The church that John built

Beavers used to live happily in Yorkshire. The town of Beverley is named after them. But, they were hunted to extinction for their fur in the early days, so disappeared from the landscape around the 1600s, until recently, when a couple were introduced back into the forest close by, to see if they would build natural dams to mitigate flooding problems.  That research is still ongoing.  But the pair have clearly been happy here as they have produced a couple of kits, and their family appears to be thriving.  

As did the town of Beverley when we visited. This place was around when the early beavers still lived in Yorkshire. There was a small church here, too, since before the early 700s, though that, it is thought now, might later have been sacked by Vikings marauders, during one of their raids along this stretch of coast hunting down altar jewelry and gilded treasure. The person who made the Beverley church famous was a local fellow, John, born just up the road a short distance, in Harpham. John was the son of local well-to-do noble.  He went to school, amazingly, in Canterbury. Way down in Kent. So, rather like the modern day students we visited the other day at Ampleforth College, John would regularly have made his way south, then home again, during his scholastic years. Though, it likely took him a little longer coming and going in the 700s than it takes the Ampleforth boarders these today.  

John became a religious.  His devotion was renowned and he quickly became the Bishop of York.  He was much loved and revered for his holiness and his compassion, and became especially famous when he blessed a young mute boy with the sign of the cross, who soon found himself able to speak with John's help.   Many such efforts made his work exhausting, so he often needed to find a place of seclusion and retreat, and on one such trip found a quiet spot filled with woods and water and a tiny church for contemplation.  Over time, that wee church, under John's auspices, grew to be the Beverley Minster, and young monasterians from all over soon flocked to hear the lessons of John of Beverley.  

The church has been rebuilt and renovated over the centuries since, but it is one of the most beautiful gothic churches in all of England. Frequently used as a film set. Not long ago for the excellent Victoria television series.  It is rich in history and tradition. Canopy arches drip stone decoration venerating noble families. Tombs are solid in stone, marble and brass.   Glass, high in arched windows, are of exquisite Medieval glasswork.  The ancient 16th century quire stalls each have uniquely carved misericord seats and are masterpieces in wood.  

When John died he was buried in the Beverley Minster.  His tomb has been moved a few times as renovations have gone on, but today it holds a special place at the heart of the church. Since the Middle Ages Beverley Minster has became a place of special pilgrimage and veneration, and even today, the church was busy with travellers and volunteers, there, like St John, to assist wherever possible.  A classical pianist and soprano were offering a special recital while we wandered the aisles.  It was all quite beautiful and uplifting.  

The town, too, is a pleasant place to wander with its winding historic heart wearing so many remnant features of its early life such as the Butcher's Row, where the meat used to be sold or the roads into town converging towards the Minster, so the closer market sellers came to the city, they were barred, not by city walls but by Gates, or Bars, where tolls were collected: North Bar,  Keldgate, and so on.  The town outside North Bar was called North Bar Without. But once you passed through the gate it became North Bar Within.  We wandered across a likely spot for the toll collection called Toll Gavel, and smiled.  It wasn't too far fetched to imagine friars and market merchants mingling in these narrow spaces.  

Beverley Minster

Stone musicians decorating the arches

Dripping with ornate stonework 

A bust of St John of Beverley

The stone font is Norman

A simple tombstone for St John 

Narrow pedestrian mall of Beverley

The painter and the philanthropist

We have been a couple of days away from Filey this week, staying in a lovely hotel as we hunted down the works of David Hockney in the town where he grew up.  A 'gothic' childhood, Hockney remembers, growing up in Bradford, which had been one of the centres of wool and worsted production since the industrial revolution, where, way back, factories smudged the sky and fouled the land.  Buildings, then, were black with pollution, and water was disease ridden.  In the 18th century immigrants poured into Bradford seeking wool work at the mills.  The city could not cope with the numbers and their lives were grim and desperate. Children as young as nine, were employed at the work. Most died before they were 20. A twenty year life span, if they were lucky.  It is simply unthinkable.

