There is so much to do in London and we could spend a lot more time in this great city. We’ve been here a few times in the past and have always enjoyed our days in the Olde Blighty, as the overseas army called it back in colonial days. But our allocated London days have come to an end and it’s time to move onward to see a few other corners of the UK that we’ve missed in past visits.
It was a suitably sodden English day as we donned rain gear and rolled our bags to the nearby ThamesLink station (just next to the West Hampstead underground station) to catch a fast ride to Kings Cross station, and a train heading north. At Kings Cross we dried out with hot coffee and scones before buying tickets to the old Viking city of York. There are about 25 trains per day from London to York, so tickets are easy to come by. And as the trip only takes 2 1/2 hours, there was no rush.
It’s a great pleasure to be on a comfortable train rolling northerly through the drizzly green English countryside of farms, streams and villages to a place we’ve never seen. York has been an important railway center since 1839 and is now the site of the National Railway Museum, along with the Jorvik Viking Center, and other attractions. The town was also a target for the infamous Baedeker Raids of WWII, that were based on the important historical sites included in those popular pre-war guidebooks. Most of that damage has been repaired by now, and we rolled in to the stately old rail hall in anticipation of whatever the town named York might offer.
There have been inhabitants for about 10,000 years in this location, where the River Ouse meets the River Foss. But it was the Romans who founded a city here in 71 AD and called it Eboracum after Ebraucus, a legendary king of the early Britons.
And it was in 866 that Vikings, under the brothers Halfdan and Ivar the Boneless (other brothers included Björn Ironside and Sigurd Snake-in-the-eye!) as leaders of the Great Heathen Army, conquered the city and adapted the old Saxon name of Eoforwic to something more Nordic, like Jorvik. And over time, it became York.
Which brings us to ‘poor Yorick,’ the deceased former jester at the court of Prince Hamlet’s murdered father, King Hamlet. And Prince Hamlet’s famous lament at being presented with his skull:
“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?” (Hamlet, V.i)
Alas, poor old Yorick has little to do with the city of York, but I thought it was an interesting gambit, a side track, if you will. Please pardon my lapses in judgement.
........................................................................................................
YORK
The train station is far from our lodgings and we know nothing about the bus system, so a cab is our only good option on this intermittently drippy day. But we’re soon safely inside our newish abode to stash our bags and make ready to wander. As soon as the rain lets up.
But Carolyn has now come down with the London Crud, or whatever she inhaled back there. So we’ll spend a day just hanging out in our room as I venture forth in search of soup mix packets and saltine crackers.
And then she’s up and it’s my turn to be bedridden for a day or so – right on the day we planned to have tea with Luke Waterson, our Brit author friend. He writes for Lonely Planet and other publications. He also has a couple of very good novels out, including his most recent called Song Castle. It’s an excellent read based on an actual musical event that occurred in Wales back in 1176 and attracted contestants from as far as Persia.
So we both finally beat the Crud, but it keeps raining outside. And it’s unseasonably cold, according to the local people we ask. Unlike our past trips, this one is on a kind of schedule without lots of extra days built in before we board a costly river boat in Amsterdam, departing for Basel. So our wandering time in York will be truncated and we’ll only see a small portion of what’s on offer. And it keeps raining.
But the sprinkles lessen just enough for us (two desert rats from Mexico!) to see huge York Minster and enjoy a welcome cup of hot tea and a needed sandwich in a warm and dry place called Bennetts.
The Guy Fawkes Inn, on a nearby street, reminds us that this notorious character was born here in York – apparently right where the Inn now stands. And I’m very sorry that we’d just had a good sandwich and we missed out on a hearty plate of Bangers and Mash with ale in that particular restaurant.
Fawkes was a Catholic who was part of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when they conspired to blow up the House of Lords, and the Protestants therein, by planting 36 barrels of dynamite in the basement. He was caught before the blast, tortured and executed, as were his 12 confederates, and the survival of the King was celebrated by bonfires in the streets. But the event is now commemorated in the UK on November 5 as Guy Fawkes Night, and his effigy is traditionally burned in a bonfire. With fireworks of course.
Later, we wander the famous narrow streets of The Shambles to marvel at the offerings, including art, home made potions, and a window-full of enticing fruit scones. We notice there are ample provisions for broom parking. And we share the drizzly day with a bedraggled-looking mutt in a baby carriage.
As the day ends and we make our way back toward our lodgings, we stop at the Stonebow Inn for ale and a platter of bangers. With peas, of course. Sadly, it will be our last meal in rainy York, and we savor the few dry moments.
The following cold and drizzly morning finds us rolling our bags to the nearby Stonebow bus stop and a drizzly wait for the warm local Coastliner 840 bus that will take us on scenic back roads all the way to Whitby. And it only costs us £2 each (about US$2.62 each). The Brit transport system – and in most of Europe too! – is a precious gift for the frugal and slightly-intrepid traveler. Oh, and did I mention that it was drizzly?
