sheep just want a little attention. Before we could properly introduce ourselves, they wobbled back to the long grass at the back of the churchyard, turning and watching us with skepticism.

OK, never mind - St Martin's Church, Wenby

Sheep in the churchyard. OK.

We shot the church - spare, humble, rescued from oblivion like so many other redundant churches by the tender mercies of the CCT - and caught a few shots of the churchyard and its detachment of skittish woolly guardians (and a lonely pig, 'round back).

Not a sheep, and I don't bark - St Martin's Church, Wenby

Back to York and the hotel. The Buzzard Sisters were predictably planted in the garden; they asked about our day and I didn't have the energy to manage more than "It was great". We washed up and headed into town for dinner. Thomas's had closed their kitchen, so we went down a few doors to the Pizza Express and noshed on some over-priced, thin crust pizza next to a family with two bored-looking teens.

This was a good day.

JFK +50

We'll take a short break from our usual UK trip programming to bring you this message from US History. 

My father, who watched Jack Kennedy's legendary press conferences with strict regularity, tells me I used to point at our little black and white TV and blurt out "Kenny! Kenny!" when I saw the man on TV. Dad was a fan and a supporter - an FDR Democrat, an Irish Catholic, WW2 veteran, a few years younger than JFK but of the same generation, invested in JFK like most Catholics and many WW2 vets and many middle-aged working people who remember FDR and the New Deal were.

Demographically, I am (so I am told) right at that you're-old-enough-to-remember age to recall the JFK assassination in the first person. I was 5 and a half, give or take a month.

I actually don't remember the assassination, or Oswald's murder, but I do remember quite clearly the funeral procession through DC, which happened that Sunday.

Maybe I'm two days on this side of that line.

The drums, the creaking of the caisson wheels, the rider-less horse, the crowds lined up along the route. It struck me as odd, this TV coverage of the procession, that proceeded without any TV commentator voiceover. I did know what it meant. I'd never seen anything like it, and haven't still, fifty years later. I have seen a lot - a LOT - of assassination weekend footage in the ensuing years. The funeral feels different from all of it. Because I remember it.

The other memory I have, quite a vivid one, is of seeing and picking up a copy of Six Seconds In Dallas, Josiah Thompson's landmark 1967 book on the crime, on a coffee table at my uncle Vin's lavish and glassy-modern Manursing Island home, probably sometime in 1967 or '68. Vin was a upper-level executive at IBM at that time, and would become CEO a few years later. He had a wall full of books, but this is the one that was out on the coffee table.

I leafed through the book. Diagrams and blurry photo enlargements and lengthy captions...it was a heavy book, I was a little fascinated with it.

The assassination and the (apparently) manifest evidence of a conspiracy lingered in my consciousness for years, and three decades after the fact, I went through a period of intense reading on the subject, prompted (if I recall accurately) by the British TV program  "The Men Who Killed Kennedy", a sober and fairly exhaustive documentary written by a guy named Nigel Turner, which initially aired in 1988 and posited the theory that Kennedy was probably killed by the New Orleans and Chicago mob through the hired marksmanship of a notorious Marseilles hitman, Lucien Sarti. (The theory has largely since been discredited, as there is strong evidence that Sarti was in a French prison at the time of the hit. And Sarti never had the chance to address or refute the charges - he was killed in Mexico City in 1972.)

But I immersed myself in book after book - Lifton, Marrs, Groden, Lane. Even at that time, early 1990's, I had only scratched the surface of conspiracy-tilting assassination literature, but nonetheless I went through 12 or 14 books in a couple of years, and used to share notes with a friend who was a simpatico assassination buff. (He retired from the JFK conspiracy thing after reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed, which, itself, has come under repeated fire by conspiracy researchers.)

I eventually shelved the JFK obsession - not because Posner or anyone else convinced me of the conspiracy-deflating assertion of Oswald's solitary guilt in the case, but because...this was in the days just before the internet, so I believe it was because, quite simply, I had purchased every assassination book available from my local bookstore. Sounds silly, but it's true. I ran out of books.

