The Old Hall, an old church, and our ghost hunting friends

Well, "sleeping in" sounded like a swell idea, but we were still pretty new to this hotels-across-the-sea thing and neither of us slept very well that night. The Bestwood is a nice enough place, but we didn't like the room and when we return in 2015, we probably won't stay there.

Sharon got up early, threw on some jeans and went down to the lobby with her single-serving hotel room coffee for a morning smoke. I long ago adjusted to the fact that Sharon is a can't-function-without-my-coffee type, and that's ok. She insists the coffee over there is pretty bad; all I can do is take her word for it. I don't drink coffee - all of it tastes pretty bad to me.

While she was gone, it occurred to me that she was still without her spare Nikon battery, which was likely merging with some Yorkshire churchyard flora somewhere, and as we were in a big city, maybe there was a chance we could snag one in Nottingham before our scheduled meetup with the Past Hauntings crew. What I found from a quick Google search for camera stores was, unsurprisingly, a handful of Curry's in and around the city centre, leaving me the prospect of negotiating downtown traffic and finding a place to park, most probably to learn that they didn't have the same camera battery that the Curry's in York didn't have. I pitched Sharon on the idea upon her return, half-heartedly, and she waved it off.

It was our idea to meet up with the Past Team during the early afternoon, as we wanted to visit at least two locations and were leery starting off after sunset, lest we'd be in for a long night and too little sleep. We were traveling to Suffolk the next day, and needed to get our ghost hunting fix in before it got too late.

We packed up the equipment and went down to the car, passing a few hugging wedding reception holdovers from the night before, and one or two others who looked like they needed more pretty bad coffee. The GPS fired up, we eased out of the car park, headed for our arranged meeting at Sutton Scarsdale Hall, a recommendation from the Past Hauntings patriarch, Sean.

Sutton Scarsdale Hall - Derbyshire, UK

The ruined Georgian mansion (or, more properly, "stately home") was built in the 1720's, the third or fourth building on the grounds dating to pre-Conquest days. It was commissioned by Nicholas Leke, 4th Earl of Scarsdale with blue blood extending back four hundred years. He died childless, though, and the place eventually passed into the Arkwright family, where it remained, more or less intact, until WW1.

Much larger inside that it appears from in front, scattered here and there with graffiti, desperately sad, the place is unmistakably early Georgian with its classical architectural conceits still in battered evidence; I suppose a convenient metaphor for the decline of Empire for anyone concerned about that sort of thing, but it didn't feel like that. More like a forgotten place of worship, to an indifferent and vacated god. Its ruin was more compelling than its scale.  

We don't know if it's haunted - we did a fair amount of EVP recording and got nothing, and nothing noteworthy appeared on still or video - but we imagine the place must be intolerably creepy at night. In an overcast afternoon, it just exuded a yawning, vaguely impatient melancholy.

Sharon shot some walkin'-around video. Let us know if you see anything paranormal - we didn't.



The War created a massive upheaval in the fortunes of the historically wealthy families of England, between the dearth of manpower to sustain massive estates, heavy taxes imposed by the Crown, and, most brutally, the death of so many estate inheritors in the French and Belgian trenches.  We don't know for a fact that Sutton Scarsdale fell victim to this wealth-sclerosis, but suspect so. The place was purchased by investors in 1919, stripped of many of its absurdly ornate features (including mahogany staircases and complete paneled rooms, one of which was purchased by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and still stands today...in Philadelphia), and left to crumble slowly as a cavernous  shell, until saved by a local writer named Osbert Stillwell in the 1940's. The place is now owned and managed (lightly, it should be said, as there is not gate nor admission) by English Heritage.

Hi Sharon ! - Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire

Next door to the Hall is the ancient St Mary's Church, built in the 13th century and rebuilt by the Leke's in the 14th and 15th century.

St Mary's - Sutton Scarsdale, Derbyshire

 Some amazing floor and wall memorials, and a terrific churchyard.

Floor memorial - St Mary's Church

 

Floor memorial - St Mary's Church

Memorial - St Mary's Church,

We spent a couple of hours or so at the Hall and the church, the churchyard just would not let us go. The Past crew, whom we had met last year and was kind enough to give us another whole afternoon for English ghost hunting, suggested we go off for lunch before hitting the evening attraction, a re-visit to the desperately creepy Annesley Hall, just outside Nottingham. The place is a ruined manor house, parts of which date to the 13th century, and on its grounds is a ruined church (All Saints) dating to Norman times, and an abandoned cemetery.

