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.  

York to Nottingham, the long way

Driving day again, we woke up a little hazy from the night before. I took a quick shower, we packed up and checked out of the hotel. 

The car was lodged into a maddeningly tight parking space, and despite my best 7-point turn, I couldn't seem to get the thing out. A guy exiting the gym came up to my window and offered in a crisp Eastern European accent to dislodge the VW for me – I was a little embarrassed that my de-parking skills had elicited the charity of strangers, but the guy smiled and said he parked cars for a living and this was a no-brainer for him, and he understood that American tourists had a little trouble with the tight spaces. I never really got comfortable with that car. Or most parking lots, for that matter. Car parks, as they say.

We were off to Nottingham. We had contacted a local ghost-hunting team over the Internet months before and they offered to take us out for an investigation. I was excited by the prospect. This whole trip was, after all, the Dead Englishmen Tour, and tonight promised to be dead guys up close, in the dark. Rock Cemetery, the city's oldest municipal burying ground, also looked promising, but I had some doubt we'd have time to see it.

Nottingham is south of York, a couple of hours if you take the fast way, but instead we headed north toward Rievaulx Abbey, Byland Abbey and Helmsley Castle. This was going to be one of our longest driving days; I tried as best I could to re-steel my road nerves, which had slackened the previous day walking around York.

We hopped on the B1363 and headed north out of town. 

Along the way, we came upon Gilling East, an historic and quiet village considered something of a York exurb. We had made no prior plans to stop there, but I spied the church on the main drag, pulled the car off the road and parked. The spontaneity thing again; in earlier years, I had found myself in periods of lethal boredom watching Rick Steves travel programs on PBS, at a time when a trip to Europe was as likely for me as a trip to Mars, but one thing I did take away from them was his unerringly emphatic tip to stop at unplanned places and just walk around. You can’t do that on a bus tour, and I figured this soft morning in Yorkshire was as good a time as any to liberate my Inner Steves. 

A nice lady visiting the church, a local, said hello to us as we entered the churchyard of Holy Cross. She seemed pleased we had stopped to visit, asked where we were headed (“ah, so you’re going north, to go to Nottingham,” she noted dryly) and invited us to go inside. At the entrance to the churchyard stood an immense and ornate memorial archway dedicated to the area’s fallen WW1 soldiers; WW1 memorials are a common site everywhere in England, a reminder of the generation-rending scars England still bears from that war, now almost a century ago.

The church itself was fascinating, dating to pre-Norman times and including the tomb of an unknown knight in the sanctuary. The visitor’s sign indicated he may have been the church’s founder, but the age and identity of the sarcophagus is known only to history. 

The church also housed the tombs of Sir Nicholas Fairfax, 3 times High Sheriff of Yorkshire in the 16^th century and something of a heroic figure in challenging Henry VIII's pogrom against the Catholic establishment, and his two wives.  

Here's a bit we found (after the fact) about Fairfax. 

In Oct of the same year a rising took place in Lincolnshire and 6 days later the rising in Yorkshire began with a great assembly in the East Riding. Fairfax was one of the Yorkshire gentlemen who received a letter from King Henry VIII commanding him to aid in repressing "certain traitors" and "suffer by dint and sword or else so yield that the ringleaders be committed to prison" to await trial. But Sir Nicholas was more inclined to join the "traitors" than to obey the King’s command. Sir Thomas Percy sent for Sir Nicholas Fairfax to attend a muster of 10,000 men at Malton. 

William Stapleton, in his account of the rebellion, says that on Saturday 21st Oct he came to York and heard how Sir Thomas Percy and Sir Nicholas Fayerfax, with the Abbot of St. Mary’s York, had gone to Pontefract (Pomfret) with a goodly band the same day. Meanwhile the Duke of Norfolk was marching north against the rebels. It was obvious that the Duke was inclined to be lenient and begged that King not to reprimand him for any concessions he might make. However, on reaching Doncaster he met a deputation from Pomfret. It would appear that Norfolk was persuaded that he had the inferior force and on 27th Oct an agreement was made, the King’s pardon published and the rebels were dismissed to their homes. The King however demanded 10 ringleaders to be delivered to him.