And because, I think, to some extent I came to believe that the truth was ultimately now unknowable. The trail was cold. Countless cranks and publicity seekers claimed to have the final evidence of conspiracy and the last word on who was behind the hit. Some admitted to actually being the Grassy Knoll shooter, or the one who supplied the weapons, or facilitated the getaway. Someone claimed to have run a metal detector over Dealy Plaza and found a bullet, sometime in the 1990's. Really ????

The internet came, and unsurprisingly, the commerce in assassination conspiracy lore exploded. In my view, rather than clarify and solidify the case for or against Oswald, it has only muddied the waters. The bottom line for me, I guess, is that even if the actual Grassy Knoll shooter came forward today, fifty years later, and admitted his guilt, and laid out the entire scenario (with or without Oswald as a very cleverly planted and framed "patsy"), it would be impossible to prove. The truth has no mechanism now to stand above the lies, or the misinformation. We settle on Oswald because that's the baseline against which to compare the conspiracy. The mythology has grown larger than the truth could ever be.

I remember a few years ago when Nellie Connally died. The last living occupant of the Limo. She had been petitioned for years by assassination researchers to allow exhumation of her husband's body and examine his remains for fragment of The Magic Bullet that may have been imbedded in the soft tissue or bones in his right wrist - should there have remained too much metal in Connally's body, it would have proven that exhibit 399 could not have produced the wounds in both men, that JFK and Connally were hit by different bullets, and given the already established shooting timeframe, proved the presence of at least two gunmen firing at the motorcade.

But she refused, and that was that.

JFK's assassination is the most meticulously studied crime in US history, and I am comfortably assured that if I wanted to dive back into it, I would never, for the remainder of my natural life, run out of books, internet blogs and videos to satiate a revived obsession. Part of me wants to.

I really don't know what to believe.

I still don't know why a guy who had just shot the leader of the free world, from his place of employment, with his own gun, would hurry down the stairs afterward just to buy a Coke and stand around. Nor, why a guy who it is said was a importance-craving nobody would vehemently deny upon questioning that he had just perpetrated the biggest crime of the twentieth century. Something doesn't feel right there. Oswald is portrayed as a cunning assassin one minute, a confused and delusional psychopath the next, methodical and calculating here, unhinged and incoherent there. You can't know when it comes to homicidal nutcases, they say.

Anyway. Tomorrow marks fifty years since the assassination. I sort of remember the event, and I sort of became, at least for a time, an assassination buff. I do not weary of The Chase, but I have other things to do and other passions to dance with, and the Rorschach pastiche that has become the assassination continues to produce disgraceful fraud, clever insight, breathtaking scholarship and mountains of evidence that only serve to keep the event clouded by distrust and speculation and questionable motives of many who wish to attach themselves to History.

I do know that almost everyone who has written about the assassination is wrong about who did it, and it's a big crowd.

Maybe someday, we or someone after us will know, once and for all. But I doubt it.

I still remember the horse.            

Yorkshire (Day3): The (Almost) Deserted Medieval Village

Wharram Percy - St Martin's Church, overlooking the churchyard

Note to self - if a GPS gives you directions to a medieval village that's been abandoned for 600 years, be skeptical.

The Wold country of North Yorkshire rolls and heaves like a fat, napping giant after a great feast; we found ourselves buzzing up a lengthy and narrow dirt track in search of Wharram Percy, up and down and up again, chasing the little blip on our dash-mounted GPS, until we came to a fork at an overlook. The directions pointed us right, but there was a roadside sign saying it was private property (and oddly, you don't see very many private property signs in the English countryside.) We pulled over.

A white Jaguar was parked at the fork, to the right, and to our left we saw a lady setting a large video camera on a tripod. Sharon rummaged through the paperwork - said I, "c'mon, this is a Heritage site, they can't keep us out, let's go to the right" and Sharon was all "it says Private Property, we can't go that way", and I was all "but the GPS says...", and it was like that for about 10 minutes before a well dressed gentleman in his sixties, presumably the camerawoman's husband, came over to the car.

"You're looking for the old village?" he asked, pointing out the painfully obvious with devastating politeness. Afraid so, I replied sheepishly.