The bus windows are huge, if dripping with heavy rain. It’s a double-decker, but we decide to remain below with our bags. And soon we’re winding among dales and draws, over old stone bridges, through stone villages, and across the Yorkshire moors. In 2018 it was voted Britain’s most scenic bus route by Bus Users UK. I don’t believe you’d get a more scenic view on a big and costly Mercedes tourist ride.
The Yorkshire moors remind me of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is set in Dartmoor, Devon, in southwestern England. Although that terrifying hound was fictional, moorlands can be rocky and sparsely-wooded, lonely and bleak, with dangerous peat bogs that can swallow an unsuspecting person.
The Book of Dartmoor (1900) related the story of a man who was making his way through Aune Mire at the head of the River Avon when he came upon a top-hat brim down on the surface of the mire. He kicked it, whereupon a voice called out: "What be you a-doin' to my 'at?" The man replied, "Be there now a chap under'n?" "Ees, I reckon," was the reply, "and a hoss under me likewise."
Peat bogs have sometimes yielded valuable archeological treasures, including unlucky animals and people who fell into them over the millennia. The remains can be remarkably well-preserved due to the oxygen-free water contained in the bogs.
But if a lighter version of the tale is more to your liking, a retelling with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore may just be the ticket. And no, I haven’t seen it yet but hope to at some point when in dire need of something ridiculous.
........................................................................................................
WHITBY
Soon we’ve arrived, warm and cosy, in the little seaport of Whitby, and the cold and drizzly (here we go again) day somehow befits its location on the North Sea. The stark skeletal ruin of the famous old dead abbey on the hill overlooking the Sea is a haunting emblem of the little port of Whitby.
The wrecked abbey is often visible down narrow lanes and from vantage points over the village, just as it has been since the days of King Henry VIII.
The first abbey at Whitby (then named Streoneshalh by the Saxons) was founded in 657 AD by Oswy, King of Northumbria, and destroyed in the Danish raids of 867-870. It was rebuilt as a larger edifice in the 1220s during a period of religious fervor that saw the beginning of the Crusades and the only English Pope, Adrian IV (r. 1154-1159), born just north of London. But the attending Benedictine order was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1540 and the abbey was abandoned. And therein lies a tale, of spite and malice, and ruthless headstrong rulers.
The ancient abbeys of England were victims of King Henry VIII and his spat with Pope Clement VII who refused to allow him a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry decided to start his own church, which granted him the divorce. He then gained Parliamentary approval (the Suppression Acts of 1535 and 1539) to dissolve the Catholic religious orders at 625 abbeys and convents of England.
Anti-monastic criticism was not unprecedented at the time, due to the vast wealth many of them had accrued and the few positive results they had on the morals of society. Desiderius Erasmus even characterized the majority of them as lax, comfortably worldly, wasteful of scarce resources, and superstitious.
Henry also had ulterior motives, as he was funding various expensive wars at the time and needed the massive income that the monasteries and nunneries were generating from their lands and other profitable operations.
Among Henry’s other rash actions, his second and fifth wives Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard faired poorly when Henry gave them each a trim at the notorious Tower of London. (“A bit too much off the top, eh whot?!”)
Henry died at the age of 55. With a girth of 54 inches, he was an obese wreck of his former hearty self. Although Henry blamed his six wives for failing to produce a fit male heir, modern science has traced several genes in Henry himself that probably account for the nine stillbirths and early childhood deaths he left behind.
Edward VI, his sickly only surviving son, served briefly as King of England, dying at the young age of 15. Henry’s daughter Mary I (by Catherine of Aragon) ruled for only five years, while his daughter Elizabeth I (by Anne Boleyn) reigned for 45 years until her death at the age of 69, and became one of England’s most important monarchs.
Henry’s tumultuous reign reminds me of a line from a Dorothy Sayers novel: “Nothing in life so became him as the leaving of it.”
The old ruined abbey appears in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, and that’s why we’re here. Stoker and his family were on holiday in Whitby in 1880, and it’s been speculated that he found the name for his new novel while doing research in the town’s library. And there’s no way he could have missed the ghostly silhouette of the ruined abbey on the hill. Early in the novel, Dracula sails from his castle in Transylvania for England to prey on young women. The ship’s crew all meet a variety of ghastly ends and the ship is wrecked on the coast near Whitby with its dead captain still lashed to the wheel. Then a bizarre dog-like creature is seen to leap off the deck and run up the 199 steps to the graveyard by the old abbey ruins.
I had wanted to see Whitby ever since reading Stoker’s novel. It’s an epistolary work, told by letters and diary entries, which has little relation to the movies that came later. But that image of the broken abbey above the little village remained in my imagination. And I was compelled to climb those 199 steps leading to the ancient ruin. The views that unfold on the way up, the tapestry of overlapping red roofs, the harbor mouth into the forbidding North Sea, and small craft clustered safely into the inner harbor, are certainly worth the climb.
