Scotland 2023 Day 5: York Minster and Fountains Abbey

Breakfast at the Radisson Hotel in York was a more traditional hotel buffet, with the notable exception being that, in addition to the expected tray of scrambled eggs, there was also a tray of fried eggs. Neat trick! While E had the pork sausage, I had the (English) bacon. My recollection of the latter had me expecting more of a ham flavor, but these also tasted a bit more like pork sausage to me. Disappointing.

York has always been this trip’s “problem child”. By all rights we probably should have scheduled two nights in York so we could enjoy about a day-and-a-half in the city, but for reasons I had us arriving mid-afternoon and then leaving just before lunch the following day, giving us time to only take in two main attractions plus (perhaps) a couple of side attractions if things worked out. From the start I was worried we’d might have to cut some things short. (When we were deciding on whether to do many one-day trips with short drives in between vs basing ourselves in a single location and then making fewer longer drives on the way to Edinburgh, it was York that was the likely spot we’d base ourselves in for a 2-4 days if we’d selected the latter option.)

Anyway, we checked out of the hotel after breakfast (leaving our car still parked in the garage) and did the ½ mile walk to York Minster, walking along a portion of the city walls at one point. We went past the main entrance in order to see the Roman column and statue of Alexander the Great, then purchased our ticket just in time to join the 10A free tour. The tour was wonderful, giving just the right amounts of history, architecture, and explanation of many of the stained glass windows. We were really happy we’d taken advantage of it. From there, back to the hotel to pick up the car and make the (roughly) 60 minute drive to Fountains Abbey.

Approaching York Minster from the south

Closing in on the south entrance.  We arrived just prior to the 930A opening and didn't realize that this was the main entrance since the door was closed and no signs were out yet...

...so we went to the east side, which looked more inviting and where we saw a lot of people (already on some kind of private tour).

About 1/3 of the east side was undergoing structural work - apparently, one of the big windows and walls was unsound and being worked on.  This was all the scaffolding we could see from our hotel room.

A semi panoramic shot of the east side of the Minster.  York is a full cathedral, but it started as a minster (mission).  They've stuck with that name over the centuries.  Although it started Catholic, it became a non-denominational minster centuries ago.  This helped it escape the Dissolution of the Monasteries.  It also avoid significant looting during the Civil War because the Rebel commander who occupied York was a York native and loved the Minster, so he ordered his men to treat the Minster with respect.

The Roman-era column outside York Minster.

The statue of Constantine the Great outside the east side of York Minster

Various views of stained glass windows at York.  Our tour guide did a nice job of giving us context for a lot of these.  This particular window, located just above the main entrance on the south end, includes the Heart of York tracery at the top.

The middle row of windows here depict the Apostles.  Panes 1, 2 and 8 each show two Apostles, for a total of 11 Apostles.  Pane 7 is SUPPOSED to have a 2nd head, but it was removed during a Victoria-era repair.  Although it wasn't 100% clear, the implication is that the missing head was Judas's.

These windows were found in the Chapter House.  Underneath are the seats lining the walls, each with vaulted ceilings above them that provide amazing acoutical reinforcement.  It was possible to hear everyone who was sitting in a seat even if they were clear across the room from you.  Some renovations going on in the room prevented us from confirming this, but apparently they have school groups sit down and experience this.

The Rose Window.  After the War of the Roses ended the victorious Lancastrian monarch commissioned this window for York - it very clearly shows the red rose of Lancaster rather than the white rose of York, and was a massive display of royal (Lancastrian) power to remind the Yorkists who had won.

Walking through The Shambles

Although we ended up deciding to have lunch at Fountains, there had been another plan initially. I thought that illustrated an interesting example of how things are different between the US and UK.

In the US, if you’re in a decent sized town you’d not only have a huge number of choices on where to grab a bite, but you’d not think twice about where you were going to park your car. OF COURSE the place you were going would have lots of parking just outside the door. Well, not so much in the UK. First, there’s not a McDonald’s on every corner, signage is much more discreet (so you aren’t going to see a place worth stopping for from half a mile away – you’ll be well past it before you even realize it was there) and whatever place you find is extremely likely to have no dedicated parking spaces. Even the street it is on might not have any parking since so many lanes are so narrow.

So I wasn’t prepared to “just wing it” and assume we’d randomly find a suitable place. There was just too much risk of passing something and then finding out that we’d passed the last option for the next 10 miles. Once again, Google and TripAdvisor to the rescue, with a small sandwich shop just barely on the outskirts of York that had a simple menu and an attached parking lot. I admit, when I looked at the Google Street View of the place I could NOT figure out how you actually were supposed to orient your car in the parking lot – even THAT looked different from American-style parking lots. However, this is how Brunches Sandwiches originally made the list. Kinda the best of a bad situation, but it would work.

