Sunny, Hot and Freezing

"Oh no! I've overslept again.", I thought as a I sat up in bed to the light coming in through the window. I pulled back the curtains and saw the sun dappling the city wall, lighting up the York Minster in the background. A cyclist went riding past.

It was strange, though. Kathy usually gets up an hour or so before me. So, why was she lying there asleep? I decided to give her a nudge and wake her up; I didn't want her to be upset because she'd overslept.

After a few prods, she poked her head out from under the covers and asked what I was doing. I pointed to the window and said that it was time to get up. She pointed to the clock, and said that we'd been asleep for five and a half hours, and to go away.

I got up, made coffee, had breakfast and worked on the blog. About the middle of the day (6:30 am), Kathy got up and did a little email. We set out for our walk around the wall by 7:30.

It was a sunny, very hot, absolutely beautiful day, and we were alone on the wall. We walked past the castle museum (that's Clifford's Tower in the background; I don't know who Clifford is).

We saw several flocks of geese in the parks as we walked on and

crossed the Skeld Bridge over the river Ouse. At the edge of the bridge we picked up the wall again at Bishopgate. This was the location of the original castle built by William the Conqueror in 1069 when York rebelled against the Normans taking over England.

In the "Harrowing of the North", William told his armies to kill every living creature between York and Edinburgh. William was determined to root out Anglo-Saxon culture (the kingdom of Northumbria).

Decades later one of William's supporters would write:

The King stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies. He cut down many people and destroyed homes and land. Nowhere else had he shown such cruelty. This made a real change.

To his shame, William made no effort to control his fury, punishing the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food be burned to ashes. More than 100,000 people perished of hunger.

I have often praised William in this book, but I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.

—Orderic Vitalis, 11th century, The Ecclesiastical history of England and Normandy

Today, of course, William is dead and the descendants of the Yorksters who survived have their picnics on the ruins of his castle.

A little further on, the wall is broken again at the Yorkshire museum and the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey, the legacy of another famous English King.

If any of you have watched the cable TV series, the Tudors, you know that one of Henry the XIII's great campaigns was subduing the power (and grabbing the wealth) of the great monasteries throughout England.

While his Protestant advisers (notable Thomas Cromwell) were perhaps acting out of conviction, it's hard to see the course of the "reformation" in England as other than a political power grab; even though I'm a Protestant, I think that I would have ended up on the side of Sir Thomas More. I mean, after all, the monastery even had a Chapel to St. Stephen.

Leaving the ruins, we rejoined the wall at Bootham Bar, site of the original Roman fortress from AD 300, walking all the rest of the way around the city, back to Walmgate, where our flat was.

Before going back to our flat, we stopped at the Calvary Chapel run Coffee Shop over the Walmgate,

where we ran into Sarah [who used to be a Sylvester] and her husband Dan, both work at the Church and Bible College in York.

After lunch, we decided to use our BritRail pass to do a little sightseeing, and visit Durham, about an hour north of York. While we were waiting for our train, two steam engines came into the station, with hundreds of photographers rushing to take pictures.

We talked to a lady and her daughter, who live in Darlington (about 30 minutes north of York), and she said it was kind of an obsession with the "odd types". They rush around the country, recording the locomotive numbers, kind of like bird watchers.

The trip up to Durham took about an hour (with one stop, in Darlington). Neither of us brought our coats because it was so hot in York; when we stepped out of the train, it must have been twenty-five degrees cooler and heavily overcast. It was like being at Twin Peaks in the fall, and we were both freezing.

Saturday in Durham is kind of crowded; mostly English tourists, I think. There is a market square (where I later had a pork roll sandwich, with stuffing and apple sauce), kind of like one of our swap meets.

At the top of the hill are the Cathedral and the Castle. The Castle is part of the University of Durham.

You can't take pictures inside the Cathedral, which marks the burying place of St. Cuthbert, the monk who was responsible for the famous Lindisfarne gospels, an illuminated manuscript now in the British Library. Here's a picture of Kathy in front of the church door-knocker.

We spent an hour or so walking through the church. There was an art show in the Galilee chapel (surrounding the tomb of the Venerable Bede). We spent some time looking at that because of our daughter Hosanna.

We also saw the head of St. Oswald, one of the first kings of Northumbria. (Actually, to be clear, we saw a plaque marking the location of the head of St. Oswald, not his actual head.)

We wanted to visit the castle, but it was closed. I poked my head into the central courtyard, ignoring the "don't go past this point" signs, so that I could get a picture of the place where part of the first Harry Potter movie was shot. What's an ancient relic compared to that, eh?

The train ride back to York was restful; I fell asleep a couple times. It was only around 6:00, but we decided to stop for dinner in town. Both of us knew that if we made it back to our room, we wouldn't be going out again tonight.

We ate at the Bengal Bazaar; I had the mixed Tandoori, while Kathy had chicken curry and sweet nan.