While we would have been pleased enough to go hit another site, I did experience a very unsettling phenomenon at Annesley in 2012, and we both wanted to go back. Better still, even after taking a long lunch, we'd get there during the daylight, which would give us a chance to get a better look at the church and the cemetery, both of which were essentially bathed in darkness in 2012, frustrating our obsessive graveyard photography ambitions.

Plus...we wouldn't be tripping over tombstones. (Actually, I tripped over one anyway...)

I made Sean - who at one time was a cabbie in Nottingham - promise me that he'd do his best not to lose me on the way to Annesley, and he cheerfully assented. A lover of all things automotive, he regarded our rental wheels with a little envy, telling me he had his eye on the very same model. I conceded my indifference to the thing, admitting that we got ours in an auto-transmission trim. He laughed a bit. Tourists.  

We found a place to eat lunch not far from Annesley, a family-type affair called The Badger Box. Sharon tells me that this site was hosted a legendary ancient public house from the days of Robin Hood - you'd never know it from looking at the place, but England is like that.

We had a full crew: Sean and his wife Sarah, his son Daniel, daughter Sian and her boyfriend (now fiancee) Leon. Ghost hunting is a family affair for the Cadmans. We chatted about the ghost hunting scene, Sean lamenting the increasingly competition for decent sites to investigate, and exchanged our philosophies about evidence gathering and the unfortunate popularity contest that social media had introduced into what was once a relatively humble and carefully drawn discipline.

Sharon went outside for a quick smoke, and a local approached her for a light. She responded to his request in her American accent, and the guy immediately went off into a rant about, of all things, John Kerry, who had ruffled some feathers the day before by characterizing France as "our oldest ally" in his diplomatic efforts to gain support for US intervention in the Syrian civil war. I suppose he was technically right, as it was France who helped us win the Revolutionary War against George III's vainglorious colonial governors, but still...stupid and needlessly offensive to our British pals.

It wasn't a big deal, but like the 2012 trip when we encountered (and sympathized with) a group of Welsh golf vacationers in York who took some exception to Mitt Romney's idiotic remarks about London's readiness for the 2012 Olympics), we were gently reminded that clumsy US political rhetoric regarding our relationship to the English did not slip by unnoticed. Nor, evidently, anything favoring the French. 

We finished up lunch and headed off to Annesley Hall in the fading late afternoon light.  

 

St Bartholomew in the Trees, the Blind Range Rover and Nottingham

Parish Church of St Batholomew - Maltby

We recently spent some time discussing, or more precisely trying to remember, why the church at Maltby - St Bartholomew's, as it were - ended up on our Conisbrough itinerary. We think it was because we had planned to hit it on our way north to York, on what turned out to be rental-car-snafu day, and it was sort of on the way to the Castle if we were going in that direction, and it just kind of stayed on a list.

Months later, subject to the absurdities of travel blogging nearly a year after the fact, neither of us can be quite sure why we stopped here on the way to Nottingham, but that's the current theory. It has a Saxon tower, and it must have been that feature that landed the place on a list now long lost.

And again, it was just as well we caught the thing heading south, rather than the way north. Had we bothered to look at the church's website - and virtually all active churches, as well as plenty of redundant ones, have websites - we would have found easy directions to the place, but instead we plotted it on a Google map and kind of winged it, in the fairly busy town of Maltby, laced with tourist-befuddling roads and skimpy street signage.

We ended up driving down an alley and turning nose-to-nose up against a broad community garden, the church lurking 100 yards away in the trees on the far side. It made no sense to either of us that the good parishioners of Maltby would traipse across a community garden every Sunday for services, so we pulled out of the alley and tried again.

We eventually found what we believed to be the right road leading to the church, and parked our little Ford at the top, in front of a sad looking Range Rover, missing its headlights and listing with melancholy over a patch of engine oil on the street, and walked down the alley.

The Sad Range Rover and its puddle.

We passed the White Swan, a seventeenth century pub and inn that appeared to be for sale.

Fancy a pint? Meet you at the White Swan...or, maybe not.

It was still for sale when we looked this past May, and frankly we can't tell if it's been re-opened yet or not.

There were a couple of locals chatting in front of a cottage at the bottom of the alley, one of them jumping into his car to leave. We asked the other if this was the proper way to the church.

"It is," he replied somewhat stiffly. "Why do you want to go to the church?"

Well, I stammered, surprised by an otherwise perfectly reasonable question, we're a couple of tourists and we like to photograph old English churches and churchyards. It sounded funny as I said it, and maybe not too persuasive, but my American accent probably validated the story. Why else would a couple of Americans be here? I was ready to show him our Nikons if he pressed us further, as silly as that would have been, but he didn't.

Would you like to see the inside?

Yes indeed.

My wife's the church warden - I'll fetch her and she can open the church for you.

Her name was Pam - we sadly didn't get her husband's name - and she came and opened the church for us. The church is largely Victorian, built on the site of a medieval church and including various memorials from earlier times,

Early 18th century memorial - Parish Church of St Bartholomew - Maltby

Parish Church of St Batholomew - Maltby

Parish Church of St Batholomew - Maltby

and yes, the tower is obviously much older than the rest of the structure.

Saxon tower - Parish Church of St Batholomew - Maltby

Pam was gracious and more than a little flattered that someone had come all the way from the States to see and photograph their humble little church; which, of course, wasn't exactly the case, she should have been flattered that it ended up on a list, and we can only be glad that she isn't quizzing us now as to why, because (as we admitted earlier) we really don't know why.

Her husband explained a bit about the post-war renovations that the church had undergone,


including some workman finding bones beneath the structure while they were working on modernizing the heating system; medieval burials, undoubtedly. Saxon? Norman? No one knew.

Bathed in yellow light, cast against the now-fading evening light outside, the church, while not itself particularly historic, beamed with a weird kind of haunting glow.

Parish Church of St Bartholomew - Maltby

The churchyard, set in a tight and darkened grove of trees, was especially atmospheric.

Churchyard - Parish Church of St Bartholomew, Maltby

The church sits in a little valley bisected by a stream, and evidently there was a prolonged disagreement in medieval times between neighboring parishes which side the church should sit on, presumably in a time when the stream was more of an obstacle to cross (we barely noticed it). Anyway, they settled on that side of the stream, and no one knows why.

Another local, an older gentleman wearing a beret, came strolling across the church grounds with his two dogs as we were leaving the church. The churchwarden's husband promptly asked us to not let the dogs in, but one of them snuck in anyway and we spent a minute or two chasing him around the empty pews. We chatted a bit with the older gentleman as we shot the churchyard, telling him we really enjoyed visiting the old churches. "You've certainly come to the right country," he said.

Getting out of Maltby wasn't much easier than getting around it, and we were both pretty whipped. We found our way back to the A1 and made for Nottingham.

There was a wedding reception in full throttle at the Bestwood Lodge when we pulled in, and we had to settle for a parking space some distance from the hotel itself. We spent a night at this place last year, and we liked it - the site dates to the fourteenth century when a hunting lodge was first constructed for King Edward III, although the current structure is Victorian. The place is surrounded by forest land - and no, not Sherwood Forest, which is most commonly associated with Nottingham.

We lugged the bags past the flashing lights and pounding dance music exploding from one of the side bars, and came up to the front desk. To our dismay, we learned that they had moved our reservation to one of the "back rooms", presumably to accommodate wedding guests reconsidering their plan to weave home after the gala. I was too tired to argue with the front desk girl. I think Sharon wanted to make a bit of a stink, but I figured we were only there for two nights. So what.

The room was actually a bit of a disappointment, a healthy hike from the only hotel entrance, a bit cramped and at least a travel-site star less than the one we had in 2012. I suppose we had grown a little picky about hotel rooms by this time; the place wasn't exactly cheap, and since they had downgraded our room, we wondered if they should have offered us a partial refund. They didn't, and it's too late to ask now. 

We got up there, dumped some bags and trudged back to the car for more, past the lights and music and wobbly reception guests.

The bar in the main hotel room was open, though, so after squeezing our stuff into the room we went downstairs, ordered a couple of ciders and sandwiches, and ate dinner in the fading summer twilight outside on the terrace.

The reception was just barely within earshot, and from time to time one of the tanked-up guests would stagger across the grass nearby, but other than that we had the terrace quietly to ourselves, a bit of unwind-time we both needed.

Our plan for the next day was to meet our friends from Past Hauntings at a heritage site in Derbyshire, maybe 14 miles away, around late morning. That meant we could sleep in.