"Well, it took us some doing to find it ourselves, but here's how you go," and he pointed us left, down the road, through the dale, up to the village, make a right and go up the hill and watch out for a tiny sign on the left, which points you to the right. Watch for the sign, it's easy to miss.

GPS fail. I smiled and thanked the gentleman. We'd probably still be there.

Of course the village was abandoned. It's damn near impossible to find. (There - been carrying that one around for three months.)

The guidebook (which we picked up from the Heritage concessionaire in a lonely little car-park booth) says that the dirt path leading to the village - the guide says it's a three quarters of a mile, but I would have guessed somewhat longer - dates from the Iron Age.

Go that way. 

Through a cow pasture, over a tiny, barely-running creek, and up a hillside.

It is said that Wharram Percy is the most extensively studied of all the 3000 known abandoned medieval villages in England. Of course, most of the populated villages in England have their roots dating to medieval times, or even further back than that, but presumably you can learn more about medieval society from places that don't have modern people living inconveniently atop the medieval bits.

It's important to note that Wharram Percy is, at its heart, an archaeological site. The village itself exists as a series of topological scars and mounds on the otherwise graze-worthy pasture, the outlines of some houses and the village longhouse are neatly described with chalk, and barely-distinguishable mounds trace the outlines of others. There's little sign of the extensive excavations conducted here between the 1940's and 1990's, and for that matter, were it not for the chalk-stone outlines laying out some building foundations and a few interpretative Heritage signs, you'd hardly know there had ever been anything here at all.

Wharram-Percy townsite

Down the hillside, though, lay the remains of St Martin's Church, the only building still standing that dates to the Middle Ages. A classic pre-Norman church (excavations revealed the remains of a timber church dating to the 11th century beneath current structure), the place is a skeletal ruin now, with half its bell tower collapsed, it's glass-less windows keeping silent sentinel over the churchyard.

St Martin's Church and churchyard

Oddly, though, the church door was still intact, heavy and ponderous and a little bit pointless, the portal between outside the church  and outside-inside-the-church.

Come right in. Church door, St Martin's Church  - Wharram Percy

Although the village itself was finally deserted for good in the early sixteenth century, the church was still in use as late as the 1870's, and a wedding was celebrated there in 1928, although it had long ceased to be a parish church for anyone by then. The nearest village had built a church of its own in the 19th century, no one saw the point to keeping St Martin's maintained, and the place became effectively a roofless ruin by the 1970's, falling apart slowly (with some help from periodic vandalism), as old and unloved churches do in England.

St Martin's - Wharram-Percy

Ruined churches are a special treat for us, but the experience was mitigated a bit by a few "lightly supervised" 8 year olds chasing each other around the ruin and shrieking periodically with ear-splitting, non-contagious glee. Having studied a bit of the early 19th century English Romantic poets, who frequently drew their floridly constructed poetic inspiration from places like this, I am involuntarily compelled toward some kind of contemplative epiphany in the presence of mute vestiges of the long-dead.

Nice idea, but it clearly wasn't going to happen today in this deep Yorkshire dale.

We shot the graveyard and its 18th century stones

Churchyard beside St Martin's Church- - Wharram Percy

(the churchyard actually dates to the 12th century, but the older graves aren't marked) and went inside.






17th century grave stone. St Martin's Church - Wharram Percy

A pleasant couple, unrelated to the shrieking kids, were eating lunch in an alcove beneath the church tower. They offered to move to allow us some photo-angle leeway, but we waved them off. Sit, enjoy...you were here first.

The lady, a Yorkshire local, told us about the various spirits that inhabited the church and grounds.



Spirits...up there...

St Martin's Church - Wharram Percy

Late-fortyish, she said she lived a vigorously off-the-grid life a few miles away. No TV, no internet, no radio, no car (I guess her lunch companion was her ride that day), and said she came here often for solitude and inspiration, even if lunch was probably all she was going to get today. She expounded at great length on the various legends about the place, and especially about the spirits that lingered sullen and malevolent around the 19th century labourers' cottage, nearby the church itself.

Labourers' Cottage - Wharram Percy. Bad mojo here. 

