UK Roadtrip: York & Yorkshire Moors

Back home from Nice and time for my second post about our UK roadtrip (first here)!

We said goodbye to our friends in Wales and headed back to England and to Yorkshire where our first stop was York. In old York we only had time for dinner and a walk around but we hadn't planned to visit any museums there anyway so a few hours was plenty. Like Chester, York is a walled city, founded by the Romans (though the wall is medieval), and was also a (Danish) Viking town for a while, Jórvik. As you can see in the photos below York has pretty little streets, called Snickelways. One of these, the Shambles, is a narrow medieval street, lines with shops and tearooms (and pubs of course), which was once the butchers' street. Shambles takes its name from "shamel", meaning the stalls or benches on which the meat was displayed, some of which, including hooks, can still be seen. The current look of the street(s) is from the 1400s.

Cute shop windows


Beautifully adorned building and window

The geography of the world through a tube map

Peter being silly in front of Clifford's Tower, a remnant of a 13-14th century castle and the city wall

We spent the night at Manor House Hotel in West Aukland, County Durham, a hotel which would be our base for the next few days. The Manor House was once Henry III's hunting lodge and apparently there are ghosts around (they didn't say if it was the King himself or someone else...), but we didn't notice anything, maybe because we don't really believe in such things...

The following day (Friday) we steered the car towards the North Yorkshire Moors, or the North York Moors, as they are also called. The moors are one of the largest areas of heather (ljung) moorland (characterised by low growing vegetation on acidic soils; hed in Swedish) in the UK - covering almost 1,500 km² - and it has been a national park since 1952. First, and before we had entered proper moorland, we stopped at Rievaulx Abbey, the ruins of a Cistercian monastery from the 12th century.

As you can see, the cathedral must have been quite something back in the day




Pretty flowers among the stones

Lunch was had in a small village called Hutton-le-Hole where the sheep grazed by the road between the church and the pub!

After lunch we entered real moorland. It was quite uphill getting there but going down was even worst; we had to drive in first gear! It's difficult to take photos that really illustrate how steep it really was though.

Surrounded by heather


Don't want to run down a cute lamb!


Hilly, beautiful landscape


Taking some time to look at the world and reflect

Next episode: Yorkshire's coastline