Day 6: St George, Medieval gravity systems and the guy with the Mercedes

We had planned to hit Conisbrough on the way up to York a few days earlier, as it's only a few miles west of the A1, but the Bank Holiday snafu with the rental car squashed that plan flat. And actually, it was just as well. Had we actually managed to collect the car in Edgeware as planned and tried to hit the town and its two star attractions - the Castle and St Peter's Church - we would probably have been rushed for time to beat darkness. And neither of these places surrender their charms quickly.

I ducked into the car-park behind St Peter's church. We didn't see a sign saying not to, and didn't see the sign that actually said "Free Car Park"

Yeah, park it here mate. Conisbrough.

which might have been a dead giveaway that it was ok to park here, and as I had someone behind me, I made a fast executive decision, which was rewarded to my astonishment with an available spot to park the car, the only available spot. Right next to a Mercedes.

We didn't know this at the time, but the church is thought to be the oldest building in South Yorkshire, dating to the (say what ??) 8th century. Well, maybe we knew it long before we were actually there, but had forgotten. Either way, experience told us that pretty much any castle town in England is likely to have an awesome church nearby. With a churchyard. Count on it.

St Peter's doesn't look particularly old, at least from the outside.

Church of St Peter - Conisbrough

Much of the exterior fabric is constructed from neatly aligned and regularly arranged stonework, screaming late Victorian, and browsing the headstones in the churchyard did little to dispel that notion.

But as soon as entering the porch, you realize you're in the presence of serious antiquity - a sculpture in the porch is considered Romano-British (suggesting it was originally carved for an earlier structure somewhere else and moved here...), so weathered no one is certain whether it was a Madonna and child, or St Peter with the keys to Heaven. (I'm going with Madonna...).

St Peter with the keys to heaven...or Madonna and child.
St Peter's, Conisbrough

The interior of the church is heavy, cavernous and relatively unadorned by the Victorians - the walls are largely undressed stone, in some places constructed from masonry from a nearby Roman bath house. Thankfully, many of the church's antiquities have neat little exhibit labels - Sharon called the place the best labeled church ever.

St Peter's - Conisbrough

There are a number of medieval tomb cover slabs,

Tomb cover slab, c 14th century - St Peter's

including one which is thought to be the earliest sculpted depiction of St George confronting a dragon - in this case, defending a freaked out bishop from the fire-breathing beast. Look carefully: dragon in the center right (with a defeated knight underfoot), George with sword and shield at the left center, the besieged bishop clutching his crosier beside him.

Fie, ye evil beaste ! St George and the Dragon, St Peter's, Conisbrough

The church was a little intimidating - somewhat dark,

St Peter's - Conisbrough

desperately quiet, humming faintly with ancient religious symbolism and savory bits of death iconography. We loved it.

St Peter's - Conisbrough

We ambled down the road to the castle.

Down the hill toward Conisbrough Castle, just peeking over the rooftops on the right

The name 'Conisbrough' is derived from Old English, meaning 'the defended burh of the king,' but the name predates the castle itself, which was actually not a royal property. The extant structure was built sometime around 1180 by Hamelin Plantagenet, an illegitimate half-brother of Henry II and husband to Isabel, Countess of Surrey, descended from Norman nobility. Hamelin was a Crusader and lifelong supporter of Henry, even as his reign became troubled and his popularity eroded. Henry, it is worth mentioning, was a famously ambitious castle-builder himself. But this one was Hamelin's.

The place is imposing.

Conisbrough Castle 

But not unlike any number of extant early medieval castles, there isn't much once you get past the curtain wall. Conisbrough's keep is certainly impressive, but inside the castle walls was very little; the Great Hall was barely an outline on the grassy floor, the kitchen was a series of worn stone steps and flooring.

Remains of the Great Hall and kitchen - Inside the walls, Conisbrough Castle

There is a little jail behind the south side of the wall, its stone toilet still in place.

Jail and privy - Conisbrough Castle

The toilet suggests to people who study such things that the jail was a short-stay proposition, more like a time-out cell. Too small to be a dungeon, petty criminals would have been tossed in here to get their few-day corrective lesson in civic behavior; the hardcore bad guys were dealt with in some other way, somewhere else.

We walked through the keep, and followed the narrow and steep stairway upwards,

Stairway - Conisbrough Castle

Stairway - Conisbrough Castle

through a few rooms and eventually to the top, giving us a pretty nice view of the town and sweeping river valley below.

View from the top of the keep - Conisbrough Castle.

