Q: Since 1066, every British monarch has crossed the English Channel to France except one. Can you name that monarch?
A: Queen Elizabeth II--because she went by Chunnel.
And so did we! Because we wanted to see the countryside, and because Emily is a train fan, we took the Eurostar from Paris to London.
Eurostar rocks.
It could not have been more comfortable, more quiet, or a better experience, and beats the hassle of airplane travel all to hell. The trip took two hours and fifteen minutes, arriving in the heart of London at St. Pancras/King's Cross. By way of comparison, by air the trip takes an hour, so it's very efficient as well.
Less efficient was our transfer from Eurostar to Northern Express for the trip to York. London was hot and muggy, and the station is under major renovation so we banged around a bit before finding our train. Once on board, though, it was another lovely and civilized trip, and the train even had wi-fi! So we blogged on the way.
Why don't we have that kind of decent train service here? Oh, maybe it has to do with the fact that England is about 8 times more densely populated? And the whole country is about the size of Minnesota? Oh well, we enjoyed it while it was available to us in Europe.
We stayed in a nifty hotel that evoked the glamor of the 1930s, sleek and spare--Churchill Hotel. The room was small and mostly unadorned, which was kind of a visual relief after all we had been seeing. Once in the room, it was still daylight, so we took off to the place Cris was looking forward to seeing--York Minster.
A "minster" is apparently the term for a church that was in use during Saxon times, so very few "minsters" even exist any more. The York Minster is lovely, and superlative, with the largest expanse of medieval stained glass in the world. It's also the third building in that spot--restoration work decades ago uncovered evidence of Roman barracks, as well as the foundations of earlier, smaller churches.
The church that stands there now may be the newest, but it still dates from about 1220. It's constantly being repaired, and there's a story about that. The tales goes: Around 1539, when Henry VIII was dissolving the monasteries and acquiring the riches of the Catholic churches, the Catholics reluctantly turned over control of York Minster. Officially, the King's men were going to strip it of its offending idolatry, and when they were done the Catholics were going to get it back.
That's right--once they were finished with all the reconstructions work. Yeeaah. Scaffolding hasn't been down in nearly 500 years. They ain't NEVER going to be "finished."
(We were told this story in all earnestness, and we haven't checked it out on Snopes.)
My favorite was the 13th century chapterhouse, where monks would gather daily to hear a chapter of the Bible read out. It's a large octagonal room, with stone bench seats around the perimeter. Each of the seats has a sort of canopy over it, made of stone, and each ends in a unique carving. Most are faces, and the first half dozen or so that I looked at were serious medieval burgher type faces. Then they started to vary, some laughing, some angry, a dog or two, and a couple where the figure uses its fingers to make a silly face. Yes, you can buy copies of some of these, and yes, we bought the one with the silly face.
The day we were there was a day special to St. Peter, who is the patron saint of the minster, so we were treated to a solid quarter hour of bell ringing. It was AWESOME!
Outside the church itself is a statue dedicated to Constantine, who was declared "Caesar" while at York. It just boggles the mind to realize that even that long ago, someone like Constantine could travel from Rome to York and back again in months rather than in years--or a lifetime.
Oddly, it appears that we have no photos of York Minster, or even the city generally. Perhaps we were simply enjoying ourselves too much. York was a definite high point of the trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment