the city walls

The Bar Walls of York are the finest and most complete of any town in England. There are five main "bars" (big gateways), one postern (a small gateway), one Victorian gateway, and 45 towers. At two miles, they are also the longest town walls in the country.

The tan line on the old map below shows how the walls worked in 1610. The magenta line shows the remaining wall segments, most of which you can walk on. The lake, number 12 on the map, doesn't exist any more. They damned up the River Foss at one point to have a huge stocked fish pond for the King. The lake also served as a natural defense. Later on the water completely surrounded the motte of the old motte and bailey castle (near number 7 on the map). The river silted up over time and is now a sluggish, murky little canal, but people still fish in it.



Like most things in York, the walls have been added to and modified over the ages. The oldest parts date back to the Romans (71AD). In some areas, the "newer" medieval sections were built directly on the Roman wall. In other areas, they run parallel, and in yet other areas, they've been extended beyond the Roman walls. For the most part, the walls are around 13ft high and 6ft wide.


This picture shows the old Roman wall with the small blocks and brick stripe below the larger blocks of the more decorative medieval section. This tower is called the Multangular Tower because of the faceted sides. It's the only original Roman tower to survive. The stone coffins in the bottom are from a Roman graveyard excavation and are being stored there, but didn't come from there.

Bootham Bar, aka Monk Bar, is the only gate on the site of an original Roman one. Bootham is one of the few streets on top of a main Roman road and happens to be the one we take to York. It's said Bootham used to go up to Hadrian's wall.


You can walk through Monk Bar to get onto the prettiest section of wall. Inside you can see a portcullis aka big wood gate that used to drop down to block the entrance. This one is only decorative, but is impressive all the same.


Each bar has its own little personality as it was added to over the years. Some remain more of a pedestrian entrance, like Monk Bar which is only open to traffic at certain times of day, whereas others like Micklegate Bar are used for traffic all of the time. Of course it's only a one-way at a time system controlled by lights.


Walmgate Bar is the most complete of the York Bars. Not only does it have a working portcullis, it also has its inner door system and barbican. This was the highly sophisticated version of a medieval security check. The "guest" would be invited into the gated barbican, a long rectangular room with no roof. The door would close behind them and the next door would not open until the "guest" had passed inspection. This could be observed from a protected walkway on the top of the walls so they could shoot you full of arrows if you forgot to put your 3oz liquid in a clear, quart-size ziploc bag.


Once passing inspection, you were then permitted to enter the next set of doors beneath the tower. Not sure what happened in there, maybe the air puffer test? It was only then that you were permitted to go through the final set of doors and enter the city.


Back in the day, ditches that were 60ft wide and 10ft deep and ramparts that were 100ft wide and 30ft high added additional defensive reinforcement to the walls. Very little of that can be seen today, but here's an idea of what it must have looked like.


The defensive geniuses of York even devised ways of controlling the River Ouse. At one point, they had two sets of chains strung across it between wall towers. This was really more capitalism than defense since they charged a toll to cross.

Today the wall is not nearly as defensive. It's more like Swiss cheese. Holes were punched through in areas for people and train access. In 1800, the City Council got approval from Parliament to start ripping down sections of the wall to "improve" the city by allowing easier access. Luckily, the citizens got riled up and put a stop to it before too much had been ripped down. They honored the leader of the citizen resistance with a statue and now York pays $200,000 a year on wall conservation.

The walls are definitely one of the reasons we are living in York. I highly recommend walking on at least a section if you ever make it here–it's really an incredible experience. You get to see buildings built into or up to the walls, beautifully landscaped gardens, great views of the Minster and city, and you get to walk up, down, or through most of the Bars for free.




And to wrap this up, I'll leave you with the most humorous part of the wall walk—the medieval urinals. I was already somewhat suspicious before I learned what they were. Strangely, these are the only ones on the entire 2 mile stretch of wall.

Happy Birthday GREG!!

