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.  

North Yorkshire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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