Church Rock, Roche, Skipton Castle

I wasn't much looking forward to morning rush hour traffic in Nottingham - but we had a long day ahead and not much choice.

Loaded up the Mercedes and up Mansfield Road we crawled toward Church Rock. The cemetery gates were open, but it was a right turn against busy traffic and I just wanted no part of it. Standing the evening before in the light drizzle at the cemetery's locked gates, we had actually discussed strategy for parking the little blue rascal - instead of trying to turn into the cemetery, we'd actually hang a left and head up Mapperly Rd, at the Victorian Church of St Andrew. An impressive CoE building, but clearly a Victorian enterprise that we didn't have the time to visit, and probably wouldn't have anyway.

Hung another left at Cranmer Rd, behind the church (doubtlessly named after Thomas Cranmer, the Tudor-era Reformation figure executed by Queen Mary for heresy, and regarded today as something of a martyr for the Protestant movement), swung around and parked the car. Someone's cat watched us pile out of the car from across the street.

Church Rock Cemetery - Nottingham

Church Rock Cemetery is a sprawling municipal cemetery, tightly packed and draped over a series of swales and gullies. Impressive stonework, and even in the brilliant sunshine of the morning (yes, the sun came out), the graveyard's weird alcoves and cul-de-sacs teased a sense of mystery about the place.

Church Rock Cemetery- Nottingham

It was actually a difficult cemetery to shoot, the sense of scale being continually thwarted by the heaving topology of the place.

At the bottom of a steep walk was an enclosed amphitheater, embracing a number of ground-level stones and a few bricked up alcoves.

Church Rock Cemetery - Nottingham

We climbed down to shoot some pictures, and happened to spy a ramshackle encampment in one of the alcoves, its resident awake and tucked back in shadow. A Polish gangster maybe, but likelier a homeless person. We knew he was there, he knew we were there, but we ignored each other. Apart from that, we were the only ones in the cemetery.

The drive out of Nottingham was easier than I had feared; we caught a break when the GPS had us slip perpendicular and past Mansfield Road and guided us down a few minor, streetlight governed side roads until we reached the on-ramp to the M1.

Roche Abbey was next, unfinished business from our 2013 trip and an easy hour up the M1. We managed to make a wrong turn (we were perfecting the art of getting lost in defiance of a very good GPS), but eventually found the steep cobblestone road down to the English Heritage site. Like many abbeys, at least the ones in the countryside, Roche is tucked into a wooded valley beside a stream, not altogether easy to find.

There was a small car park outside the site, the same one we had parked at in 2013. I pulled into a space and a older gentlemen in a beret walking his dog came up to my window and spoke to me. His accent was impossibly thick, but with a little translation help from Sharon, possessed of an inexplicable gift for being impervious to dense rural English brogues, I gathered he was cautioning me against parking here, as cars in this little area were subject to break-in's by local kids. Hooligans.

"In the middle of the day?" I asked.

"Criminals keep a schedule?" he countered. Well, yeah....if breaking into cars is your thing, you do it when there are actually cars to break into. Roche closes at 5PM, and there'd be little reason to park down here after that.

So we pulled out and proceeded down the narrow lane to the gated site itself.

Roche Abbey

In-situ grave slab, probably an Abbey patron. 14th century. Roche Abbey

Roche was founded in 1147 as a Cistercian mission, passed through a number of hands and suffered near-total destruction in 1538, during Henry VIII's maniacal Dissolution. Plundered by Henry's commissioners and locals alike, the site nearly dissolved into the forested countryside until the 1920's, when it was excavated and cleaned up.

Roche Abbey

Set deep in the narrow valley, elegant in its skeletal dignity, it will never be considered one of the must-visit's of England's several dozen medieval monastic sites; for us, it was a gem.

The next leg took us northwest toward Skipton Castle. Sharon set a route that would take us around the south side of the industrial town of Leeds, but it did take us more or less directly through Leeds' small satellite city Bradford. A tangle of fast, busy roads with tricky last-minute moves and jammed with impatient delivery truckers, it was probably the hardest single day's drive of the whole two weeks.

Skipton Castle

We had had our doubts about Skipton. An extraordinarily well preserved medieval fortress, founded in the late 11th century, the castle is now a privately owned tourist attraction. Privately owned castles can be a hit-or-miss proposition. Sudeley Castle, which we visited in 2012, was a disappointment - crowded with vendors and costumed performers, the place felt like a Tudor-era theme park, and it was a turn-off.