We found Hockney's work in two places: the Salt Mills wool factory, and Cartwright Hall. We followed his evolution as he turned his dark childhood memories into light, bright, magical pieces as if he had singularly discovered light and sunshine.  

Hockney's work in the Salt Mills is displayed on the walls of two flagged floors of a woollen mill that had been built in the 19th century by a young Bradford man, Titus Salt, who had learned the wool business from the bottom up by working with his father, Daniel. Titus was a Congregationalist and philanthropist.  He hated the filth and disease of Bradford. He thought like an entrepreneur. He bought Donskoi wool from Russia and Alpaca from South America when others did not care to handle these very different fibres. He overcame weaving difficulties of both by buying dedicated factories and learning how to successfully weave and blend them. He soon became rich and famous. He is reputed to have made Queen Victoria's mourning clothes as his light and lovely wools were the first that could be worn year round. He had long anguished over the pitiful state of his workers so when he had the money he determined to built a model factory and a model town for them down by the river, just a few miles away from the black hell that Bradford was then. This he did.  It opened in 1853. 

Today the entire town, called Saltaire, with its beautiful clean Italianate architecture has now become a UNESCO site with its comfortable homes for the mill workers, its hospital, shops, public buildings, mill and churches all sloping downhill to the massive green park split by the delightful river. Wonderful to see what he designed and created.

Salt's descendants lost control of the village and the mill over the  decades after his death. The village and its stock finally went to a property consortium, broken up gradually, and sold piece by piece. The  mill, named Salt Mill after Titus, was sold separately until it came into the hands of a local, Jonathan Silver, another Bradford boy made good, who went to the same school as David Hockney and was passionate, from the beginning, about David's work. Jonathan bought the mill with the intention of displaying Hockney works there, while letting the remaining spaces.  Two floors of the mill is where we found much of David's work hanging, and there is so much to see.  He is incredibly prolific. We followed this visit with another display of his work set up in the beautiful Cartwright Hall, just a couple of kilometres away in the park. So we were lucky to spend the better part of two days viewing his etchings, his lithographs, his theatrical set furniture, his graphic illustrations, his first steps building up to, then creating, his swimming pool series, along with an entire floor devoted to his 'Arrival of Spring' series, all painted around where we are living and driving daily while in Yorkshire, so we see bits of him everywhere there.  

On the way home this afternoon we called in at Ampleforth Abbey again, to join the once a week tour offered by one of the remaining monks.  That was a delightful experience with an anarchic monk of the Benedictine order espousing at great length on architecture, history of the Benedictines since before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the current state of world politics.  We all enjoyed it.   A delightful way to spend a couple of hours.  

Hockney's view of the Salt Mill

Salt Mill 

One of Saltaire's churches built by Titus

Titus was buried here in the church that he built

Theatrical set chair designed by Hockney

Letter Box, designed by Hockney

Entire flagged floor of display for Hockey's 'Arrival of Spring' series

Cartwright Hall 

One of Hockney's famous swimming pool series

A pop art Hockney

A pensive Hockney

A portrait of Hockney

Ampleforth Abbey altar

Robert Thompson, 'the mouseman', designed
the beautiful Bishop's chair in the Abbey

A Hockney view on our drive home

The giant and the vicar

So far we have done a lot of north or south days of sightseeing from Filey, so today we decided to spread our wings a little and head inland to the moors, as opposed to the wolds. Our attempt at distinguishing between these geographical features has us recognising that moors, typically, are covered in scruffy vegetation like heather and sheep, while wolds appear to be created from gentle limestone waves with neat rows of grain able to grow on top.  

The further inland we drive the haystacks decorating the fields are disappearing, most have been lifted and stored or sold, so that is one chore just about done for this year. We drive till we find a stack of cars parked on a very high moor, so we stop to take a peak and find out that Walt, the giant has been here before us. He has taken a fist of Yorkshire earth in a fit of temper with his wife, scooped it out entirely, and tossed it elsewhere, leaving a giant hole with steep sides, that hollows out the high moor for a long kilometre or more. It is called the Hole of Horcum.  Walt Horcum. And sometimes it is called the Devil's Punchbowl.  The reality of the geography is that this hollow was actually formed by springs oozing from the high sides of the cliffs, eroding the land over time creating this massive sinkhole through 'spring sapping' the land.  It has created an awesome sight which is dotted with ancient barrows in places, visible reminders of bronze and iron age settlers who once lived and worked here.  

We headed back a little to track down an adjoining road to check out where this might lead. Following this, we drove past the occasional idyllic farmlet tucked into the landscape until the road increasingly became more like a lane, much narrower, much rougher, winding ever upwards.  At the very top of this vertiginous drive we came upon a delightful little hamlet called Levisham.  A quintessential English village with homes set well back behind trim grassy verges on either side of a single street leading to a pub at the top decorated now with fallen autumn leaves and window boxes.  Charming.  

We soon discovered that Robert Skelton, a vicar here in the early 1800's, once owned the manor of Levisham, including the village and all its stock.  The current church, which is from his time, now stands in the village not far from the pub, and is full of delights.  The font from an earlier church, had been lost but was found on a farm nearby in the 19th century where it operated for years as the horse trough before it was cleaned up and installed here.   It  is considered Norman, or even earlier, so the wee churches from this parish go way back in time. There is an amazing gravestone lying to one side of the nave found in the earlier church, now crumbling away in the valley. The funeral stone was lifted and brought here for safety, and is decorated with a Scandinavian style dragon carving, so a Viking Christian once lived and was buried near here, and that, too, is amazing.   The wooden pews and communion rails were made by the wonderful Yorkshire timber artist, Robert Thompson of Kilburn when he was alive, and some of the pews and the font bear his unique mouse signature which Miss Bec helped track down.  We found six or seven of them. 

Rev Robert Skelton was an eccentric man we were to discover. He built himself a second home, Grove House, a mile and more downhill from Levisham. Where only sheep dare go normally, but we drove that crumbling track to find, near Grove House, a functioning railway.  An earlier version, through here, we discovered, was a horse drawn link which did not have stations as such, but stopped on demand, a little like a stage coach between Pickering and Whitby.   This was surveyed and engineered by none other than George Stephenson, another fine historical name.   

The merchants of Whitby at the time felt that their town was failing, cut off as it was from inland trade, having only shipping access.  The moors were so high and problematic for transport.  But they wanted them penetrated and this problem solved.  They wanted to build a rail linking Whitby to the inland trade routes.  And so the railway men came calling on Reverend Skelton.  He agreed to them crossing this land as long as the rail link built a station near Grove House.  Not close to  his needy villagers up on their hill in that treacherous location, where today, every 25 metres a sandbox stands warning of the harsh winter snowfalls and slippery ice as their only access route.  No.  He wanted it set close to his home, downhill, and that was the stipulation.  And they agreed.  Even though hardly enough folk used the horse line to justify this upgrade.  And over time, even many sections of the upgraded steam line proved unsustainable, and were gradually closed.  

But, times change, and the patch of line between Grosmont and Pickering has reopened. It now functions with volunteers.  It is more popular than ever with some 150,000 tourists a year using it to travel across the moors to see sights they cannot see by car.  

One of these sights is the picturesque ruin of a tower, the third dwelling that Robert Skelton built, a folly, high on the moors overlooking the trains chugging puffs of white steam across the route he insisted be built.  Skelton Tower is now crumbling, but Robert used it for his invited guests to go grouse shooting. It was well fitted with good windows and a fireplace so would have been comfortable no matter the weather. He told others he used it as a quiet retreat in order to write Sunday sermons.  But, many of the villagers believed Robert used it as his personal and private drinking den. Ah, those Victorians.  

Hole of Horcum

Pretty Levisham

Ancient font once used as a horse trough

A Viking Christian gravestone

Robert Thompson's mouse signature

Narrow lane down 

Levisham Station near Grove House

Ruin of Skelton Tower

Tales that Wold villages tell

We have visited so many Wold villages now, we are starting to recognise their special features: especially the delightful ponds at their heart.

