From Pyrenees to Pennines

Project Exhaust-a-Twin (or two)

It’s half term this week. It seems to have become a bit of a tradition to have the twin grandsons – now ten – over for a few days. This time though, all plans got thwarted by almost a week of constant unremitting rain. No fresh air and fun for us this time.

An hour or two at the local adventure playground was rejected in favour of a visit to the local swimming pool.

The boys were charmed by the antiquity of Ripon Baths - built 1903. — The boys were charmed by the antiquity of Ripon Baths – built 1903.

We spent hours playing old-fashioned board games like ‘Go for Broke’. This involves trying to lose the million pounds with which you started the game. In ‘The London Game’, you have to blunder round London’s Underground system whilst your opponents do their best to prevent you reaching your destination. ‘Stone Soup’ means lying through your teeth about the cards you’ve just placed, face down on the table. All useful worthwhile life lessons, I’m sure you’ll agree.

It’s a tradition that breakfasts have to involve ‘Grancakes’ – pancakes to you. Here’s a shot of Ben tossing his – and that one didn’t end up on the kitchen floor.

A more recent tradition insists that during every stay, a traditional English Roast Dinner has to make an appearance, and the twins have to do much of the hard labour: roast chicken, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, carrots, broccoli…and the all-important gravy. I find the timing of all this a bit stressful. No wonder roasts don’t make a frequent appearance in this house.

And of course, we had to have a Grand Day Out. Malcolm had communed with timetables to plan our journey by train and bus: public transport’s a rare treat for these young twins. But the weather on the day was so evil, we abandoned the idea. Walking through town to stand in the rain waiting for a bus that would almost certainly be late suddenly didn’t seem that exciting. So we took the car to Elvington, home of the Yorkshire Air Museum. It was a Bomber Command Station during World War II, and was also the only base used by French heavy bomber squadrons. With one twin passionately knowledgeable about planes – his future career as a pilot is already mapped out – and the other fascinated by World War II, we thought we had a hit on our hands. We did. They clambered in and out of uncomfortably chilly, uninsulated, uncomfortable and draughty cockpits, trying to imagine how it would feel flying long hours through winter skies to the industrial heartlands of Germany, always on the look out for enemy craft, fearful of being shot down in enemy territory. We remembered that only half of all pilots survived the war. We looked round workshops and period displays. And we watched a few films, moving accounts of the lives of those young men who gave their youth, their normal careers and loves and often their lives to the war effort. Lunch at the NAAFI however raised our mood. We were glad not to be placed on wartime rations.

That night, Ben slept for 12 hours straight, and Alex managed 10. Result.

So that was Project Exhaust-a-Gran (& Grandad). No, wait……. it was meant to be called ‘Exhaust-a-Twin’.

Souvenirs of Seville

Torre del Oro by night: or Seville as not seen by Columbus.

‘In fourteen hundred and ninety two

Columbus sailed the ocean blue’……

….as any English school child of my generation will tell you. Well, he actually set sail from Palos, not too far away from the city of Seville: soon it became the gateway to the New World. Ships returned here laden with silver bullion from Bolivia, Peru and Mexico. And before that, in the 12th century, Seville had been the capital of the Almohad Moorish dynasty. So it’s had a splendid past, and has still scores of magnificent buildings from those glittering periods in its history. Seville is famous for its fiestas, its party-going spirit, its bullfights even, and as the home of the tapas, those delicious snacks made the more enjoyable for always being shared with friends. What’s kept us from visiting it until now, I ask myself?

We spent a week there. In mid-October it should have been as warm as an English summer’s day. But in true English style, it rained, deluged, bucketed down for the whole of our first two days. So we’ll draw a veil over the soggy sights we saw then. I won’t tell you about the wonderful cathedral and its Moorish tower, la Giralda , or about the palaces of Real Alcázar: you can read about those elsewhere.

Let’s talk instead about other highlights: Pilate’s house, for instance. It’s sometimes called the poor man’s Real Alcazar, but for us it was magnificent. A mixture of Gothic, Renaissance and Mudéjar styles, it’s a visual feast of elegant and beautiful tiling of the kind even the meanest back street in Seville will produce a dozen examples. It was the then Mayor of Seville who started to have this house built following his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1519. He discovered that the distance from Golgotha to Pontius Pilate’s house was the same as the distance between his planned new home and a Sevillian temple known as Cruz del Campo…. so Pilate’s house it was. Here are some photos.

