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| Pea Soup |
We set off for our northern adventure on one of those foggy London days that people call ‘pea soup’, and that Sherlock Holmes describes loosing his criminals in. We trudged through the mist to pick up our car, which to Tony’s delight had been upgraded from a VW Polo to a Pergeot 308CC convertible - not that the weather was going to be conducive to having the top down.
Our first stop was Kings College Chapel in Cambridge - partly because it was on the way to Yorkshire where we were spending the night. We walked through the beautiful streets of the university town to get to the Chapel. It was graduation day so we had the added bonus of seeing the students striding around in their gowns, posing with their parents.
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| Busy Cambridge Streets |
Inside the Chapel was as beautiful as I remembered from my visit with Mum and Dad in 1998. What I hadn’t remembered was the intensity of the Tudor motifs. As one of the plaques pointed out, the Tudors had just won a long civil war, and so probably felt entitled to revel in creating a beautiful church filled with their red and white rose. While we were sitting and enjoying the stained glass windows and the elegant fan vaulted ceiling, the Organist started practising. We finished out visit bathed in the peals of the organ as it echoed around the walls.
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| Outside Kings College Chapel |
We bundled ourselves back into the car - and because it now gets dark (proper dark) here at about 4pm in the afternoon, abandoned plans to drive through Ely (it apparently got its name from the Eels that use to thrive in the water around the village - eel pie is still served as a local speciality) and headed straight for Yorkshire.
We were booked into The Mount House, a stunning B&B in the little village of Terrington which is in estate of Castle Howard. The drive was tough - only 2.5 hours - but all of it in the pouring rain on unknown roads. We arrived tired at 6.30 to be welcomed into the lovely warm house of Kathryn and Nick and their two Labradors and a cat. After a glass of wine, the tail end of the rugby, good chats to our hosts and a freshen up, we jumped back in the car to head to the local gastro pub ‘the Durham Ox’. Named after an Ox that was apparently over 1000k and stood 5’10”, the pub is in the village of Crayke which sits at the bottom of the hill that the Grand Old Duke of York marched his 10,000 men up and down. The pub served excellent local steak, game, and deconstructed apple crumble. perfect fare in the cold and wet.
We drove through the winding country roads back to the Mount House and curled up in our gloriously soft bed.
Houses, Romans and Ruins
After a lovely leisurely breakfast, with plenty of coffee, pats of the dogs, and lessons on my ipad for Kathryn and Nick, we packed the car and set off. We had wanted to go for a walk locally but persistent rain and strong wind meant that it would have been just miserable. Instead we went for a drive around the nearby villages while we waited for Castle Howard to open.
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| Castle ruins at Sheriff Hutton |
One of the most amazing things about driving through Britain is the ability to drive through a village, and look up and see the ruins of a castle or an abbey. Our first real experience of this was driving through the village of Sheriff Hutton. We pulled off the road to take photos. What was most striking was that the village had probably been there as long as the castle had, and when the castle fell into ruins, the village just continued on around it.
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| The approach to Castle Howard |
Getting excited about castles was nothing compared to Castle Howard. We were very lucky as many of the manor houses are only open during the summer - however Castle Howard opens again for the end of November (yesterday to be exact) until Christmas so the public can see the house decorated with lights and holly. Castle Howard was the set for Brideshead Revisited, and for anyone who has seen the movie, you may remember the approach to the house - long straight roads through archways and gatehouses lined by trees. Even in the winter with the trees all bare, it really is breathtaking.
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| Walls - to keep things out - or in |
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| The door to the walled garden |
We got ourselves tickets from the stable courtyard where the visitors’ reception is and wandered down the hill towards the house. On the right hand side of the walk down is the walled rose garden and ornamental vegetable garden. We opened a very unassuming door in the wall and suddenly found ourselves in a private world. It felt just like something from The Secret Garden (Tony hasn’t ever read or seen it so I had to give him the Reader’s Digest version as we wandered around). No one else visiting the house was bothering to look at the grounds (it was still raining and quite cold) so we had the place entirely to ourselves.
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| The front of Castle Howard |
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| The Moat |
The house itself is so ‘happily situated’ by the shores of a large lake, surrounded by woods and rolling hills. Built around 300 years ago by the Howard family - after their brush with royalty when HenryVIII married Catherine Howard and then beheaded her - and has been owned by the same family ever since. The tour of the house is really comprehensive - walking through bedrooms, music rooms, through the main entrance hall (with a quick stop to warm up by the fire), up the stairs to look down from the gallery. Adorned with christmas decorations it actually felt like a home. Pictures of the current generation of children stood on the desks and pianos as they would in any house, and presents under the various christmas trees were wrapped and named by a mother (and not a stylist). Unlike visiting Versailles - which just feels like a museum - Castle Howard was a modern example of how to run a large (and expensive) house, whilst remaining engaged with the local community that now supports it - rather than the other way around.
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| Castle Helmsley |
From Castle Howard we headed for the Yorkshire Moors for a taste of Wuthering Heights. At the entrance to the Moors National Park however we got sidetracked by the castle in the village of Helmsley. The castle had been started in the 1100s and added to over the next 600 years. It has quite amazing defenses which still survive - a ditch, a very high hill, then a deep moat, then another steep hill and then the castle. During the English Civil War the defenses were tested as the castle was under siege for 3 months until they surrendered. The parliamentarians determined that the castle be destroyed to prevent it being used in future by the royalists - and so most of the towers were knocked down - and later pillaged by local farmers for the stone. We had a great time clambering around the ruins in the cold and imagining how hard it would have been to actually attack such a well placed castle.
From Helmsley we drove into the moors. The countryside actually changed colour - from rolling greens to reds and browns - and craggy peaks. It was easy to imagine it as a fitting scene for King Lear to be wandering and Heathcliff to be ranging. A couple of quick roadside stops for photos and we headed for Hadrian’s wall and the remains of Corbridge Roman Town.
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| The Moors |
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| The Grain Stores at Corbridge Roman Town |
We got there just on dusk (3.30pm) and rushed out to wander the streets of what was once the frontier of the Roman Empire. We were quite astonished at the level of sophistication in the frontier town - carefully constructed grain silos with channeled air underneath the floor to keep the grain dry, stone drains in the streets (with carefully laid stones to allow you to cross without falling in). But most amazing of all was the road - the main street - which connected Corbridge with the other Roman Towns along Hadrian’s Wall all the way across. By the time we finished it was too dark to see the wall itself so we set the TomTom for Edinburgh, and we’ll catch the wall on the way back South.
As I write this we have just crossed the Boarder into Scotland and will be in Edinburgh in an hour. The real North begins.
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