York and a pub crawl 2

Forty minutes later I was back outside my hotel.  Not you understand because my business for the afternoon was concluded in truly efficient style or because I’d decided that the Minster was nothing but a big church anyway and I might as well come back and read the paper.  No, not at all.  I was back at my hotel because in following my nose I had got hopelessly lost in an area of back-to-back houses and skulking cats that made me feel like I had dropped into the opening scene of Coronation Street. Every time I attempted to rectify my directional errors I was stymied by either 1. York City Football Club ground or 2. the railway track.  Not having a ticket to one and not wearing the right shoes to attempt to breach the other I decided that as much as it might pain me, my only option was to try and find my way back to the hotel and start again.  Which I did.  And on turning right this time, out of Marygate and onto Bootham heading in the opposite direction to before, within five minutes or so I found myself in the shadow of the mighty York Minster. Oh how I let out a merry chortle as I beat myself around the head for such earlier stupidity.  But this was quickly forgotten as I found myself gazing at York Minster which is truly spectacular and is one of Europe’s greatest gothic cathedrals.  Sitting in a plaza with gardens beyond, the Minster we see today has evolved over fourteen hundred years and survived in one guise or another through the invasion of the Romans, Vikings and Normans.  It’s strange to think of real life toga parties being held in the Roman Basilica beneath the Minster and Centurions wandering around scratching their heads and wondering where they’d last parked their chariot.  The Vikings followed the Romans, the Normans followed the Vikings and generally the Saxons didn’t get a look in.  The cathedral as we know it was mostly completed in about 1100 but since then bits have fallen down, bits have gone up in flames and over the millennia other bits got added.  For the full details go to www.yorkminster.org.  I didn’t want to go into the Minster because I would have to pay and if I went to Evensong later I could get in for free instead.  I clearly have some Yorkshire roots.  Instead I wanted to revisit the Jorvik Viking Museum and if I had time go to the National Railway Museum for which York is rightly famous.  I had about two and a half hours to fit this in before I came back at 5.15pm.