Rambling

York has proved a good base for my rambling. It’s relatively central, if you want to go to Edinburgh and London, and there are lots of day trips you can make out from it by train or bus. It’s also a nice city in itself and there’s plenty to do, and it's early spring.

Wild racoons, driven to angst by the scent of spring, ravage York

The Jorvik Centre stands in testament to the brilliant Viking remains uncovered in the city centre itself, and includes a little glass-covered segment of the site that one can even walk upon. There is also a short ride in a suspended pod through a reconstructed village where some of the plastic people talk to you in their language (thank god for the helpful guide voice and her translation skills). The artefacts there are also very interesting, not quite so plentiful or well-marked as those in the National Museum of Scotland, but still worth a good peruse, and there is someone (occasionally dressed in a Viking costume) manning a desk who will personally tell you about items if you point at them. Somewhat similar, though less interesting, is the Barley House. This medieval building was discovered beneath a more modern covering, and has now been turned into a kind of museum oriented particularly for children. It sports a jaunty song about getting the plague. There are, of course, many food dispensing buildings with variations on the chocolate theme – after all, York is considered by York to be the home of chocolate. I had a delicious chocolate, honey and lavender fondue to complete my lunch (a selection of delicious pork, including black pudding) one afternoon and thought I would drown from the richness.

Birdhouses, or batboxes?

I’ll add to that handguide summary a path up the Ouse. There are paved paths some of the way, as it’s part of a cycleway, but there is also a right of way that follows the river almost directly. I passed some birdhouses in a small stand of trees, found daffodils, a very green paddock where the Vikings once were, a murder of crows clattering around their nests, robins, the houses and private jetties of rich people on the opposite bank. I walked along the edge of a paddock where sheep looked expectantly to me, and where lambs leapt around next door. I saw a multitude of mole hills, and my first English rabbit. Then I walked back. I was pretty hungry.

While in the Yorkshire area, it’s almost obligatory to see at least some of the dales and the moors. The bus to Whitby went through the northern moors, big expanses of strangely flat rises with an uninviting purple shade pressed into them. I went for a walk in the dales, which in parts had some of the same semi-alien quality as the moors, but much less so. The ground was green, as much of it is farmed, and the hills seemed a more recognisable shape.

My plan for my dales adventure was to walk from Ribblehead (hehehe ribble), which turned out to be a small stop in a somewhat uninviting area with only an Inn to tide it over, to Horton-in-Ribblesdale (HEHEHE), which turned out to be quite otherwise, by means of the summit of Ingleborough. The dales are big, which I got a strong sense of immediately I got off the train. It’s only the peaks that are the real landmarks – everything is farm with long stone walls trailing up and down and across. The dales are big. You wouldn’t want to get lost in them. Imagine that. How silly would you have to be to get lost in the dales.

I had a map, but it may be that perhaps it wasn’t entirely clear on how to get to the initial walk, and it may be that I ended up skulking through what probably wasn’t parkland, scrambling up a ledge of limestone, leaping down over a stone fence topped with barbed wire and landing miraculously on my feet like some madskill ninja, then scaling sideways over the hill to get to the path which I then somehow abandoned by accident, and thereafter abandoned my initial plan to conquer Ingleborough. Instead, after playfully standing in a hole and deliberately filling my shoes and socks with water, I found my way back down off the hill and followed the paths as they were marked by posts or tracks. There were still patches of snow sitting in sheltered places, dips in the ground or against walls. It felt exactly like New Zealand snow, all crunchy and yuck. The wind was chilly.

Again, I found it disconcerting to be walking through what was farmland at least some of the time. Even when I was standing underneath signposts, the presence of cattle or sheep made me feel guilty, and there was nowhere to take shelter should an angry farmer come out and yell at me for trespassing. There were a few other walkers I passed though, and I consoled myself that none of them appeared to have been shot.

It’s difficult to say what the most remarkable thing about the dales (or, the part of them that I saw) is – the vast and bare expanse of them, or the stretches of limestone. The form of the land is very impressive, and I think the emptiness of it emphasises that. The different peaks, including Ingleborough, may not be real mountains, but they are high enough to feel important without overwhelming you like a gnat in a basin. You can see the stone walls dividing it up in sections.

The limestone was, in some respects, more impressive. It’s in the stone walls of course, shards of the stuff piled up on top of itself with a line of barbed wire just for good measure. There are little places here and there where holes in the ground are apparent, lined with the pale limestone. Some have shallow cave-like gaps where you could probably crawl if you were hard-pressed for shelter, though I’d be worried of my foot slipping and catching in an unseen crack. Some of the stone itself was cracked, almost like you could pull the top off it if you tried. It had been weathered and sculpted, with dips and curves, like little islands on a sea of hardy grass. Some, I thought, even looked a little bit like New Zealand, maybe.

As I headed onwards, I came across some very big expanses of the stone, grey and stretched out along the ground. This was the truly alien part of the landscape. The stone almost seemed alive, and it was a little alarming to suddenly drop from a rise, or to look down into a valley, and find it sitting there like a colony of tight-knit creatures watching your every move. If you acted suspiciously you could feel them ruffle and nudge each other, and the air grew thicker while they waited to see what you were going to do.

What I did was walk on down a right of way through clear farmland, disturbing some ewes with their wee lambies, and emerge at the Horton-in- Ribblesdale train station above the township. And what a township it is. If you have ever seen a picture of an idyllic rural English village, you may begin to have some idea. The sun had come out entirely for the afternoon. It was golden and thick on the green paddocks, real honest-to-god green. It gave the giant hill of Pen-y-ghent that the village sits beneath a doting parent quality. Two waterways converge and run beneath a pedestrian bridge, with a wooden seat beside it, and a little paddock of sheep and chickens before it. I think that the last few hours, just wandering and sitting on that seat in Horton-in-Ribblesdale, were the best part of the day.

I have seen bats, flickering around the river as darkness comes down. They move like giant butterflies, and click. No foxes yet. No puffins. 

To find out what exciting animal I have recently seen, tune in for the next instalment, based in Fort William, Scotland. And look at this sunset from York in the meantime: