Smultron mellan blåbär: York, Keighley, and Haworth

This week I spent some time in Yorkshire. I visited York to see the Minster and city walls, and went to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Once again, I am impressed by the trains and a railway network that can take me from Cambridge north to Yorkshire in only about two and a half hours! (The journey back to Norwich was a different story—but it was the wind's fault, not the railway.) York, with parts of its ancient city walls still standing and as the site of an even older Roman settlement, has the feeling of being medieval and also Victorian while skipping all that in-between time. The buildings look very 'industrial-age,'—the brickwork even looks dark and sooty. In the undercroft at York Minster, you can look down at the ruins of a Roman fort. That's how far down it is—underneath the basement of a present-day church, parts of which have existed since Norman times.

River Ouse from Skeldergate Bridge

York Castle in the distance

Queue at Betty's Tea Rooms

Looking up

The Rose Window, York Minster

The Great East Widow (Medieval Glass)

York City Walls

View from the wall

Walking on the wall

There are many excellent book shops in York. A few that I visited are the Minster Gate Bookshop, The Little Apple Bookshop, The Amnesty Bookshop, two or three Oxfam stores specialising in used books, and more charity/thrift shops that all had used books. Next time I will have to stop in at the Blue House Bookshop that I missed! I also visited the King's Manor library, part of the University of York. I restrained myself and only bought one book (oh, the willpower), but I discovered many more to look up and read later. Since the queue at Betty's Tea Rooms was so long, I had cream tea at a place called Parlormade in Shambles Market. I spent longer in cafés and restaurants just to listen to people's accents!

Minster Gate Bookshop

The Little Apple Bookshop

King's Manor Library entrance

Parlormade in Shambles Market

Classy cream tea

View from where I stayed in York

On my way to Haworth, I stopped in Keighley where the nearest train station is and took a bus from there. First, though, I had time to see the public library and the shopping centre with a number of charity shops. The Wool Shop was rather disappointing, as it was actually selling mainly acrylic yarns. West Yorkshire Spinners has a mill in Keighley—however, I'm not sure whether there is also a storefront, and since it was some distance from where I was and I had my suitcase to cart around with me, I didn't get there (alas!).

Keighley Train Station

Keighley Public Library

It's pronounced Keethla?

I arrived in Haworth on a beautiful day! If only I had taken my walk then...

Welcome to Haworth

Main Street

Distant Dales

Bare trees at sunset

Villette Café

Cream Tea

My favourite parts of the Parsonage Museum were the staircase, the children's study, and seeing one of Charlotte Brontë's tiny books. The book I found in the shop is stories taken from those tiny books such as "The Green Dwarf" and "The Spell." Here is a taste of what they are like: 'Ten minutes sufficed for arraying my person in a new suit of very handsome clothes and washing the accumulated dirt of seven diurnal revolutions of the Earth from my face and hands.' So funny! I enjoy her later books, of course, and the writing of these early stories does not match those—but I am particularly intrigued by the Brontës as children, by the stories and characters they imagined together.

Brontë Parsonage Museum

The Stairs

The Children's Study

One of Charlotte's tiny books

St Michael and All Angels

Due to wet weather once again destroying my fantasy of reading or knitting out of doors, I opted for the five mile walk to Brontë Falls and back (instead of a seven or nine mile route), but I still got thoroughly soaked. The drizzle is deceptive because it doesn't feel like it's raining that hard, and then once you spend ten minutes out there you are drenched! I had a pasty from the Villette Bakery to eat for lunch in the mizzle in a slightly sheltered spot from the wind. Even so, it was a flaky puff pastry crust and bits of the crust were immediately stripped off and taken afield (amoor?) by the wind. It was beautiful out there even at this time of year. I can imagine what it must be like with leaves on all the trees. On coming to Brontë Bridge, I must have missed the chair. It's somewhere around there...but my glasses were all foggy. These pictures do not convey the sheets of rain drifting in waves across the moors.