York
July 31 – August 1, 2023
The Lendal Bridge links the station area on the southwest to the Minster area on the northeast side of the River Ouse. (The lovely name is pronounced like "ooze.") So from our hotel we crossed it a few times a day and ate at several places nearby. Just across the river and down some steps is the Star Inn Restaurant, so named because its branch in the county has a Michelin Star. We had a late lunch there. The meal certainly didn't disappoint and wasn't that outrageously expensive, at least compared to places where we ate in Norway.
York was founded by the Romans in 71 AD under the name Eboracum and became a provincial capital. It has something to do a yew tree, supposedly, and based on a Britannic name. Somehow in the Old Norse of the Vikings that became Jórvik, and hence now York. The various walls and structures might be Roman, Danish, Anglo-Saxon, or maybe something else. According to Wikipedia, the Archbishop of York uses "Ebor" as his surname in official signatures. The main streets in Gloucester end in “-gate” in reference to actual gates that were there. Street names in York ending in “-gate” instead refer to Nordic names. The modern Norwegian word for “street” is gate, pronounced sorta like “gotta.” I've read that in York streets are called gates and gates are called bars, but I don't know the reason for the latter.
York has been a religious center since the Middle Ages. The present building was completed in 1472. The cathedral is the seat of one of the two archbishops in the Church of England, in reality third to Defender of the Faith and Head of the Church of England His Royal Majesty King Charles III, and next the Archbishop of Canterbury. The cathedral is popularly known as York Minster, a minster being a missionary teaching church from Anglo-Saxon days. The real name is The Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Saint Peter in York, so we call it the Minster for short. Given the building's immense size and the closeness of other buildings, it is not easy to get a good picture of the whole front. My efforts are shown below. If my brain had been working, I would have tried my iPhone, which has both a wide angle lens and a super wide angle lens. This is the first trip I have taken since I got this phone, so it didn't occur to me to use it for pictures except when I didn't have my real camera with me.
Looking up into the spire: This is one of my favorite pictures from the whole trip.
The Chapter House ceiling:
I made the next four pictures in 2017:
Back to 2023: the pulpit
Bottoms of bass pipes, down to floor level, both wood and metal
The dragon is hard to spot.
The dials at the bottom of the astronomical clock remind me of the “complications” on an Apple Watch.
The East Window is the largest expanse of mediæval stained glass in the world.
There is an exhibit on the making of the statue of Queen Elizabeth II.
The statue on the West Front is furnished with a net, I think to keep birds off.
Several times a day one of the cathedral staff will say some words of welcome and lead a short prayer.
We attended Evensong there one night. In the summer they have guest choirs. That night they had a choir from a parish church, which did fine, but obviously not up to what were used to in Gloucester. It was likely considered a treat for the singers to sing in the cathedral. And it was still a moving service. At that point it hit me how profoundly thankful I should be for being able to have the trip I was having, and especially fortunate to have lived this long and still be in good enough shape to do all this. And of course I am grateful for friendships that span more than fifty years. I could have done all this trip by myself, but it would not been as much fun.
Stairs lead down to areas where you can see exhibits of remains from Roman times and items from different periods of the cathedral.
