London :: UK
A lucky escape in Postman Pat country.
Places: York, Middleham, Semerwater, Aysgarth, West Burton, Swaledale, Hawes & Hubberholme.
Coolest thing I did: Sat looking over the glacial lake of Semerwater out towards the snow-covered peaks of the Pennines.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Vikings didn't have horns on their helmets. Apparently they were buried with their drinking horns and when the Victorian archaeologists found them they put 2 and 2 together to get 5 and decided they'd just fallen off.
During my on and off time living in the UK over the last decade I've been telling people at home that I've been living in England. While this is strictly true in a geographical sense, I've really been living in London. London may as well be a different planet to the rest of England and while I've visited quite a few of the provincial cities in England in my time here, I've never really seen much of the countryside. This doesn't seem to bother anyone from London itself, but if you ever meet people from the land outside the M25 (not a given by any means if you restrict yourself to the capital) they will be aghast that you've never seen THE REAL ENGLAND. So now that it looks very likely like my stint in London is over, I've been and gone to see the Yorkshire Dales, which I'm reliably told is part of said Real England.
For the English, England is a land of green hills, pubs with fireplaces and sheep. This is pretty much the description of the Yorkshire Dales. You look out a softly sloping valleys of pure green divided by the unnatural harsh lines of stone walls used to keep sheep eating the particular grass you want them to be eating. Off in the distance you see the snow-capped peaks of the Pennines, a low range of mountains (though I'd imagine most Europeans or North Americans would call them tall hills) that cuts through southern Scotland and much of England. It's all very pretty to look at, and it fulfils the English idea of what their country looks like.
That idea that the real country is where your farmers live is an idea that's shared by lots of Western nations, Australia being no different. Even though most of our population lives in cities on the coast we go and make movies called "Australia" and fill them with drovers and farmers and the like. The English, like us, also seem to be an urban population who yearns for a rural setting, until of course they realise that there's no amenities and walking around in the rain and mud isn't all that much fun.
Having said that, there was a lot of walking around in the rain and mud. From our base in Middleham, a horse breeding town with far too many pubs than necessary to water the local population, we struck out on several day trips into the Dales themselves, climbing hills, walking around lakes and dodging sheep. For someone from Australia, where walking mostly involves National parks and well marked tracks through the bush, walking in England can take a bit of imagination. Most of the time the footpaths you're following don't really exist, they're just agreed routes you can take through someone's farm. Stiles and gates have been provided where possible to allow you to climb over stone walls without knocking them down and letting sheep test the theory of whether the grass is greener but if you, like us, have trouble following the maps then you can sometimes find yourself crossing paddocks full of sheep trying to find where the bloody path went. And sometimes climbing those stone walls you're not supposed to anyway.
Having said that, the scenery is as beautiful as you're led to believe. We were exceptionally lucky with the weather, with a few days of mild fog, one of light rain and even one of blue skies and warmth (!). The day we tried to cross the hill between Keld and Muker the fog was so thick up there that once we got past the road we really couldn't see more than 50 or so metres ahead of us. This meant that while the view was probably spectacular, on our trip it was more spooky. There was also quite a bit of snow up there, which wasn't something I'd expected.
On the return to London just how lucky we were became apparent. It was freezing over Saturday night and Sunday morning and right now (Monday afternoon) I could be looking out the window at Canada. It hasn't stopped snowing for 24 hours or so and is probably far worse up in Yorkshire. We had a freakishly warm week for this time of year and I'm thankful for it.
York itself is one of the oldest cities in Britan, having been founded by the Romans and variously been in the hands of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Normans and the rest. It's restored walls are an anomaly in modern Britan, though the traffic in York itself is a testament to why walls went out of fashion quite some time ago. Unlike most other smaller English cities I've been to it has a certain level of affluence meaning the menace that can sometimes come with gangs of young unemployed men hanging around the middle of your town is missing to a certain degree. It's maintained it's cobbled centre and due to some threatening looking traffic controls (our hire car was almost impaled on a post rising out of the ground to block a street once the bus in front of us had passed) it's almost car free. It's one of those places you'd find full of Americans in summer wandering around yelling "ISN'T IT PEACEFUL?!?!?!" at the top of their lungs. However, in winter they seem to be out of season and it really is ye olde and peaceful.
We did some cultural things but I can safely recommend avoiding both the Viking Centre (complete with costumed staff and faux-time machine) and the Castle Museum. I don't really want to go to these places to listen to manikins moan about the woes facing them in their day-to-day lives. I really couldn't care if Yorik the Blacksmith stiffed you on some horseshoes, as you are made out of plaster-of-Paris and don't exist.
I did like the York Minster, especially going up on the roof and looking down at the city below. I think I've discovered I have a bit of a problem with needing to take every opportunity to see cities of the world from a high vantage point. Perhaps I burnt too many ants with magnifying glasses as a kid and require therapy. Anyway, I've seen shed-loads of churches over the last decade of my life but I must have been in a bit of a lull over the last half year or so, because I'm surprised at how impressed I was by the one in York. It's big, which is always good, has loads of stained glass windows and could probably hold more than a couple of thousand people when there's a blockbuster sermon going on. I'm not 100% sure how having to leave through the gift shop and camels-through-the-eye-of-needles co-exist but they did have some nice gargoyles for sale.
My biggest failure of the week was taking 5 days to finally get a proper fire going in the fireplace of the cottage. It was only on day 5 I discovered kindling in the outhouse, meaning I no longer had to attempt to get it going with wet logs and pack upon pack of fire-lighters (the place reeked of kerosene by the end). Lucky there were lots of nearby pubs that could do so much better.