The historic centre of Seville is a warren of tiny streets, some barely longer than a garden path, no wider than a single car. How does anyone become familiar with them? We didn’t. Once, Malcolm decided to explore what he thought was the parallel street to mine and meet me on the corner. We didn’t see each other again for an hour, not till we’d both abandoned meeting again and each returned to the hotel. On the way of course, we both got waylaid by splendid ceramic tiles in entrance halls, over doorways and climbing up facades. Every stroll through the town was an act of discovery.

Glancing through a perfectly ordinary front door.

Even the undersides of balconies are decoratively tiled.

And street names – often with a strongly Catholic flavour – are always shown in ceramic tiles.

Here’s an old fire insurance sign: ceramic of course.

A favourite: this frieze runs the whole width of the building on both sides.

A narrow street by night.

No cars here, please.

A particularly fine terrace just near where we were staying.

We had a special evening on the Guadalquivir river, seeing the city by night.

I went to a truly wonderful concert, ‘In-vocazione’, that I spotted advertised in a craft-makers cooperative. Sixty singers from Seville, from Italy, and a Franco-Russian-Spanish(??) group sang together, plundering mainly from the folk traditions of southern and Eastern Europe, of Iran, of India,. At the beginning, a single male voice was joined by other men, then by women singing from the balconies. As one group moved down to join the men, more sang from the balconies and others, joyfully, among the audience. They inhabited and involved the architecture of the building as much as they did us, their audience. At the end, as part of their encore, they taught all of us there to join in one of my own choir’s standards, ‘Belle mama’. Singing ‘our’ song with these astonishing choirs was one of the most moving moments of my life.

The women start to sing.

We didn’t expect to enjoy visiting the Bullfighting Museum. But we did. Who knew that bullfighting was devised not as a spectator sport, but as a means of teaching the soldiers of the nobility how to go to war with the enemy? Or that Spain’s youngest bullfighter in recent times was merely nine years old? Or that tickets on the black market to a specially anticipated fight can cost as much as three thousand euros? No wonder we don’t plan to go.

Plaza de Toros de la Maestranza: not a bull in sight today.

And tapas. We ate somewhere new every day. We ate different dishes every day. The variety of foods on offer is quite extraordinary, from refined and elegant to rib-sticking and peasanty, with fish very often being star of the show. Here’s a picture of a DIY dish. Bake your own chorizo over a little bonfire of alcohol. Delicious.

Let’s end on a popular, un-cultural note. Here’s a sequence of decorated garage doors and graffiti that made us smile as we mooched round the city.

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Do you fancy going to Seville soon? I certainly do.

A view of Plaza de España, and the popular horse-drawn carriages of Seville, seen reflected in the windows of the public toilets.

Have baby, will travel.

It starts at the airport. No standing for ages in an untidy queue waiting to struggle your way onto your place in the ‘plane. You, your partner and baby are ushered forward, taken onto the aircraft like minor dignitaries and shown to your seats where the emergency procedures are explained.

At your destination, everyone’s prepared to make friends with you, help you in every way they can.

Out at a restaurant, your baby will be the star of the show. He may be passed round for a series of cuddles while you get on with your meal .

William in a restaurant with his Spanish would-be Granny, who made every attempt to add him to her existing collection of 8 grandchildren.

If you have the sense to travel with two sets of the baby’s grandparents, you may only get a chance to spend quality time with your infant after bedtime and before breakfast. This may mean you see him mainly round about 3.00 a.m. , but you can’t have everything