On the way up, another toilet. Indoor plumbing was still a few centuries away for the Britains - the guys who worked this place would take their privacy in these little vestibules, their bio-byproducts tumbling down the exterior of the keep.

Bombs away - Privy, Conisborough Castle.

Perhaps some unfortunate gob came by periodically to remove the pies. Or maybe not. One thing you learn reading about medieval times is that most people lived with the smell of shit, more or less all the time. Then again, it rains a lot in England - it could be that these things took care of themselves by the by.

It's a bit trivial to point out, but we'll do it anyway: every castle is different. Conisbrough had some terrific rooms, worn but ornate-in-their-own-way stone work under yawning arched ceilings....

Arched ceiling stonework - Conisbrough Castle

heavy wooden doors... really heavy wooden doors,

They don't make 'em like they used to - Conisborough Castle. 

circular rooms with defensively designed windows,

Castle room and fireplace - Conisbrough Castle

Castle room - Conisbrough Castle.

Window - Conisbrough Castle

Conisbrough Castle.

Except for some mild exhibit-grade lighting, and a few interpretative signs, we felt like we were in a castle. A bit of fantasy displacement that most modern Americans can only speculate about. You can't force this sensation, not in a place like Conisbrough that's a partial ruin and a partial functioning structure. You have to let it tells its story, fragmentary and suggestive as it may be, in whispers and subtle gestures.



Outside the walls, the castle is a looming testament to power, wealth and will...

inside the walls, a ghostly patchwork of ground-level stonework, hardly recognizable as anything (except the toilet)...inside the keep, the place resonates dimly with the clomp of boots and clanging of steel, the swoosh of lord-y garments, the hushed murmurs of strategy and power and intrigues.

In a sense, I appreciated it more after we left. It reminded me that the Tower of London, far larger and more complete and dating to an only slightly more distant time, had very little of this fantasy resonance - crammed with tourists and the flashing of cell-cameras off perspex displays, the Tower felt like a museum. This was a castle.

We might have been the last visitors to Conisbrough Castle for months - English Heritage was closing the Castle the next day for 'extensive renovations,' whatever that meant.

Getting back to the car, we met the owner of the Mercedes next to us. His name was Dave Steele; we chatted for some time about Yorkshire, the presence of tourists in this little town (they actually didn't get that many, he said), the durability of his beloved Benz and some recommendations for getting out of town. (Go out the way you came - the streets in the town center are really narrow..) He actually gave us his phone number and told us to look him up if we were ever by this way again - an odd and disarmingly friendly gesture. We still have it - and if we ever are there again, we'll ring him up and do tea.

On the road (Day 6, part 1): Saxon, she said

Drive day.

We knew it'd be a while before we'd be back in York (if ever), but we were also happy to wrap up a middling four-night stay at the Lady Anne and say goodbye to the Buzzard Sisters, who were faithfully holding court in the garden as we wheeled our luggage past them to the car.

York still holds an almost mystical grip on us both, but it was time to move on.

South, as the plan would have it, but like last year we started the route headed north. Sharon had pinned a couple of churches at Wigginton and Haxby, close-in York exurbs that seemed easy enough to fit into the schedule.

St Nicholas - Wigginton

Both villages are ancient, pre-dating the Domesday Book, but neither church was particularly historic. Wigginton's parish church (St Nicholas) was built in 1869, replacing an older structure from the fifteenth century, and Haxby's (St Mary) was built in 1878.

St Nicholas - Wigginton

Both pleasant and light churches with tidy Victorian churchyards.

St Mary - Haxby

St Mary - Haxby

                                               

Back on the road.

We'd had the next destination in our back pocket for a few days.

Chatting with Miss Jones at Kirkham Priory, we mentioned that we were really into old churches, and she recommended we make a stop at the Saxon-era St John the Baptist, in Kirk Hammerton.

St John the Baptist - Kirk Hammerton

Originally dedicated to St Quentin, rededicated (at some time unknown to historians) to St John the Baptist, the church is a really patchwork of Saxon, Norman and Victorian construction and remodeling, with the tower generally considered to be the oldest surviving (and unaltered) feature of the building, dating to about 950AD. This makes the place a little extraordinary - the Saxons didn't build many churches from stone, but researchers have found evidence of Roman tooling on some the churches oldest stonework, suggesting there may have been enough pilfer-able Roman stone laying about to build a church with, or at least some portion of a church tower.