A couple of days ago we picnicked on the village green just opposite The Green Dragon in Welton, a pub famed for being the spot where Dick Turpin supposedly jumped through a window attempting to avoid arrest for stealing a foal, among other misdeeds, prior to his conviction and hanging at the Tyburn Gallows in York, which is just a hop, step and jump away, so poor Dick could not have evaded the law too long after that.  The gallows took him before the small pox did, it seems.

The village and the green are much quieter these days.  There are even a couple of delightful cottages built right onto the green.  Here we chatted with a local livery rider who dismounted outside the pub for a cool drink while we fed apples to her super sturdy cob as he relaxed under the trees until spooked by the village ducks coming up from the pond.

Later we called in at Skidby Mill, one of the last working mills in Yorkshire, that has been in operation in the village since 1821.  Many of its original outbuildings have survived, too, and have been turned into an operational forge, a tea room  and a museum displaying rural life artifacts,  which was closed today, but had some great graphic drawings of implements it had stored,  some of which had us guessing their function before we read their relevant screed.

And today we visited Wold Newton, with a charming pond at its heart, where we chatted with local villagers who told us about a 25kg meteorite that landed here on a hill one rainy afternoon in 1795. The site is private, but they gave us directions on how to get to it, where to walk, and from whom to get permission. So, down the village lane we went, scouting out the terrain and the access.  

The day in 1795 was wet, it was 13 December so it was cold as well as damp, and John Shipley, a ploughman and shepherd for the village magistrate, Major Edward Topham, who owned Wold Newton Cottage, happened to be out in the back fields doing his job of work in this miserable weather when he and others around heard the whoosh! of something coming at them from the skies. John felt clods of soil hit him as the earth briefly shook. When all was quiet, he and the others went to explore. They found a great round rock, later determined to be a meteorite, still smoking, embedded below the topsoil, deep into the chalk rock strata, making an indentation of about a metre radius, all up. We were surprised it was not more. This was only the second recorded meteorite to have fallen in England at the time, so it enjoyed much publicity and notoriety.

The meteorite is now on display at the Natural History Museum in London. On the site it landed Edward Topham built a tower as a memorial to the event. John Shipley lived and worked another 34 years in Wold Newton and was, interestingly, the first person buried in newly consecrated grounds of All Saints Church at Wold Newton in 1829.  This new church was built on the site of an old chapel of ease that had been built on land gifted by William, the Conqueror to his nephew, Gilbert de Grant after 1066. Gilbert built the original chapel of ease in Wold Newton around the turn of the 11th Century. So, with that information at hand, we had to visit that, too.  The church is now old.  It is terribly musty. The font looks as ancient as the steeple.  And the mould meant that none of us could stay inside too long.  Old age is just not all it is cracked up to be at times.

The Green Dragon where Dick Turpin escaped 

Quintessential village green

Rider on her cob

Skidby mill, the last working mill in these parts

Rural inventions to assist rural life

Wold Newton pond and village green

Where the meteorite landed in Wold Newton

John Shipley, the meteorite spotter, buried here in 1829

Part of the All Saints Church was here in the 11th century

Remnants in the peat

The English are excellent at uncovering and recording their history. They have laws in place that allow them to hold up expensive works, if needs, be, to discover what is lurking under the ground before that ground is messed with for such things as construction or roadbuilding. And they often leave these sites without any indication they have been here before.

We discovered that when we attempted to visit Starr Carr, one of the rare sites where early mesolithic man has left traces. We did all that any online direction revealed: we parked beside a lodge in a tiny hamlet.  We walked along a little track which had a fairy message that amused Miss Bec.  The track was lined with wild apples, brambles and nettles so we surmised as we walked what mesolithic folk ate. We came to a field with actual barrows laid out like humped dig sites, which looked so promising we photographed this, thinking this must be what is visible of the famous Starr Carr site.  It wasn't.