Fairfax, notwithstanding their promise to the King, moved that the parishes of Dent and Sedbar might rise and raise both Lancashire and Cheshire. It was decided to rally the Abbots of the Yorkshire Abbeys, remembering that Gilling Church had been given to St. Mary’s Abbey, York many years before. On Dec 2nd the rebels held a gathering of lords, laymen, and clergy; the Archbishop of York preached. Among them were Sir Nicholas Fairfax, Sir William Fairfax of Steeton, Sir George Darcy (Nicholas’s brother-in-law), Sir Henry Gascoyne (Sir Nicholas’s cousin), and Mr Palmes (perhaps a cousin of Sir Nicholas’s wife). At this meeting they accepted the granting of a full pardon but no conditions as to the arrest of ringleaders. Sir Nicholas succeeded in making his peace with the King and was pardoned on 18th Jan 1537. He took no further part in a subsequent abortive rebellion: he had had enough.

The connection to St Mary's Abbey was a coincidence (we had just walked around the place the day before) that we were unaware of until after we got home. You can walk around and photograph the history, or you can bury yourself in it; thankfully, there's plenty in between. Gilling East was a small place, not necessarily on any tourist-guide must-see lists, but if we go back to Yorkshire, I'd like to see it again.

Helmsley Castle was next. 

Built by Robert de Ros in the late 12^th century, the castle is one of many in the care of English Heritage, although it is privately owned. Most of the fortifications are in ruins, having suffered significant damage during the English Civil War (c. 1640’s), although the manor house and apartment buildings are in good shape, and some of the 15^th century rooms are still intact with original wood furnishings and trim.

The place was intriguing; our first real exposure to mostly-intact medieval interiors (apart from the churches), and it took some time to see the whole facility. There was a light scattering of fellow visitors as well. Ruined castles play tricks on your sense of time and space – large open areas, laced with occasional exposure of foundation, peripherally marked by large and irregularly ruined keeps or houses, usually from different eras and betraying different building styles. 

Your mind wants to associate them all to a single notch on history’s timeline, but it’s actually a little more like stratography, where you’re seeing the passage of centuries, a sequence of building and destruction, re-building, remodeling, neglect and restoration. The reality is that you have to de-compress the centuries and understand these sites as processes. Just because what you see is hundreds of years old doesn’t mean it existed whole at any one time.  It challenges a two dimensional view of these sites, and all the large historical ruins we visited were like this.

Then came Rievaulx (pronouced REE’ voh).

A massive Cistercian ruin, once one of the largest and most prosperous Cistercian Abbeys in all of England, this enormous mission was established in 1132 and fell to ruin at the hands of Henry VIII in 1538, and is considered second only to Fountains Abbey in renown. The place absolutely dwarfs the ruin at Whitby which we saw two days earlier, and is far larger than the view we got from the road that day.

Many of the ruined abbeys were scavenged for their stone by neighboring villages (much of the lead and other metals were plundered by Henry’s troops), but Rievaulx stands far less pillaged than many of the others in part due to its location deep in a river valley in North Yorkshire – it was simply too difficult for  the area villagers to remove the massive stone blocks up the steep banks of the valley. The road in was by far the steepest and one of the narrowest we drove the entire two weeks in England.

Rievaulx is a shattering experience up close. The monks working this property diverted the river Rye three times out to accommodate their building projects, and they also built a prototype blast furnace at nearby Laskill, producing smelted metals of refinement far beyond anything else being produced at the time. It has been said that the closure and dispersion of the Rievaulx mission delayed the onset of the Industrial Revolution by two and a half centuries.

The church columns and arches are largely intact, and the chapterhouse, dormitories and other buildings are at the very least well defined around the church itself. In some respects, it is a difficult place to photograph; the scale and breadth of the place is absolutely vital to the experience. 

