NORTH YORKSHIRE

We spent last weekend in North Yorkshire, part of the world that I have hitherto only passed through on the A1. My father loved the Dales and now I can see why.

We arrived in Ripon late on the Friday afternoon and had time to see the cathedral. It is one of those (relatively) small northern cathedrals, more picturesque from the outside than inside. Though there is a crypt reputed to have been built by St Wilfred around 680AD. (It is apparently very similar to the one in Hexham Abbey which is definitely his.) The crypt was for relics, and of course there was a church over it, but that and several successors have been destroyed, so that now it is under a rather larger edifice than Wilfred could have imagined. Like Hexham's it is accessed by stairs and a narrow passageway. The chambers at the centre are not as large as most suburban bathrooms. Alas the relics are long since gone, so it is rather bare.

The only other feature of the cathedral that took our attention inside was carving on the choir stalls and their misericords. There is a griffin which might have come right out of Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. People have wondered if Lewis Carroll was influenced by the carvings. He certainly knew the place - his father was a canon there - but since he didn't do the illustrations for the book himself this seems doubtful.


As it happened the Bed and Breakfast establishment that the Tourist Bureau found for us was in a building which in the nineteenth century was a boarding school attended by Charles Dodgson (to give Carroll his real name) when he was a boy. We were told that Henry Liddell, the father of Alice Liddell, the child to whom Carroll first told the story of Alice in Wonderland, had also (before Dodgson) been a pupil at the school.




Ripon has a tradition going back to medieval times that every evening at 9 o'clock the Watchman blows his horn in the town square. Unfortunately it took rather long to pay our bill in the restaurant so we arrived in the square in time to hear the last blast but not soon enough to actually see the man.

Next morning we went to the market again for the Continental Market, a jolly affair. We bought three tins of cassoulet, one of my favourite stews from Provence (pork sausage, duck and haricot beans) from a stallholder from Normandy, and some Sicilian cakes. Delicious.





Then it was off to Skelton-cum-Newby, a village three miles away, to see the church of Christ the Consoler. In around 1870 the son of local gentry was part of a party ambushed by brigands between Athens and Marathon. The kidnappers first demanded 50 000 pounds as ransom, which was collected, but then they decided that what they really wanted was an amnesty from the Greek government for their previous crimes. That wasn't forthcoming, so they killed the hostages, including young Frederick Vyner.


The family had this church designed and built by William Burges at enormous expense to remember him by. It is set in a field on the edge of the family estate, is very beautiful, and redundant in every sense of the word.






Then we visited Newby Hall itself. It has Adam interiors and Chippendale furniture and gardens going down to the River Ure along which there runs a miniature train line for the amusement of the children. The house and gardens were used in a recent production of Mansfield Park. Not sure if I saw that one. There's been a bit of a Jane Austen glut recently. The place was well worth visiting. Highlights - the gardens, the chamber pot museum and the views of the Ure Valley from the upstairs windows.



The day was bitter, but was clear. After lunch we drove north up the Ure Valley, stopping at random. Masham church proved to be quite ordinary apart from one window of St George. The dragon looks almost puppyish, like a Pekinese (or is it now called a Beijingese?) dog.




Then there came Middleham, a small village with the ruins of a large castle. Here Richard III grew up under the eye of Warwick the Kingmaker, who was big in these parts. Alas, since the Civil War of the 17th century when it was ordered to be slighted it has not been lived in since.














Wensley, the village after which the dale is named, has one of the most depressing churchyards we've ever seen. It is completely let over to rabbits, which brazenly cavorted in front of us. The ground is all humps and bumps like a warren, and several gravestones lie flat on their faces. Once can only hope the rabbits that undermined them got squashed underneath when they fell.

Inside the church is the most enormous curtained double family pew. Legend has it - and I don't believe a word of it - that a seventeenth century duke fell in love with an actress at Covent Garden and she agreed to marry him if he bought the box he had first seen her from. I'm surprised the rabbits haven't had it for a hutch.

We ended at Askrigg, high up Wensleydale, and quite near to Hawes, notorious for its nineteenth century inhabitant Branwell Bronte and his literary sisters. We didn't get as far as Hawes, but did walk the hills, ending up at the very scenic Mill Gill Force, pictured here.










My last two pictures are not of real places at all, but railway models, that we came across on our travels. Somehow they look more realistic than lots of real places.