And at the top of the steps it’s a special experience to be confronted with the ruined abbey and the old moldy graveyard just before it. How many locally important lives are chronicled on these cold and mossy stone slabs.
It’s a solemn and haunted experience to wander through the remaining pieces of a wrecked abbey that must have been spectacular in its days. And to imagine the gifted workers who assembled these stones using only what we now consider primitive tools and techniques.
But only a small number of these ruined English abbeys were actually destroyed on the order of the King or local authorities, while most of the abandoned buildings were looted for their valuable building timbers, the lead was stripped from their roofs, and the stone was quarried from their walls and arches to build the town itself. The fate of Whitby’s abbey was much the same as those many other shrines encountered and destroyed in past conquests by ancient empires throughout history. And sadly, it’s much easier to destroy than to build.
Perhaps the most famous of the shrines dissolved by Henry VIII is Tintern Abbey in Wales, memorialized in art by Gainsborough and Turner, and in poetry by Wordsworth – and even an acid-fueled visit in 1967 by Alan Ginsberg who beheld, “clouds passing through skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey.” Yet others, such as Martin Tupper (1858), ask us to "Look on these ruins in a spirit of praise" as an "Emancipation for the Soul" from superstition.
Regardless, the powerful image of an ancient ruined edifice can still inspire great art.
Back in the charming narrow and winding streets of Whitby there is much to explore. It’s a happy day spent meandering these lanes and alleys with rarely a car to pass us by. Add to that the added pleasure of taking a hot cuppa whilst gazing at the passersby. I can believe it’s why many of the Brits we’ve spoken to have fond memories of past family visits to the village.
Carolyn had found us a nice room overlooking a quiet street to snug up in against the cold and rain, and vampires. Yet since Bram Stoker did so much to put Whitby on the traveler’s circuit, there are gothic monsters scattered about town. And there’s Stokers, a warm little coffee and scone place nearby our lodging. It became a regular stop on our mornings.
And there’s yet another famous person who was an important former resident of this little port, a fellow who had a large impact on the world in general. And a tall statue of him looks over the port these days from the headland opposite the old ruined abbey.
Capt. James Cook was born in Marton, North Yorkshire, a village not far from here. But Whitby is where he learned the sailor’s trade, crewing on colliers hauling coal to ports along the English coast. He joined the Royal Navy in 1755 and, although he was not formally educated, he soon mastered the mathematics, astronomy, and charting needed to rise in the ranks. While serving in Canada during the Seven Years War (1756-1763) he mapped the entry to the St. Lawrence River, and later the jagged dangerous coast of Newfoundland.
By 1768 he was given command of HMS Bark Endeavour for a 3-year scientific voyage into the South Seas. In addition to tons of dry goods, the livestock on board included pigs, poultry, two greyhounds, and a milking goat. The ship also carried 250 barrels of beer, 44 barrels of brandy, and 17 barrels of rum.
Coincidentally, the Endeavour was built at Whitby as a collier of 368 71⁄94 tons named Earl of Pembroke, and began her life as a local ship type known as a Whitby Cat. But Capt Cook would go on to lead two more great explorations of the Pacific on a different ship. And after her one historic voyage, the Endeavour was sold off as a transport and renamed, and was used to supply British troops in the US War for Independence. She was scuttled in 1778 as part of the blockade of Newport Harbor in Rhode Island and largely forgotten, until 1999 when her final location was confirmed. These days there’s a small engine-powered ‘replica’ of the ship in Whitby that takes tourists for rides.
So despite the rain and cold, Whitby was a fine choice for a 3-4 night layover. There are so many charming things about the place, and we didn’t get to most of them. Yet we’ll have lots of memories of this little old port village with headlands overlooking the North Sea, and with a helpful sign that informs us we’re 13,300 (km or mi?) from Tonga.
There’s a wire statue of Captain Dora Walker (1890-1980) who was the first female fishing boat captain on England’s North East coast and wrote several books about her many adventures.
Down below, there are waves crashing into the town’s protecting breakwater, small craft are bobbing on gentle waves, and a strong crew of oarsmen look to be heading for the open ocean for a proper workout. There’s a timelessness about the place, as if that’s how it’s been here in little Whitby for the past many centuries, and that’s how it’s likely to remain.
I drop a bob or two onto the platter of a gifted sand sculptor seated by his mournful-looking dog, and I admire a well-kept old Morris sedan parked in the alley as we head back to our lodgings on our last day here in these narrow lanes.
In our wanderings about town we’ve passed a quietly elegant place with the inelegant name of Ditto. But we needed a reservation. So it was top of list for our last night in town, and it was an excellent choice.
In the morning we’ll catch an early train and be off to The Lake District, the place that Wordsworth, Coleridge and other Romantic poets and painters made famous long ago. Please come along for that one! — PRW