So that was how our holiday in la Rioja, Spain, worked out. We’d gone there with three-month-old William, his mum Sarah and dad Tom (my son), and Sarah’s parents. Daughter Emily and her boyfriend Miquel joined us from Barcelona for the weekend too. We’d chosen an area unknown to us all, which seemed worth exploring. Our base was a tiny hamlet, El Villar, whose only claim to fame is that there are dinosaur prints, lots of them, all over the place. You’ll find them by looking out for life-sized models of Tyrannosaurus Rex and similar ranging round the area. But we spent time wandering round the extraordinarily folded and buckled landscape of hills and mountains and the tiny villages perched on the slopes. There were vultures, soaring high above us on the thermals as they searched for their next meal. There were ancient towns and churches. There were Spanish lunchtimes, lazy affairs that started at 2.00 or so and carried languidly along till 4.00 or later. There were evenings of fiercely competitive card games in which the best (wo)man didn’t always win

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Most of all though, there was William. He was the centrepiece of a holiday in which an extended family had the chance simply to spend time together, getting to know each other better, and having fun. Babies make good holiday companions.

William's exhausted. — William’s exhausted.

A church crawl in Beverley

‘A minster is a church that was established during Anglo-Saxon times as a missionary teaching church, or a church attached to a monastery. A cathedral is the seat of a bishop (his seat, or throne, is called a cathedra).’

So that sorts that one out. We’ve been wondering what makes York and Beverley minsters, when one is in effect a cathedral, and the other a parish church: both are equally magnificent.

West Towers, Beverley Minster: Wikimedia Commons

Over the years, we’ve visited York Minster many times. But Beverley, tucked away in the East Riding of Yorkshire, in the flatlands of the Wolds, was unknown to us both. An outing organised for some National Trust volunteers at Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal put that right this week.

Beverley itself is a lovely town, founded way back in the 700s by St. John of Beverley, who was a scholar, a healer and a holy man. He built the monastery which became the nucleus of the town, and indeed of the minster. Even by the 1100s this church had been rebult several times, especially after a serious fire in 1188. Then it was all to do again in 1213: the tower they had built was too ambitiously large, and collapsed. But later, the building was yet again in a bad way:

‘The Minster as we have it today owes much to the work of the great 18th Century church architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. By the early 18th century the church was in a bad state – decaying and neglected. Worse, the north wall of the north transept – built on a marsh, don’t forget – was listing badly: it had actually leaned four feet into the street.

Hawksmoor was called in to advise how to save the building. The roof of the north transept was removed, and a wooden cradle, designed by York joiner William Thornton, was fixed around the wall. Then, over a period of 11 days, using ropes and pulleys, the entire wall – 200 tonnes of stone – was pulled back upright.’.

Do follow the link to the article in The York Press from which this quotation is taken. It’ll give you an excellent potted history of this wonderful building. And it’ll introduce you too to the Minster’s very special tower. Toil up the 113-stepped spiral staircase and you’ll find a Georgian treadmill, used to open up a ceiling boss over the nave to enable workmen to haul materials into the roof area. You’ll find graffiti, some more than 200 years old, scratched into the plain glass of the rose windowsby the men who’ve worked up here over the centuries.

The treadmill used to lift the ceiling boss

View once the ceiling boss is lifted.

Lifting the ceiling boss.

Graffiti

More recent graffiti.

Ancient beams in the Minster.

So here is a serene and beautiful building which has so much to offer: a fascinating ecclesiastical and architectural history, wonderful stonework and stained glass, misericords to investigate.

The Minster could keep you happily exploring all day. But Beverley has another church, St. Mary’s, which is one of the great parish churches of England, and it too provides a lesson in mediaeval church architecture.

Monarchs of England.

There are traces of its early years, when it was first built in 1120, but wander round, and you can see how the nave, side aisles and chancel date from the 13th century, the truly wonderful west front from the 14th century, the glorious painted wooden roof, and the choir stalls with their misericords from 1445. You don’t know what a misericord is? It’s a ledge projecting from the underside of a hinged seat in a choir stall, which when turned up, gives support to someone standing through the long, long moments of a mediaeval church service. Not normally on public display, they’re often whimsical, drawing on folk traditions, or slightly imperfect knowledge of exotic beasts. Here’s an elephant from St. Mary’s. And here are minstrels atop a carved pillar. And a 13th century rabbit, thought to be the inspiration for Tenniel’s illustration of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.

