Day 4: York yarn and Carperby cottages

Woke up late this morning and missed the pre-breakfast stroll (again); this time it was to find all the cat sculptures scattered about the York city center. But I did rouse myself enough to join the group for the Minster when it opened. It was magnificent as always, and the Chapter House was beautiful. It’s a big octagonal room with a beautiful ceiling and windows and great acoustics. I had to change my camera battery and every noise I made switching it out was magnified tenfold. I was very tempted to sing, but thankfully I couldn’t come up with anything.

Chapter House ceiling

The East Window is pretty impressive; it’s massive, and filled with stories from the Bible. Each pane related to one story, and there were neat touchscreen guides to help navigate. Without context I couldn’t follow along well, though; there were just a lot of people standing with different backgrounds. But don’t get me wrong! Really beautiful window.

And here in the left panel we have, uh, Jesus?

  

The central tower and its bosses. I want a coffee table book that’s just a picture of each boss.

The organ in the quire. Beautifully carved wood.

Even the little wooden struts in the ceiling under the organ have their own bosses.

The Organists of York Minster: the list goes back to the 1400s!

After the Minster I stopped in a neat little bookshop and got a book about folklore of the Lake District (and a couple others, I have been buying a lot of books). Then we headed back to check out of our hotel and visit a neat hardware store and the adorable craft shop next door. I got some beautiful yarns made in England from English sheep!

A sheepful of wool!

We picked up the rental cars and drove to Fountains Abbey. It was fun riding on British roads, it’s like a very mild thrill ride. Going around a roundabout to the LEFT? Are the speed signs in miles or kilometers per hour? So exciting!

We reached the Abbey after about an hour of exciting right-hand drive. The parking lot was very pleasant, lots of little graveled bays with trees between each one. Quiet, pretty, and much cooler than the typical lake of asphalt, I want to see if we can get some of these in the States.

So pleasant to park in!

Then we walked to the visitor center, got our maps and tickets, and headed off. This is all on a huge park owned by the National Trust, and it’s got not only the Abbey but also Studley Royal water gardens and a ton of wild space for deer and other animals to live. It’s nice to know that not all of England is farmland. We stuck to the main part, however, which was plenty.

Fountains Abbey was founded in 1132 when thirteen monks were thrown out of St Mary’s Abbey in York; they floated for a while until the Archbishop of York gave them some land to settle on. They started with a small stone church which over the next few hundred years expanded to the enormous structure whose remnants can be seen today. Of course, Henry VIII had the place destroyed in the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but what remains is still impressive. Some of it even has ceilings!

I’m not sure what part of the abbey this was…

On the left is the nave of the main church, and on the right is the cellarium

The cellarium is still mostly complete

The south aisle of the nave

The nave, from the south aisle

The other side of the main church (the quire? I'm still terrible at this)

The grounds were massive, and part of the church buildings went over a stream, which was really neat. There was a mill upstream a bit, with information on how they used to grind flour, and the guide there told us about all the different sieves used to sort the flour by fineness (the laborers got the flour so coarse it still had rocks in it, while the abbot got the really fine stuff we’d probably consider decent). It was an awe-inspiring area in general.

Connected to the Abbey are the Studley Royal Water Gardens; these were owned and curated by a Victorian gentleman who really liked the Abbey (but unfortunately it was on his neighbor’s land). So he built up these really nice gardens and ponds with viewpoints over to the Abbey so he and his friends could all look at it anyway. His son was able to purchase the land with the Abbey, and eventually it all ended up in the hands of the National Trust.

View of the gardens from the ridge above

View of the stream from a bridge. Over by the Abbey it looks like an actual stream, but in the Studley Royal gardens they wanted to control it a bit more.

We walked back up to the gift shop, hoping to buy some of the things we saw and liked when we bought tickets, but it had already closed! What strange tourist attractions close the gift shop before they close the rest of the grounds? I would have given them a lot more money if they had let me, but I suppose it’s a good thing I couldn’t buy those books. I have waay too many already.

We hopped in the car and headed on to Carperby for dinner and the hotel. We’re staying at the Wheatsheaf, the honeymoon location of James Herriot himself! It’s a very nice little place, with a cute lounge and lovely bar and restaurant. Dinner and bed!