Lady Clifford (1590-1676)

But Skipton was a more subtle and intimate experience, an intriguing stroll through narrow hallways, yawning banquet rooms and tight stairways, all wrapped around the Conduit Courtyard. Besieged in the English Civil War by Cromwell's forces before finally surrendering in 1645, Skipton was spared the worst of the Parliamentarians' usual slighting, with only the roofing removed upon their departure.

...and her Yew tree, planted in 1659

It is said that the castle's owner, the feisty and stubborn Lady Anne Clifford, planted the Yew tree now standing the courtyard as commemoration of the the castle's restoration after Cromwell's departure.

Got dragons? Coat of arms in the Conduit Courtyard - Skipton Castle

Skipton Castle interior

Counter-intuitively, you have to park up the steep hill from the castle, and walk down to it. It was late afternoon by the time we made our way back uphill to the car, and we spied the bumper-to-bumper traffic down toward the town square with exhausted dismay.  Deep in the reaches of sheep country of North Yorkshire (its name actually derives from the Old English, sceap), Skipton is a deceptively sizable town, and what we were looking at was a kind of rural rush hour. The GPS had anticipated our heading back through town, but forget about it. We made a left out of the car park instead; our little Garmin, by now accustomed to our willful non-compliance to its perfectly reasonable demands, dutifully traced a new route for us through some minor country roads outside town, until we were properly headed toward Cumbria.  

Nottingham Pt 1

One of our 2012 trip's highlights, if you could call it that, was our determined effort to avoid  Swindon, a largely industrial city in the eastern reaches of Wiltshire. (Andy Partridge from the alt-quirk rock band XTC is a life-long Swindonian and something of an erstwhile cultural spokesman there.)

It was on the leg that would take us back to London from Wiltshire, after prowling the neolithic mysteries of Avebury and West Kennet Long Barrow, and the real reason we pasted a skull and crossbones on it was to avoid the Magic Roundabout, a truly malevolent intersection famously regarded as England's scariest place to drive.

Swindon's Magic Roundabout, from a safe distance.

 Avoid it we did.

What we didn't know when we left Watford, emptied of bladder and properly re-clutched with the Mercedes, was that the directions the EuropCar gave us thankfully guided us just past the SECOND scariest to drive in England, the six-circle roundabout at Hemel Hempstead.

At least they have some trees in the center. Hemel Hempstead roundabout.

Neither of us recall him even mentioning it, but had he sent us to the next exit north of Watford to gain access to the M1, this motorist-munching monstrosity awaited.

We didn't discover this bit of good fortune until weeks after we had returned to the States. Half tempted to go back and thank the dude all over again.

We were headed to Nottingham to meet up with our friends from Past Hauntings - Sean, his wife Sarah, his kids and associates - for a ghost hunt somewhere, but the weather was rainy and on the way north Sean texted us that Sarah was ill and they had to cancel for the evening. We had a room booked, so we were going anyway, but we now had the evening free.

The drive into Nottingham - through its inner-ring suburbs and winding, hilly streets - wasn't much fun, and we fumbled through a couple of bad turns before we found the Best Western Westminster (not sure why it was called that, since it was nowhere near Westminster,  a London borough) on Mansfield Road, one of the two or three main thoroughfares through Nottingham.

We had wanted to hit Church Rock Cemetery, the sprawling and vaguely foreboding graveyard right in the middle of town. 

But after dropping off the bags and spending some time chatting in the car park with Christopher, a friendly and slightly disheveled 30ish local who ambled up to us and expressed some interest in our Mercedes, we walked up the road to find that the cemetery was very, very closed, Locked tight. We'd leave that for morning.

Walking to the cemetery....something told me I didn't want to drive thru this.
But I did anyway, the next morning. 

Church Rock Cemetery - the next morning

Instead, a quick check on our GPS indicated that Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, the self-proclaimed "oldest inn in Britain" and one of Nottingham's most famous tourist attractions was a mere mile's walk from the hotel. Easy decision; the weather was holding, we were both hungry and in need of sudsy sustenance after a brutal day on England's roads, and we had wanted to see this ancient place for a long time.