After all that, there was no time left to explore Beverley. We’ve decided that’s a pity. We’ll be back. But however much time we spend in the town, we’ll be sure to revisit both the Minster and St. Mary’s: both are very special places

Fountains by Floodlight

The days are getting shorter. The nights are getting longer. We grumble every time we notice another milestone passed, another hour in which it’s no longer possible to enjoy sun and light and – daytime. Ten o’clock. Nine o’clock. Eight o’clock. And now we’ve reached 7 o’clock. Winter’s on its way.

But there are consolations in that diminishing light. Yesterday for instance. As darkness started to blot Fountains Abbey from view, floodlighting blazed over the buildings, enhancing well-known silhouettes against the night sky. Places grown familiar to me over the past months presented themselves fresh and new. The structure and proportions of those arches! Those solid yet soaring columns, supporting unimaginable weight! That vaulting in the cellarium! No mediaeval monk would have had the least experience of the power of modern lighting to illuminate every corner of the abbey they knew so well from a lifetime spent within its confines. Yet last night, I felt closer to them, and to their spiritual concerns and way of life than I do as I enjoy the abbey site by day.

Glancing upwards to Huby's Tower. — Glancing upwards to Huby’s Tower.

The place was busy though. I was there as one of my duties as a regular volunteer there*. Dressed as a monk, I first of all spent an hour or so with families, taking them round the site while talking about the daily routine of those silent choir monks, from their first act of worship at 2.00 a.m. to their eighth and final one at an early bedtime. And then I stayed dressed in those robes as night fell, the floodlighting came on, and Saddleworth Male Voice Choir assembled in the cellarium to perform in the gathering darkness. The acoustics of the place are exceptional, bringing a power and mystery to the voices of the singers, affecting listeners and performers alike: everyone present knew they were witnessing something special.

As for me and my fellow ‘monks’. Well, we answered questions, We tried to persuade children to join us at 2.00 a.m. Vigils (Did any of them come? I don’t know. I was asleep at the time). We were on call as local colour for all kinds of photo opportunities.

As the music finished, we all walked up the hill, away from the Abbey, to street lights, a car journey back home, and 21st century life. It had been good, very good, to have an hour or two away from all that, in touch with life in simpler times.

*I keep promising to tell you more about life as a National Trust volunteer at Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal. And I will, I will.

A late September garden, in the early evening…..

…. is a lovely thing.

So I thought I’d share it with you.

Our well-travelled tourists … and guests

We do like to be beside the seaside..... at Whitby. — We do like to be beside the seaside….. at Whitby.

According to my daughter and son-in-law, there’s an old Chinese proverb that says that guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.

According to our friend Kalba, it’s Benjamin Franklin who coined exactly the same phrase.

Either way, received wisdom is that nobody can put up with house guests for more than a very few days without losing their patience, their good humour, and the friendship.

Our Ariegeois friends have just proved all that wrong. They stayed ten days, and it was wonderful. Though pretty exhausting, it was nothing but pleasure to spend an extended period with friends whom we value, but see far too little, and a fantastic chance to showcase Yorkshire – or a tiny portion of it anyway.

In my last post, I did a whistle-stop tour of our first few days together. Here’s how the rest of the holiday went….

Knaresborough, with its wonderful 19th century railway viaduct spanning the River Nidd…

An obligatory coffee-stop at Betty’s, Yorkshire’s most famous tea room…..

Christine and a plate of Bett's scones. — Christine and a plate of Betty’s scones.

A meander round the Valley Gardens in Harrogate…..

A trip to the fantastic geological outcrops of Brimham Rocks…

A day when our friends more than paid for their board by taking charge and getting our wood delivery for the winter shifted and sorted……

Max making a fine job of stacking the wood.

An evening with Ripon’s Wakeman, who since AD 886, has ‘set the watch’ to guard the citizens, sounding his horn at 9.00 p.m. every evening – every single day, whatever the weather, whatever the circumstances…..

A trip to York…..

The Shambles, once the street where all the butchers were, now a tourist Mecca. Wikimedia Commons.

A day in Whitby, fishing port, tourist destination, jet-mining town, and home of Dracula’s author, Bram Stoker…… Oh, and we ate fish and chips. Of course.

The harbour at Whitby. — The harbour at Whitby……

..... and a line of cormorants. — ….. and a line of cormorants.

And that’s only the headlines.

If it’s Tuesday, it must be…. Yorkshire.