I say “originally”, because later I had an epiphany. We were going to be visiting York Minster during the morning and would be heading to Fountains Abbey for the afternoon, arriving somewhere around 1PM. This meant we’d be walking back through The Shambles to check out of the hotel in late morning – so I decided to search for options we could stop at and pickup food to go. And here I found Henshalwood Deli and their amazing picnic lunches. Between the convenience of being on our walk back to the hotel, the menu, the prices, and the reviews it seemed almost too good to be true. Top all this off with the fact that Fountains Abbey is rated the 2nd best place in the UK to enjoy a picnic and this was a no-brainer! On the day of we decided that the Henshalwood picnic was massive overkill in terms of the food provided – we would have likely thrown 90% of it away – so we didn’t both stopping there and decided instead to eat whatever they were serving at the food service at Fountains.

An interesting thing I learned while looking up restaurants. I’ve long turned to Google Maps and made heavy use of the “Nearby” feature to find restaurants close to a hotel or attractions – and this remains a great method. However, I discovered that TripAdvisor seems to have 2-3x as many restaurants on their maps compared to Google. I’m not sure if TA has more “dead” places or not. It may be that (AFAIK) restaurant owners have to take responsibility for putting a pin onto Google Maps whereas (maybe?) TA restaurants can be added by anyone entering a review – so there’s more opportunities for a restaurant to get entered into TA’s database than Google’s? I don’t know if this is the case, but could be. Sadly, the UX of researching restaurants on TA is not great, so I’m not 100% sold on using in in lieu of Google.

At the Abbey we bought out tickets and then stepped into the restaurant for a bite of lunch. E had a cheddar and onion jam toastie while I had the ham and smoked cheddar baguette. Both of us pleased with our personal choices, and the sandwiches refreshed us without loading us down. We made the ½ mile walk along a lightly forested meadow trail down – sometimes rather steeply down – to the Porter’s Lodge, from which we knew a 2P free tour would launch. Inside the lodge was a model of the abbey along with some history, all with good descriptions of “just enough” details.

We joined the tour which wasn’t as good as the York Minster tour. It covered a ton of “this is what monastery life was like” and less “this is what you should notice as you look around” and while the guide was quite knowledgeable about her stuff she did have a tendency to repeat things. We still stuck it out for the hour before wandering around on our own for just a few minutes more. However, even with our great sleep last night we were starting to flag and, knowing that we were going to have to go UP the steep path to get back to the car we decided to make our way to the car and back to Ripon to The Royal Oak.

A panoramic view of Fountains Abbey ruins taken from the Porter's Lodge as we awaited the start of our tour.

More details of the abbey ruins.  I had thought that the ruins were the "draw" for this site, but it turns out that Studley Royal Water Gardens are the main attraction (and what earned this place its Unesco designation).  At the height of operation, Studley used that ruins as their hook to get more people to visit.

The ruins of old guest houses next to the abbey.

Fountains Abbey had been a very successful Cistercian facility up until Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries.  At that time, following seizure of assets, he had all the roofs removed to prevent the monks from being able to return.  Fountains was essentially made uninhabitable and therefore fell into ruin.

A view of the undercroft.  When the abbey was in operation, this area would have had many walls separating this into multiple smaller rooms serving many different purposes.

An aisle on the side of the nave.  At some point the arch in the background was in danger of collapsing so the monks stuffed it full of supporting materials.

A view through to the other side of the nave.  Huby's Tower pokes up in the background.

Huby's Tower, named after the prior who had it built.  It wasn't many years after the construction of this was completed that the abbey was seized by Henry VIII.

The cloister. The dark arch in the middle background led to the Warming Room, which typically had a fire going and would provide a few minutes of relief to the monks who would have had workstations lining the outer walls of the cloister.  Important documents (leases, landgrants, etc.) were kept in the rooms with the small windows on the 3rd level, where they'd be kept safe and dry due to the heat coming from the Warming Room.

The remains of the Chapter House, where the monks would have meet for administrative matters.  There were the remains of graves in what would have been the floor (or at least the surface that they walked on).  As part of the seizure of assets, Henry VIII's men would have dug up all graves to search for buried artifacts.

Some birds seen on our walk back from the Abbey

The Royal Oak is a pub nee 18th century coaching inn with rooms above the ground floor – so this was our chance to experience this very English form of lodging. The pub fronts a small one-way street without any real parking, so upon arrival we did the very English thing of making a parking space out of something that isn’t REALLY a parking space and walking in to check in. They gave us the padlock code to their private carpark, which is simply a field next to a building behind them, accessed through a very narrow alley. (I had to carefully thread my way between a brick wall on my right and a bag of garbage on my left as I drove between the two buildings lining the alley.)

Our room was on the 1st floor (thankfully not higher since we once again had to lug the luggage up stairs) and consisted of a king sized bed, a couple of nightstands, one chair, and one stool (which I’m sitting on as I write this up). The bathroom basically looks like the boys’ bathroom at our house. The window is open to a very nice afternoon outside, and we can hear the sound of passing traffic on the through street at the front of The Royal Oak. (The RO is just at the LH side of a fork in the one-lane, one-way road, with the RH fork being the main road and the LH fork not having any through access. Only vehicles with business on the LH side are supposed to be here.)

Our room at the Royal Oak Hotel in Ripon

The fork in the road right outside our window.  The far road is the main road, while the near road is limited access for those having business or residence on our street.  That road intersects another road about 200 feet to the left directly in front of Ripon Cathedral.

The funky chandelier in our room

Ripon Cathedral, at the end of the street outside our window