We are wishing you a Happy Birthday from Monk Bar. (Bar is the Viking word for gate and gate is the Viking word for road, confusing I know.) Monk Bar dates from the early 14th century and is the biggest and fanciest of York's surviving bars. It comes complete with a working portcullis and winding mechanism and a little "gallery" between the towers from which "missiles and boiling oil could be dropped on attackers." (It's hard to see, but is above the arch right where the center gold thing is)

We hope you have a great birthday... Try not to wound your attackers too badly :)

a Dickens day

I'm sure this won't be the last time, but this morning we woke up to some pretty thick fog. It was really quite dramatic. Most of it lifted quickly, but some of it lingered throughout the day. Pat and I were expecting some Charles-Dickens-like winter weather and I don't think we'll be disappointed.

National Railway Museum

York is home to the largest railway museum in the world complete with "an unrivaled collection of locomotives, rolling stock, railway equipment, documents and records." To top it off, it's the only free museum in the city. Pat and I spent the afternoon yesterday strolling among numerous train engines, passenger cars, and train paraphernalia. They even have a couple of cars built for the Royalty to travel around in which were quite interesting. A true train nut could probably spend days in there. As a train novice, I was there for pretty pictures and an info scan.




(Working wheel demo)



What I can tell you is:
• Really old passenger trains look like someone took the body of three stage coaches, smashed them together, and set them on rails. That was only for the fancy people, third class passengers had unprotected outdoor seating in what looks like a wagon bed on rails.

(Notice the platform on the back for a guard to sit and the rails across the top for the luggage–just like a stage coach)

• Before steam engines, horses pulled the cars uphill and across flat areas. For the downhill, they got to jump in their own little car, complete with water bucket, to rest. Some smart guy realized this improved their efficiency.

• The inside of a train engine is like a huge complex radiator whose sole purpose is to drive the pistons turning the wheels. (A train nut somewhere is groaning at my over-simplified understatement)

(Full-size train cut apart to show how it works)

• Train engines were made from some materials I wouldn't have expected. Some looked like they were made of copper and some had what looked like beadboard cladding–they're quite beautiful when they're all gussied up and sitting in a museum :)


• Toilets did (and some still do) just empty on the tracks so you're not suppose to use them while sitting at a station. Didn't know that and eww... This is changing on some of the more modern trains as they adapt airline toilets for rail use. It will still make me wonder the next time I use one...

• They had signs from 1909 inside some of the engineer cabs saying "Caution: Do not look over or pass along the side of this cab when near bridges, tunnels, loadgauges, or coal stages." I wonder why not.

• Not only is Swindon a town in England, but it's important to the railroad industry.


• The Royal cars are very fancy and are like apartments on wheels. The Queen Mother's car was very simple and austere. Partly because she wanted to travel incognito and not be bombed by Nazi's and partly because of the country's economic situation in the War. Her train came complete with armored window shutters and pulled into train tunnels for protection at night.

What I can't tell you is why...


I think our only disappointment was that you couldn't walk into many things at all. In a lot of places they had raised platforms so you could peak into the windows–looky, no touchy :)

For more information, click the link to go to their site

Black Friday & Snow

To all of those who woke up in the wee hours of the morning to kick-off the shopping season, more power to you. For the rest of you who slept in, congratulations for keeping your sanity.

Of course Black Friday means nothing over here. Apparently the big shopping day here is the day after Christmas. Christmas shopping has been going full steam ahead since right before Halloween here. It's becoming more and more common to see Christmas wrapping paper rolls and Christmas decorations peeking out of the top of shopping bags as I walk to York. The Christmas decorations have been strung up and the windows are in holiday mode. More to come on all of that later.

We were hoping that our cultural lady was right and that the country doesn't celebrate Christmas in the over-indulgent, over-commercialized, over-stressed way that the US does. That doesn't appear to be the case. (Check out the Christmas Craziness commercial by clicking here or by going to the commercial list on the right) Apparently the retailers have learned from their American counterparts and the hype is high although, possibly, not as saturating.

