As usual, we begin by discussing the county town of York which is the namesake of Yorkshire.
Yorkshire, and York especially, are profoundly grim. Terminal and blackened cloud crowds overhead, and creeps through the skies.
The city, or perhaps the town, is small, and surrounded by the old Roman wall. The wall has been rebuilt and knocked down and rebuilt and knocked down several times, but remains phenomenal and very pleasant to walk along. As you walk around, you find various ancient gates into the town. Various street names as well contain the suffix '-gata' which was Scandanavian for road.
The town is ancient in origin. The Celts called it 'Eburakon' meaning 'place of the yew trees'. The Romans renamed it 'Eburacum', and it became the central northern settlement for the Romans, being the capital of Britannia Inferior. The Angles renamed it 'Eorfwic', and the Vikings renamed it 'Jorvik'. New York was then named after it.
The town remains remarkably peaceful and quiet and untrammeled by rampant immigration. Like the old medieval standard, streets curl and wind in knotted and intricate ways, like other ancient towns such as Norwich and Cambridge. The whole town seems built around the Yorkminster, which is impeccable, and built on top of the original Roman basilica.
You wander round the town in Christian reverie, like Plato, lost in thoughts and contemplation of the Divine. Like a wandering monk. The bells raise you in the morning, and you leave the Grand Hotel and walk like a faithful subject, like an ant in God's plan, towards the bells which call you. You journey to the minster for morning prayer, and are joined by only a handful of elderly folk. The morning is cold. The sky is grey. The old streets are quiet. A security guard greets you at the entrance to the minster. Then the clergy on the interior. A bald man on crutches leads. And you are stunned by the quiet and cold of the morning, and by the great height of the minster, and also the emptiness, as if the whole space was made for specifically you to be with God.
Later you tumble through the town and all the pleasantries of the place. The place still feels remarkably medieval. There is the famous tea shop. The town is nicely arranged. And there is an opera house, an art gallery. At one time, it is true, that the clocks of this country were not in fact all in sync. Each location had no way of exactly syncing time with another in our realm. Until the construction of the railways - and you can visit the railway museum. At this point, the clocks and time had to be synced for the sake of the train timetables. Our point is, that trains enabled tourism and York became at that Victorian time a tourist destination. Various amenities, like opera house and art gallery thus made sense.
But so much history is held in one place. Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings, civil wars, Reformation, Victorian trains and tourism. Yet the wall and the basilica still stand. And as you walk along the north wall, and look out upon the town, which is so quiet and empty, you see so many neatly collected houses, nooks, and alleyways, that it feels really quite medieval. And yet the towering precipice in the middle of Yorkminster. And you can look out over the orchards, and houses, and what look like houses for the clergy, who each morning rise early and ring bells etc. And it has the absolute and definite feel of a monastery. Old and bald monks tending to their orchards within the Roman walls. A cathedral on top of the basilica. Indeed, Yorkminster is the centre of the Province of York, the second province to that of Canterbury. It thus has a crucial role within the ancient English church. And yet we have absolutely heathenry of a women in charge. Anyone who reads the Bible for five minutes knows there is zero basis for female bishops.
And the Church of England is so ancient and essential. It cannot be lost. Yet it is infected by woke. Bede recounts its formation. St Alban, beheaded in Verulamium for refusing to denounce Christ. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kings. The towering figure of Pope Gregory the Great, and his letters to his missionary Augustine, with orders to tame the English. And the wandering Celtic church, the mission of Iona, descending from some mystical isles and converting Lindisfarne and the North East and York. Thus, the Province of York was shaped by Celtic missionaries, and the Province of Canterbury shaped by papal missionaries.
And a handful of old bookshops with old well designed and constructed books in the winding streets. A quiet town, a small town, a very much still English town with little immigration. Yet the grim echo of Viking and Norsehood stays, and the Roman impulse from the powerful basilica, and represented by that statue of Constantine the Great, who was crowned Emperor here in York. Crowned Emperor of the Roman Empire in York?! Who can believe it!
And you wander in and out of the city walls, or the walls of the monasteries (this is a monastery town, like Cambridge), and the market - for these ancient English towns were often built around markets and rivers enabling trade. And speaking of the river, as usual in such strategic places, a Norman castle on the mound over looking the water. And there exist these tiny little cafes in the wall, like the Perky Peacock, which are cute. And then you can wander to the remains of the abbey, and it was indeed said to be quite a glorious abbey. The town certainly feels like a place of nuns and monks tending gardens and turning tiny and neat little corners in the winding corridors of the streets.
And yet the place is certainly pervaded by a certain misery, a certain misery that is grim and gothic, like much of the rest of Yorkshire and indeed the North of England.
You wander into the Grand hotel, arriving smartly by train, and as you exit the station see immediately the Roman wall, which you pass under. And it was autumn, so one felt the autumn cold and coffee and young student girls walked around in glee at their romantic autumnal spiced latte, reading useless books in gothic York. But compared to other English towns and cities, it was remarkably quiet and peaceful, miserable and grey, isolated and desolate.
And you wander into an Irish pub after dark and the grimness slightly subsides in the warmth.
What else can one say? That fond memories of previous visits to this grisly town recall cocktails in the Grey's Court garden in the sunshine, which is very smart and pleasant; that Yorkminster is towering and awe-striking; and that there is another church, a tiny church, within the nooks and crannies of the streets if you can find it, which was remarkably gothic and dark and gloomy, intimate, black, and Protestant, which contained wooden booths for private families, and was lit by flickering candle light. The place was certainly gothic Protestant with white-washed walls.
For York is firmly within the Germanic East of our isles, which distinguishes it from, say, Manchester, which is firmly Celtic. It also certainly contains lingering Scandanavian elements, for sure, and the towering legacy of the Roman basilica is undeniable.
What of the rest of Yorkshire? The Yorkshire Dales are most natural and sublime. Sheffield was the steel centre of the Empire. Leeds is an up-and-coming city, like Manchester.