A nearby building features an exhibit of the life of the Cistercian monks, and a tiny village adjoining the abbey property – thatched roofed cottages with satellite dishes and Range Rovers out front – summons a slightly airbrushed resonance of medieval life outside this massive religious site. Walking through the abbey itself, you hear almost nothing except the bleats and moos of nearby livestock. Rievaulx is haunting, intimidating, compelling. At the risk of overstating it, any tourist traveling the North Yorkshire countryside would be out of his mind to miss this place.  

      

 Byland was next. Another Cistercian ruin, only 5 miles away as the crow flies, and a very impressive place. A good deal less of the primary buildings remain at Byland, giving it the impression of being smaller than Rievaulx, when in fact the site is actually larger by land area. Byland also has one of the most extensive collections of in-situ medieval tile work anywhere in Europe. 

It felt different from Rievaulx – less overtly compelling, the space being less well defined, the connection to the past more tenuous. The tile work isn’t really fenced off, although there are signs requesting visitors not to step on them. The cemetery lays behind the church itself, although you’d only know if you looked at a site map – it’s just a grassy field. Byland is a less well-known site than Rievaulx (and much less than the famous Fountains Abbey, also in Yorkshire but not on the itinerary for us, for reasons owing as much to planning neglect on our part as anything else) and it is visited less than Rievaulx, while only being a fifteen minute drive away. Its charms were more subtle than Rievaulx or Whitby, but a beautiful and haunting place nonetheless. 

Three large outdoor ruins in quick succession; it was early afternoon and I was beat already. I had it in my mind that we’d go crawling around on our way south to Nottingham to find more villages and churchyards, but the clock was escaping us and we had a group to meet somewhere (we didn’t know where yet) in Nottingham, a good hundred miles or so to the south. So after a fun and slightly weird conversation with the lady at the entrance office, and laying out for a little tourist swag, we climbed in the VW, made our way west toward Thirsk, stopping off at one church along the way. A minor indulgence at my request; All Saints Church, at Kirby Hill. The name is actually fairly common in Yorkshire, and a little digging suggests it is derived from the old English (or Norse) word for "church". 

We shot the cemetery (the church was locked) and then blasted down the A1, one of Britain’s superhighways, clutching the slow lane as trucks and Mercedes’ passed us at autobahn-worthy speeds. By this time, I was grateful for highway driving – no roundabouts, no tricky off-camber turns. Just find the slowest guy and get behind him. I don’t think I actually passed anyone until Day 8.

Nottingham, of course, is well associated with Robin Hood (who may or may not have even existed), and Sherwood Forest. What’s left of the forest is a protected park, we saw signs for it along the highway as we approached Nottingham, as well Robin Hood this and Robin Hood that. There’s an undeniable allure to the legend, especially to anyone even mildly sympathetic to the notion of fleecing the rich on behalf of the working class, but we really had little interest in seeing the Robin Hood exhibiture. And exhausted from a long day, I managed to get us lost off the highway on the way to the hotel. GPS, my ass – I can get us lost anywhere. Here, watch this drive.

But we did eventually find the place – it was a Best Western, and we were okay with the notion of staying at bland chain hotel that night, since we weren’t going to be in town very long. Instead, though, we came up to a gently restored and modernized 16^th century hunting lodge once owned by King Charles II, an absolutely beautiful and slightly foreboding property set in the woods on the north side of town, in a little subdivision called Bestwood. 

Place had a hedge maze in back, and much of the Elizabethan interior was unchanged from historic times. It was a surprise for us – the staff were terrific, the property was quiet and well-kept, the grounds were elegant. After Thornbury Castle (that’s coming up), it was probably the nicest place we bunked in – we were disappointed only in that we didn’t have more time to enjoy it. We wolfed down a hurried dinner outside in the cooling summer evening, by ourselves, headed back to the room and jumped on the internet to get our directions for the ghost hunt. Sharon was in no mood for it – she was exhausted and looking forward to a quiet and uneventful evening, but I pressed her on the ghost gig. This we had to do.  

Had enough yet?