Today I'll decorate our flat with the Christmas decorations we brought over and tomorrow we'll probably head into York for some Christmas cheer. As an appropriately timed start to the season, we had our first dusting of snow this morning. I didn't get to see it fall, but was able to catch it before it melted this morning. Although it's a little hard to see, it is snow and not frost in the photo...


We hope that you're all enjoying your holiday weekend!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We did it! Our very first Thanksgiving dinner on our own!



Granted we didn't have as many dishes as we usually get on our annual double-dinner in Ohio. We also didn't have to deal with the chaos of having lots of people around. For our Thanksgiving, we feasted on a turkey breast, mashed potatoes, gravy, spoon bread (our cornbread-like stuffing alternative), peas, rolls, and, of course, pumpkin pie. We opted for the turkey breast since we don't really care for the dark meat and it would fit in our teenie-weenie oven.


This is the "big" portion of the oven. There's another smaller oven on top of this one–it's really only big enough for a casserole dish. It did come in handy having two ovens, though. We don't have that advantage at home.

The turkey came out great despite a temperature gauge malfunction.


And to top it all off, we had some mighty tasty pumpkin pie.


Luckily the cultural lady in Cincinnati tipped us off on that one. You can't buy pumpkin in England so she recommended packing what we would need to make the pie. Thanks cultural lady! Apparently you can't buy ready-made pie crust over here either, or at least we couldn't find it. Pillsbury is not in high demand over here. I ended up combining two pie recipes so we could get the traditional Libby's pumpkin pie filling and a pecan pie crust. It worked out surprisingly well considering I had to make a last-minute butter substitution for the vegetable shortening I realized we didn't have, I used a wine bottle as a rolling pin, and I used expired evaporated milk (we haven't gotten sick yet :).

Pat wished all of his co-workers a Happy Thanksgiving, even the one who said "You know we don't celebrate that, right?" Well duh... He was able to come home a little early and help with the food multi-tasking. We even played a game of Scrabble in between things.

We declare dinner a success. Pat says "Dinner was fantastic. Jamie did a great job!" That's good since we have a TON of leftovers :) But don't worry, we're looking forward to enjoying all of our favorite dishes again next year!

St. Mary's Abbey

Now that the weather is turning, it's time to catch up on all of the great stuff York has to offer...

Not to be left out, York has its own ruined abbey. It's now a rather prominent landscape feature in the Yorkshire Museum Gardens and the occasional picnic spot for moms and rebellious teens. The nice thing about this abbey is that it's close and it's free. Depending on how I go, I can walk past it on my trip home from the city centre.



St. Mary's Abbey was originally founded c1055 as a Benedictine abbey dedicated to St. Olave aka Olaf, King of Norway. That's a Viking dude. It's old. Real old.

According to wikipedia,

The abbots of St Mary's were said to be very decadent and the abbey featured heavily in the early medieval ballads of Robin Hood (with the abbot usually as Robin Hood's nemesis)... St Mary's was once the largest and richest Benedictine establishment in the north of England and the abbots were amongst some of the wealthiest landowners.

The wealth and greed of this abbey was its downfall–on several occasions. The name of the main street stretching from my house into the center of York is Bootham. Logically I guess, this name arose from the presence of many booths along the medieval main drag. Similar to the relationship of Mosques and bazaar's, the abbey owned the booths and rented them to vendors to make some dough. The abbey's wealth became so great and the people's standard of living so poor, that the people revolted–I think there might have even been some pitchforks involved. The details are sketchy, but it ended with the abbey building huge walls that connected to the city walls to keep the people out. It effectively became an annex of the city. Today its walls are easily mistaken for the city walls.


The wealth of St. Mary's also drew the eye of Henry VIII and the building came tumbling down. Unlike the Minster, St. Mary's was connected to a monastery so he had an excuse. The ruins, like others, are stunning.




The foundations of the building have been excavated to give you an idea how large it was in its last rendition. Excavated parts of the other buildings, including the Chapter House, can be seen in situ in the basement of the Yorkshire Museum.


This is a view of the abbey standing at what I think is the back of the apse.


Pretty nice. And now us poor peons can see it whenever we want.