Scarborough

Today is Sunday

We Started the day with a cooked breakfast, Matilda made Tammy the best toast ever.

We headed off towards York, we are now using the motorways as we are running low on days left with the camper.


 

 







York has most of the remnants of the old defensive city wall around it. Well through it now, the city has grown a bit since the wall was built. We walked along a two mile long section. The buildings in the city are spectacular, a lot of Tudor construction. Some of the streets are too narrow for cars. There are too many people on them for cars anyway.


 

We stuck our heads inside the Cathedral ‘York Minster’for a quick look, it was as grand and impressive as the others.





 

Then we found the pub called ‘Guy Fawkes’ this is the last building in England to still be running on gas lights, it was dark. Also it has a cottage behind the pub that is supposedly where Guy Fawkes was born in 1570. He is responsible for fireworks night in celebration of his failed attempt to blow up the houses of parliament. He met a grizzly end in London
where he was hung drawn and quartered on 31^st January 1606. As a child in England Tim and I would make a Guy Fawkes out of some of Dads old clothes and tow him around the neighbours on a billy cart collecting money. Then we would put him on the bonfire on fireworks night and burn him. These are sorts of twisted rituals my parents used to encourage. Anyway I had a beer and toasted the fact that the houses of parliament are still there for us to enjoy, from an architectural point of view at least.

 

Next we went to Scarborough. This is one of Englands top beach resorts. The first thing we noticed was that all the power lines must be underground. That’s nice.

We took the ‘funicular’ tram down to the beach which is crammed full of amusement parlors.

We had a walk along the beach and decided that the whole place was aimed at families with very deep pockets, We walked back through the shopping centre, it was very quiet as England has Sunday trading rules. Mark told me that they are only allowed to trade on a Sunday for six hours. Ikea stretch this to seven hours by having the first hour as a ‘browsing hour’. My Dad who is an Ikea addict would be happy with that.

On the beach we saw three donkeys and a seagull with his head in a bucket.

 













In the middle of nowhere we found a telephone box, still working and a roadside stall with all sorts of homemade produce. We bought a fruitloaf.

We drove through the North York Moors to Witby. The Moors road is a toll road, $14 per car but as no-one was manning the toll gate so we drove on through. The Moors are a bleak landscape after you get through the pretty pine forest. Mostley just heath and heather….and sheep.

The Moors are where the locals get a lot of their peat from for their fires.

We found a stone on a mound with some weathered writing on it some distance off the road.  Some research to do there....later.

 












 



 Just out of Witby we found Robin Hoods Bay, supposedly where Robin Hood hid his boats. It has a strong history of smuggling. To visit the town you have to park in the car park at the top of the hill and walk down the very steep road into the town. The streets are too steep and narrow for cars.
It was a fabulous place with streets full of colour washed stone cottages. We found a pub, of which there are many and had a pint of beer and some tea. The town relies 98 percent on tourism and no-one lives there anymore. In the winter is practically a ghost town. The bar tenders were definitely descendants of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck.

 


On the way to the caravan park we went to Witby Abbey ruins where Dracular was invented. It was a good time to go at 10.00pm with the twilight fading, apart from the fact that it was shut.

 








Tammy looked a little worried in the churchyard near the Abbey, among the tombstones, in the dark, near Dracular.