York and a pub crawl 3

Evensong at York Minster is a delight and with the exception of Sunday it takes place every day at 5.15pm.  The moderate congregation that gathers is guided through The Crossing and under the 15th century Quire Screen.  The screen is one of the most striking parts of the cathedral and it is hard as you file through not to be aware of the watchful and imperious stares of the eight early Kings of England which are carved into it.  Seated in amongst the choir in The Quire (I think it’s pronounced choir too) there is time before the service begins to settle down and let your eyes drift over the ornate wood carvings of the pews and up to the beautiful simplicity of the cream and gold ceiling a long way above you. Having a choir to sing Evensong with you surely helps it a long and there is another upside – it meant I could sing away to my hearts content without having other members of the congregation looking round to see if someone had stood on a cat.  If you are in York early evening I would recommend getting yourself along to the Minster and for the 40 or so minutes of piety and atonement you get to wander around FOC for about 45 minutes afterwards. That trade-off certainly gets my vote. Having had my spiritual fill more practical needs took over and I suddenly realised I was very hungry indeed. My plan was to have something suitably hearty to set me up for the evening ahead. I had taken a few moments now and then during my stroll back from the Jorvik Viking Museum on Coppergate to stop and look at a menu or two but nothing was really engaging me and so I decided I would go back to the Coach House and eat in the restaurant there.  But before that I wanted to wander over to the £210/night Dean Court Hotel and see what I was missing.  The Dean Court Hotel does have a very fine location – right on the Minster plaza and a step away from the Shambles and other tourist attractions.  It has a fine and imposing Victorian red brick exterior and over the course of 140 years has been transformed from three separate dwellings into one 4* hotel.  The inside, though, is a tragedy.

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.