Goodness me. Christine and Max, our French friends from our days in Laroque arrived on Saturday, and it’s only Tuesday today. Look what we’ve crammed in….

An orientation session in Nidderdale, taking in a few views….

A peaceful morning at Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal……

A visit to another UNESCO World Heritage Site, Salts Mill in Saltaire……

Salts Mill, Saltaire (image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

…. where we enjoyed David Hockney’s Arrival of Spring exhibition, featuring the Yorkshire Wolds…

The Five Rise locks at Bingley: a narrowboat was making its slow upward progress through the five locks as we arrived…

All five of the Five Rise locks at Bingley.

A mooch round Haworth, home to the Brontë sisters….

And views, views, always vast, always bounded by drystone walls, always different.

We’re having a rest tomorrow.

Food for free 2

Blackberries in a landscape, ready to be eaten. — Blackberries in a landscape, ready to be picked and eaten.

I’m not a fashionable forager. You won’t find me back in the kitchen preparing to fry hogweed, or blitzing ground-ivy into my mayo. I’m a bit conventional, and I stick with what I know. A month or two back it was elderflowers for cordial. Just now the blackberry season is in full swing, and cob nuts are there if you know where to look. Friends with big gardens invite me to forage beneath their apple and pear trees for windfalls, and as soon as the first frosts strike, I’ll be looking for sloes to make a batch of sloe gin, and maybe I’ll make some rosehip syrup too..

I like to look for mushrooms too, though I’m only confident to identify two or three kinds of fungi at most. There are field mushrooms for the taking at the bottom of the garden.

Refugees from the sports pitch? Or puffballs?

But last Thursday I was out walking with a friend when we saw something that put any existing evening meal plans on hold. Over there in the corner of that meadow – look! A white football, miles from any football pitch or recreation ground, with a tennis ball alongside, and a couple of golf balls next to them too. Except we knew they weren’t lost property accidentally abandoned by sportspeople . They were puffballs, those extraordinary giant white mushrooms which have no open cap with spore-bearing gills. And they are barely attached to the ground, with no apparent stem. My friend didn’t want them: she’s married to an amateur mycologist and sees quite enough of mushrooms without eating the wretched things, thank you. But I did. I reorganised my rucksack to accommodate the football and the tennis ball , and left the golf balls to grow up to be footballs in their turn.

My pack seemed unexpectedly heavier for the last mile or two of our walk. It was hardly surprising. My football weighed in at 827 grams – well over 1 1/2 lb. It made a wonderful supper, fried in thick slices in butter with lardons and parley and lemon zest, with just a hint of garlic. I gave a big chunk to friends who had us round to forage for apples and plums the next day, and the rest made a vast vat of soup. Who said there was no such thing as a free lunch?

Here's our bigger puffball, on the scales and weighing in at 827 grams. — Here’s our bigger puffball, on the scales and weighing in at 827 grams.

‘Food for Free 2’ to distinguish it from a post I wrote in April 2011, when I did indeed join in foraging for some rather odd items of wild food

From Abbottside to Yoredale, via Faggergill * and Scaleber^

What could be more fun than pottering round the back roads of England on a sight-seeing outing? Even more memorable than charming village greens, ancient market towns, and ever-changing scenery are certain English place names.

What about Affpuddle (Dorset), Barton-in-the-Beans or Burton-le Coggles (both in Lincolnshire), Dirty Gutter (Staffordshire), Dirdle Door and Gussage St. Michael (both in Dorset), Great Cockup (Cumbria), Lower Slaughter and Tomtit’s Bottom (both in Gloucestershire), Oh Me Edge (Northumberland), Ryme Intrinseca (Somerset), Sheepy Parva (Warwickshire) or Wyre Piddle (Worcestershire)? Or dozens and dozens of others.

Somehow, the names themselves give a clue about where in the country they’re situated, to those of us born and bred here. Yorkshire, for instance, often has a gritty edge to the names of its towns and villages, which are characterful, rather than pretty. Blubberhouses is where the houses by the bubbling streams were found: Grimwith was the wood haunted, once upon a time, by ghosts and goblins. And Arncliffe never used to be simply a well known landmark beloved of rock climbers and ramblers, but was instead the eagle’s cliff.