It took a local man walking his dog by our parked car to direct us down a different lane, albeit close by, to a crumbling culvert bridge, separating fields all slightly descending into a wee gully.

Today these fields look like places lambs happily graze all day under the sun.  Once, though, this was a busy settlement on the banks of a lake, home to a large group of mesolithic men, woman and children who lived and worked here.  Discovery of it has exponentially added to our knowledge of how such folk lived some 10,000 years ago between two other great stone ages: the paleolithic and the neolithic age of man.

The site was first uncovered over a century ago, looked at again in the mid 20th century, closed again, opened in recent years yet again, and closed again.  It looks untouched today.  But it has changed over the centuries since early man lived here. Then it was a marsh, sodden, with clumps of weed at the water's edge. 'Carr' of Starr Carr means marshland.  Reeds would have been used as tracking and for dwellings, as would wood hacked by stone from the surrounding trees. Stone and animal bone would have been everyday implements. That is all mesolithic man had to make his mark, and make his mark he did.  He left all of these, sometimes en masse here, in situ.  What is wonderful is that some of them lasted this long under the earth for modern archeologists to reveal and interpret.  So rare for that to happen over such a vast expanse of time.   Here they lasted, thanks to the slow build up of peat over time, layer upon layer, gradually caking over remnants of their lives leaving them almost as they were left.

These mesolithic folk would likely have wandered to this land from the east, where the Netherlands, Belgium and France stand today. But there would have been no North Sea then, separating the two land masses, just an expanse of banks, marshy lands and lakes that now is called Doggerland. This had  a river running through it, coming from Norway, slowly cutting its way south over time, until, with the help of rising seas as the Ice Age ended, the North Sea gradually formed, separating these two land masses.  Like a very early Brexit.

The bone finds left at Starr Carr tell us that mesolithic man hunted deer, elk, wild boar and auroch, a wild ox. They used stone tools and antler bones for hunting and fishing: an amazing number were found here, indicating a large population over a period of some 600 years, on and off. So they weren't just seasonal transients, passing through, as had been thought earlier. Here, they enacted rituals, using elaborate red deer headdresses likely worn by respected religious leaders, shamans, during special ceremonies.

Shadows marking wooden struts of a round house dwelling were uncovered, where poles were likely lashed together and covered with hides or reeds for protection. And a fabulous stone pendant was found with a hole for hanging around one's neck covered in markings as if to decorate it, that looked like a leaf drawing. So much, and still so much more yet to discover as the site is larger they first believed. The biggest worry, apart from having sufficient funds to continue, might be having that protective peat dry out over time, so that any unrevealed finds turn to dust before they can finally be excavated. That would be a tragedy.  

This made Miss Bec laugh

An artists impression of how Starr Carr site may  have looked

Life at Starr Carr 

After the hunt

What archeologists exposed 

A ritual red deer headdress 

A stone pendant ornamented with line markings

The quarry men of Ravenscar

Today we went to Ravenscar and walked a slash of hills dropping down to the sea where dozens of fat lazy seals lay sunning themselves on warm rocks in what is turning out to be a gentle Indian summer along this coast. This is National Trust property now, and part of the Cleveland Way, so this was quite a good workout of a walk today. 

When Henry VIII and the Tudors were at serious odds with the pope and not wanting to trade with him, England needed Alum which they used as a thickening agent in all sorts of things before they discovered a synthetic substitute in much later times. Alum was luckily discovered in the rocks of the Ravenscar cliffs, just south of Whitby. Enough to last a couple of hundred years of quarrying, and that solved a long term problem of where to get it. 

The how, was another matter. To extract 600 tons of Alum a year from these cliffs you needed hundreds of men crawling like lemmings up and down the rutted ways. You needed pick axes, wheelbarrows, wagons, horses, carts, workhouses, workshops, a mechanical rail built up the cliff face, and storage for the 3,500 tons of coal it took to burn the rock, the 400 tons of kelp and 200 tons of human urine needed in the process, along with all the timber, lead and zinc they needed for their tools, factory fitouts and repairs. 