Maybe they were upset at the state of their church, or the fact that archaeologists had disturbed their land and resting places.

She shrugged. Maybe, she said. But they were around - she'd seen them.

She offered us some of her lunch; we declined with a smile. We liked them both.

We said goodbye, she wished us well on our holiday through Britain, and we headed back to the car. We still had a priory and some churches on the day's schedule.

St Martin's Church - Wharram Percy

So...why was Wharram Percy abandoned? The village had actually survived the Great Plague of 1348-1349, no small accomplishment as many villages in Europe did not, but the population had begun to dwindle by the early part of the sixteenth century, and the remaining villagers were moved off the land by the local lord (William, the 7th Baron of Hilton, specifically), who wanted the site to graze his sheep. There weren't many people there by then anyway - maybe four or five households.

By the time we had gotten there, it seemed even the sheep had given up on the place.  

Yorkshire (Day 3): Moldy faucets, Stamford Bridge and lunchtime in Bugthorpe

The Bank Holiday now safely behind us, it was down to business - driving too slow and crawling suspiciously around old churchyards.

Sharon spent her morning coffee time plotting out the day's route. She was a little disappointed by the room; there was mold around the bathroom fixtures, which I wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't pointed it out to me, and it may have been less of a deal had she not been suffering from a stubborn upper respiratory grunge had been sending her into hacking and sneezing fits for the prior three weeks. We'd hoped it would have lifted by the time we got to the UK, but no dice. If anything, the airports and strange beds and jet lag probably jolted it back into gear, and a moldy bathroom wasn't likely to help matters. 

We said something about the bathroom to the Surly Desk Clerk on our way out that morning. Don't think it cheered her up. I made a speculative remark to Sharon about the one thing I thought might cheer her up, but I won't repeat it here. In part because it was pretty rude, and in part because deep down I don't think even that would have buoyed her demeanor. Did I mention we'll probably stay somewhere else if/when we make it back to York?

The Buzzard Sisters were planted at the same table, in the same positions - maybe they spent all night there - in the garden. We said good morning on our way to the car.  

Stamford Bridge, which is not to be confused with the immense football (soccer) stadium in Chelsea, which coincidentally nearly backs up to Brompton Cemetery (England is small), is a village 7 miles to the east of York. The place bears some event-name gravity in English history; it was here in 1066 that Harold Godwinson, then King of England, fought and defeated an army of invading Norwegians, by some estimates effectively snuffing out the 300-year Viking scourge once and for all. (Well, not really, but we won't go into that.)

Harold's guys at Stamford Bridge, Sept 25 1066 - droppin' steel on the Vikings and falling into the river

It is also notable for being Harold's last military victory before heading south and getting his clock cleaned by William The Conqueror at Hastings, which ushered in the Norman Period and by most measures essentially marked the birth of the nation of England. Whatever it meant to be English before the Norman Conquest rallied with Norse-spanking pride at Stamford Bridge, and ended in guess-we-gotta-learn-French barely three weeks later at Hastings.

Stamford Bridge is a pretty unassuming little place; we were headed toward St John the Baptist church - a not particularly historic (built in 1868) church, in a very historic village. We went over a little bridge - I don't know if it was the bridge - and pulled up to the church. There was a guy mowing the churchyard. The church was locked (0 for 1), so we shot the pleasant but undistinguished churchyard in the harsh morning sun,

St John the Baptist - Stamford Bridge

St John the Baptist - Stamford Bridge

St John the Baptist - Stamford Bridge

St John the Baptist - Stamford Bridge

St John the Baptist - Stamford Bridge

...debated briefly on asking the grounds-guy if he had a key, decided against it and took off. We never made it into the town centre. 

The next place, bearing the endearingly unexpected name of Bugthorpe, was further east off the A166 and deep in the expansive (England is big) farm countryside of the East Riding of Yorkshire. The church was pretty easy to find. With a population of about 100, Bugthorpe is tiny; a couple dozen modest (and mainly modern) homes along Main Street, surrounded by farms yawning off toward the gently sloping horizon, St Andrew's standing on a small hill right on the main drag. As in most English villages, the church tower is the tallest structure in town.

St Andrew's - Bugthorpe

We pulled up in front of the post office, there was a sign hanging in the window saying they were out to lunch and would be back at 1PM.

Come back later - lunchtime at the Bugthorpe Post Office

It was a few minutes after noon. The village was quiet - the only movement around us was some farm equipment in a field a half mile away. The mourning doves cooed from the trees. It was actually a little eerie.

We went up the door of the church; the place is a Grade 1 listed building, Saxon in origin, and a little dour even in the warm midday summer sunshine.

St Andrew's - Bugthorpe

There was a sign on the door saying that the keyholder was across the street at the Post Office. And they were out to lunch. (0 for 2). Timing is everything.

We shot the cemetery, and left.

St Andrew's - Bugthorpe

St Andrew's - Bugthorpe

St Andrew's - Bugthorpe

A tiny village in the middle of nowhere, we were surprised to see Bugthorpe's name reappear later, in a pretty unlikely place.

The deserted medieval village, Wharram-Percy, was next. Administered by English Heritage, who provide a short-version timeline of the place on their website, this one sounded promising.

But first we had to find it.    

London to York, Day 2: Roche Abbey (sort of), the elusive Church and the Buzzard Sisters

The plan was to hit Conisborough Castle and Roche Abbey, plus both of the nearby churches near each property, before sliding into York to check into Lady Anne Middleton's Hotel, our haunt from last year.

It was probably an overly ambitious itinerary to begin with, but a calendar-challenged reservation clerk somewhere in the bowels of EuropCar's bureaucracy spiked it months earlier beyond any hope. It was obvious that were we going to orphan something. Which, we actually figured, was not a huge deal, since both properties were kind of on the way to Nottingham and we figured we'd just hit them on day 5 when we headed south again.

England was back to being small again.

So, we just cruised up the A1. I was a Highway Star.

We didn't really check to see what time Roche Abbey closed, but it seemed like the best bet for a damaged-agenda hail Mary. We exited the highway at a place called Blyth, caught an unsurprisingly narrow country road and exited it toward the Abbey (getting severely honked at in the process), then eased our way down an impossibly steep, cobblestone lane into a lush valley.

There were a few nature-walkers about - but the Abbey itself was closed, or just about to be closed. The gatehouse was accessible though, and there was a lengthy pathway outside the fenced Abbey property which afforded a decent view of the abbey ruins, so we got a few pictures anyway.

Roche Abbey Gatehouse

Roche Abbey ruins

Roche Abbey - from inside the gatehouse

We made a mental note to come back. (We didn't.)

Sharon had marked the church in Maltby, which was the closest town to the Abbey, but time was running short and after a half-hearted attempt to find the place (which, as it turns out, really isn't that easy to get to anyway, as we will see in a later chapter), we got back on the A1 and blasted toward York.

We entered the city from the south, through the excruciatingly narrow Mickelgate Bar. The used to hang the severed heads of traitors from this structure.

We got to the hotel, checked in and dropped the bags off. We remembered the Surly Desk Clerk from last year.

The smoking garden awaited - I brought out a cider.

At the next table were a couple of heavy set, sixtyish woman, sitting across from each other. They greeted us with an unmistakably American "Hi!", and we got to talking. They were sisters - one from Seattle, the other from Alaska - who were at the leading edge of a ten week vacation that was to take them across northern England, Scotland, Italy, Spain and finally on a boat to Florida. Our two week trip up and down the east of England seemed puny by comparison.

The larger and younger of the two asked, "How are you getting around?" Uh, driving.

"Oh my, I be too terrified to drive over here." Hmmm.

We finished up and headed into town for dinner at Thomas's [sic], our favorite pub from last year.

By the end of the next day, we were referring to them as the Buzzard Sisters.

London to York, Day 2: Bank Holiday in Edgeware (part2)

It felt a little like a hapless-tourist comedy film, sitting on the sidewalk in front of a closed rental car office in Edgeware. I imagined some dinky soundtrack playing somewhere, fast motion cuts of me or Sharon getting up, looking forlornly over the locked gate, covering our eyes at the window as we peer inside, vainly semi-expecting someone to suddenly appear with a bag of fast-food nosh and an apology at the ready. Yeah, it was riot.