These place names should intrigue us. As elsewhere, those in Yorkshire reveal a history in which migrants from Celtic, Viking and Saxon lands, from Rome and from France populated the teritory, making homesteads and small holdings in a landscape which was not always welcoming.

Long before the Romans, the whole area was dominated by a powerful Celtic tribe, the Brigantes. They could be found in Ireland too, and even the Greek geographer Ptolemy had heard of them. They gave us place names still important round here: Pen-y-ghent – one of the Three Peaks – reminds us that to the Celts, ‘penno‘ meant ‘hill‘. They named three rivers too: the Nidd (‘brilliant‘), the Wharfe (‘winding‘) and the Ure (‘strong’, or ‘sacred‘).

The Romans had a large presence in Yorkshire – especially in York itself – and we live quite near another large and important settlement, Aldbrough. They left artefacts, buried settlements, fragments of their long straight roads, but here in Yorkshire, no place names.

When the Romans left, Eastern England was the destination of waves of invaders from Germanic peoples we now know collectively as Anglo-Saxons. They came, they conquered, they settled. They made homes – ‘hams‘ -for themselves (Clapham), and farms: ‘tun’ means farmstead (Horton). They made clearings in the woodland (‘leys’), and small towns grew up – Leyburn. They were the first to identify Yorkshire as a large geographical entity, and divided the area into Thyrdings, which we later called Ridings. Read all about it in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 1065!

During the same period, Vikings also came from Scandinavia. We think of them swashbuckling their way across the land, raping and pillaging and laying waste to all in their path. But the fact that 2/3 of settlement names in Yorkshire can be traced back to Old Norse tells a different story. The Vikings too wanted land on which to settle and make a living. Their names include terms like ‘slack‘ (‘hollow‘), keld (‘spring‘), ‘gill‘ (‘ravine‘) and ‘foss‘ (‘waterfall‘). In particular, those very many settlements whose name includes ‘– thorpe‘(‘outlying farmstead‘), ‘– thwaite‘ (‘clearing‘) and ‘– dale‘ (‘valley‘) betray their Viking origins.

And then it was 1066 and All That. The Normans came and they conquered. In particular, Wiilliam conducted a campaign of ‘harrying of the north’, systematically devastating the countryside in order to isolate and destroy his enemies. Unsurprisingly, there is little French influence on Yorkshire place names – apart from that left by the monks. Several Cistercian Abbeys in Yorkshire have left their names behind: Jervaulx (that means ‘by the River Ure‘) and Rievaulx (‘the valley of the river Rye’), as well as Fountains Abbey – ‘font‘ meant ‘spring‘ in Norman French, and the area on which the abbey is built is rich in water sources.

So by this time, most settlements in Yorkshire had acquired the names by which we recognise them now. Here are a few of my favourites. Enjoy their names, enjoy their meanings, and maybe add a few more of your own favourites?

Appletreewick (pronounced ‘Aptrick‘): dairy farm by the apple tree. (OE)

Arkengarthdale: the valley where Arkil (ON personal name) had his enclosure.

Buttertubs: perhaps named after the potholes used by the farmers to cool their butter on the way to market.

Conistone Cold: the King’s farm exposed to the cold (ON &OE)

Crackpot: the crevice where crows nest (ON & ME)

Giggleswick: Gikel’s (OE personal name) dairy farm.

Gordale: the dirty valley or the valley covered in manure: (ON &ON/OE)

Hardraw: the shepherds’ row of cottages (OE)

Ingleton: the farm on the hill (OE)

Langstrothdale: the valley with a long stretch of marsh overgrown with brushwood (OE &ON)

Muker: small cultivated field (ON)

Settle: a dwelling place (ON)

Swinithwaite: a clearing made by burning (ON)

Trollers Gill: troll’s arse ravine (ON &OE)

Whernside: the hillside where querns (millstones) were found (ON)

ON – Old Norse

OE – Old English

ME – Middle English

The landscape of Buttertubs, only a little tamed since Viking times.

* Faggergill: the ravine in a sheep enclosure (ON)
^ Scaleber: The hill with the shieling (hut or high pasture) (ON& OE)