This mess of stuff came by sailing ship into the harbour where the seals rested today. Later they blasted this harbour deeper into the land to bring the ships in closer to the Alum production. The human urine was collected in buckets from dense collection spots in sea ports along the east cost: Hull, Newcastle and London. It, too, was bought here and stored for use. 

Horses and carts took all the cargo from the sailing ships and distributed it around the site, where needed. Pretty now, but desperate in those days. Wagons operated on a mechanical incline drawn on a pulley system up the vertical cliff. 

Alum was a valuable commodity. Pirates, offshore, were forever trying to seize it. Here at Ravenscar they installed a canon high above the Alum works to frighten them off. 

High up, pickmen removed the overburden and set to hacking away the shale from the cliff face, and sending it below for processing. 100 pickmen were needed to retrieve the 100 tons of shale rock needed to produce just 1 ton of Alum. And, at Ravenscar, they produced 600 tons of Alum every year. They were real quarry men. The work was hard, the hours were long, the conditions were appalling. 

Barrowmen took loads of shale to the quarry where wood was used to ignite great ‘clamps’ of the shale rocks in piles some 100 feet high and 200 feet long. These clamps burned for almost 12 months, whereupon, when they became bright red, the rocks were dumped into shallow pits lined with stone where a new batch of men took over a liquor production regime around these pits. 

They were called 'liquor men'. They would use water to wash the hot shale and out of that came a raw liquor of alum. This was drained via troughs into cisterns at the side, then funnelled into the Alum House where it was stored for processing from this liquid state into solid crystals, a process which took some three weeks. The liquor was boiled in lead pans over a coal fire for 24 hours until it turned green. It was then left in ‘settlers’ to remove any impurities. 

To reduce the acidity, an alkaline was added at this stage, either potash from burnt seaweed, or the stale human urine, rich in ammonia, gathered and transported here. It took some 4 days after that for the first alum crystals to begin to appear on the surface. These were then washed to remove impurities. 

The crystals were placed in ‘giant roaching pans’ like giant kegs. Heat dissolved the crystals, but after eight days the mass of crystals formed into solid blocks, each weighing more than a ton. The wooden slats from the roaching casks were then dismantled, and the blocks left to stand another eight days while any remaining liquor was drained off and reused. The great lump of alum was then ground into a type of alum flour, exported in that flour form. 

To empty the steeping pits after the rocks were liquified, pitmen hauled and carted the leftover shale back to the quarry face and mounded it in a ridge of slag, about 50 feet high and a quarter of a mile long at the base of the quarries. You can still see heaps and mounds around the hillside today covered in gorse and bracken. 

The equipment and tools of iron and lead fitting and the timber casks were made in workshops on-site so the noise must have been phenomenal. But the stench of the entire process must have been constantly unbearable:the smell of forges, the stored urine with its high ammonia content, the non-stop clamp fires burning for twelve months at a time, along with the acrid poisonous boiling liquor flowing into and and out of trenches and storage cisterns all over the site, all of the time. 

Yet here hundreds of men lived and worked. Their lungs must never have breathed fresh air. It is hard to conceive of that on such a glorious day as today, as we slowly wind our way, first down, then up their hill, through their workplace, imagining their lives, while we huff and puff and rest at our leisure making this trek only once a day and feeling it. They would have been at it non-stop: up the incline as soon as they came down, then back again for another load. Interminable. Although, they must have been physically very fit, assuming, of course, that the poisonous vapours did not eat away at their insides. 

We polished our walk off with the largest Devonshire scone we have ever seen for our afternoon tea, undoing all the good effects of our day efforts.

This is the view the quarry men would see every day

Fat seals sunning themselves on warm rocks

Sailing ships bringing human urine and kelp, among other needs

Remnants  of the Alum Works

Washing the crystals by bucketload

Removing the slats of the roaching cask

Grinding the final product into a flour

The cliff face that gave up the alum shale

Slowly trekking uphill 

Ferns now cover the slag heaps

The biggest scone after our biggest walk this trip