Hello, Edgeware. Lovely day, innit ? 

Maybe I was flashing on Planes, Trains and Automobiles .

We called Chris to let him know what was up, although there was little point to it (he doesn't have a car, and even if he did, what could he do?), except for getting him out of bed again. I thought I could hear the Snickers bar melting in the warm sun, in Sharon's bag.

After an hour and fifteen minutes, the phone rang. Melanie apologized up and down, said she had been on the phone the entire time trying to get this worked out.

"So, do this," she said, "get a cab and take it to King's Cross. Have the cab wait and we'll pay for it, and your car will be waiting for you there. They're expecting you."

Good news/bad news. The good news was there was a car waiting for us; the bad news was that I was going to have to drive it out of downtown London...which is precisely what I didn't want to do in the first place. Sharon was a little disappointed by this development - she thought they should just come and get us, and hand over the keys. On some level, seeing as how someone screwed this pooch quite magnificently, this would have made some sense. But clearly this wasn't going to happen - it was a bank holiday, and almost no one was working.

We gathered up the bags and ambled up the street - there appeared to be a crosswalk up there where Sharon thought we should flag a cabbie.. On the way up to it, a cab spied us and pulled over before I even had a chance to flag it. I guess a couple of people toting four pieces of airport-ready bags on High St in Edgeware screams "tourists in need of a cab". Lucky guess.

We wrestled the bags in to the cab; the driver was a London cabbie straight out of central casting, a bald, deeply accented bloke in his late sixties, jovial and friendly, not at all surprised that we got hung up on the holiday. "You're my last fare today; I'm off to Spain for a three week holiday tomorrow."

As we approached King's Cross, it occurred to me to ask for directions to get back to the M1, despite having the GPS, and of course he recited them with cabbie-precision, and of course I was completely unable to follow it. Sharon nodded; she said she got it.

We went by the zoo. A queue easily half a mile long snaked its way from the admission gate. Bank holiday, beautiful late summer weather. Let's go to the zoo, luv.

The cabbie deposited us at the EuropCar office, which was in the throes of no-other-rental-car-office-open-on-a-bank-holiday chaos,

EuropCar at King's Cross

and we stood in line at the counter. Well, I did; Sharon sat and kept on eye on the luggage.

The guy next to me explained to the clearly overwhelmed desk guy (one of four) that he had rented a car the prior weekend because his Ferrari's windshield wipers didn't work. When the shop returned his Ferrari (my sympathy levels dipping even further here), the wipers still didn't work, and he needed a car again (a V-8 Audi, he insisted). It wasn't clear to me why the guy behind the desk needed to hear the bit about his Ferrari; maybe it was for my benefit.

Thanks for that, Nigel. Good luck with your Ferrari.

We got the paperwork straightened out, they slapped a deposit on my credit card (which Sharon objected to, but I was too weary to argue) and after a solid hour, we piled into a black Ford Focus.

The directions out of the car hire joint that the cabbie left us with were predicated on a dodgy little right turn out of the office,

EuropCar on the right. Get across that lane in front, miss the lorrie, and head down Penton Rise on the left. Sure, mate.. YOU do it. 

across three lanes of traffic, to head south on Penton Rise, then over to Wicklow St, then a quick jog to Britannia St, then right back onto the A501. Follow that, he said, and you'll run right into the M1 (eventually).

Piece of cake. 

Yeah, right.

Well, the three lanes of traffic (deceptively quiet in the Google Maps screen grab above) was packed with traffic, and I just didn't see us getting across. Screw it. We fired up the Focus, my palms sweating, and we headed left out of the lot. Sharon had the GPS running, pointed at York.

One left turn after a mile or so, and we were on the A1. Which is the same road we took the year before, the parallel route north. Stayed out of the bus lane (the only bit of advice he gave us that I actually followed) and in fifteen minutes we were in the outskirts of the city proper, and speeding our way up to York.

So much for being clever. Three and a half hours after being dropped in Edgeware, we were finally heading toward Yorkshire.

Note to self. Try another car hire strategy. London traffic 2, Dave 0.