St John the Baptist - Kirk Hammerton

Most of the churches we visited have a little guide book for the tourist, usually no more than a pamphlet commonly traded for a recommended donation of a pound or two. We donated gladly to every church, at least the ones we could gain access to; a little corner of our home office now hosts an irregularly stacked clutch of English parish church pamphleture, a pretty dire collection of arcana.

By contrast, Kirk Hammerton's guide is forty pages, detailing the history of the place (as much as is known, and a lot isn't), with grainy photos of long-dead benefactors and selected views of the building's features, as well as some commentary on the quality of various restorations and additions that the ancient church has endured. St John the Baptist escaped complete demolition at least once, in the 1780's, and some of the over-eager early Victorian restoration was subsequently and successfully reversed.

St John the Baptist - Kirk Hammerton

It's an interesting subject - well okay, a fairly obscure one, unless you're into the evolution of English churches, and we freely admit to suffering a mild dose of this affliction - regarding Victorian restoration. An awful lot of historic church restoration took place in the Victorian years, some estimates put that number as high as 80% of all the parish churches in England and Wales. Some of it was done gently and well, sensitive to the fragile and uniquely historic nature of some of these 11th and 12th century structures, and some of it heavy-handed and pitiless, boasting of the aesthetic tastes (and probably lofty egos) of the contracted architects involved.


Church attendance in the 19th century was dropping; maybe, somebody thought, it was in part due to expecting parishioners to sit on crude, creaky pews in drafty and crumbling Early English churches susceptible to catastrophic collapse at more or less any time. Maybe renewed and modernized ones would help bend that curve.

It didn't, of course, but at least on that level we can be assured that their intentions were virtuous. Or something.

And to be fair to the Victorians, some portion of their work was directed toward structures that were decaying toward irretrievable ruin. Some churches were saved from oblivion during the restoration frenzy. (And some weren't...here's one that wasn't, we'll get to this one in a few days.)

Not restored - St John, Stanton, Suffolk

So there's a bit of a box-of-chocolates effect with church crawling, at least the way we found ourselves doing it. In 2012, we used the Churches Conservation Trust website to point us to truly ancient places, but at some point we simply arrived at some realization that, at the risk of stating the obvious, England was a country brimming with villages and towns more than a millennium old, and virtually anywhere you go, you're going to find a church dating to the 12th or 13th century.

How much of that church had been once-overed by some bearded and furiously gesturing Victorian architect was usually not apparent until we creaked the door open and stepped inside. For a couple of antiquity-crazed American neophytes, we learned to savor that certain thrill in crossing the threshold into an ancient parish church, even if we knew that what awaited inside may not be a pristine time-capsule of medieval worship.

St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

So we came to a leveling awareness that neither the Victorians of 150 years ago, nor the parish church councils of the early 21st century, necessarily subscribe to an over-arching priority of keeping The Old Stuff visible and accessible to tourists. A church needs to be a church, and sometimes that imperative collides with museum-grade antiquity.

But in reality, despite all the preceding blather about the Victorians and their re-costuming of ancient churches, Kirk Hammerton is a slightly different case study. In 1887, the place came under the benevolence of one Colonel EW Stanyforth, the grand-nephew son of the village's churchwardon. The church had already been enlarged twice, once in the twelfth century (it was already two hundred years old by then) and again in 1834, but in the 1890's Stanyfield commissioned much of what is visible today, especially the startlingly vibrant mural paintings.

St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

Saxon chancel - St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

The elegant and silently dignified Saxon chancel is the oldest portion of the church, and all there was to the place in the tenth century, but it's functionally a side chapel now.

The soaring artwork is the real star of the place, and that's barely a century and a quarter old. So a fair bit of the St John the Baptist is indeed Saxon, and the tower from the outside leaves little doubt as to its antiquity, but inside, the church beams and glows with its painted adornment. Stanyfield did this one right - the place is hypnotizing.

Saxon chancel, altar - St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

We spent almost an hour inside, all by ourselves, almost speechless, the clicking of our camera shutters pinging meekly off the mute stone walls. It felt heavy, a somber and benevolent embrace.

Chancel - St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

Saxon stonework - St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

Saxon stonework - St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

We shot the churchyard ...

Churchyard - St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

Churchyard - St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

Churchyard - St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

and headed off next to pick off a highlight destination further south that we had missed on our first day.

It was time to get our castle on.