I usually blog about the places I've been in one go and restrain myself from putting up too many photos - there's only so many pictures of places you haven't seen that you can tolerate before losing interest - but I found I'd taken an embarrassingly touristy forty four photos in York today!
So starting with the Cathedral, partly because it is perhaps the most famous part of York, and partly because I spent years of my childhood playing wargames where I was trying to use the cathedral to crown pretenders to the throne during the Wars of the Roses; in another era I made the city a base for Rupert of the Rhine (my hero!) to first smash a Fairfax army, then desperately try to fight off combined army of parliamentary traitors and boorish Covenanters, but that's not really cathedral specific. Anyway. Here're the photos. They're fairly self explanatory, the Cathedral taken from various points of view. The first is seen in zoom from Clifford's Tower (of which more later), in the second it's actually very much in the background, but this is how you see it walking up from the train station (the foreground is St Leonard's again of which more later), and the final shot is taken from the entrance.
Unfortunately the photos I took inside were pretty average so I left them out. I went to evensong there as well, though unfortunately arriving late; it was fantastic. The singing was beautiful, the area where it was held, out of the main tourist portion, was fantastic, walled off in stone with statues of kings from Edward I to Henry VI, and the East Window, referred to in the sermon, was a retelling of the Book of the Apocalypse which took three years to make and is the work of (I think he said) John Fulton. The sermon was interesting as well, about the Book of the Apocalypse, that much of the context is difficult to understand now, but that essentially it has a message of hope, that God will triumph. Also interesting is that the sign of the cross was being thrown around constantly, before the sermon, over the collection, over the congregation: they must be quite high church at York Cathedral. Go them!!
However I didn't take any more photos then as I thought it rather bad manners to do that during or after a service.
Still, fantastic to have been there. I could see all my usurpers crowned in state at the high altar with their knights in attendance...
2 comments:
Lol, I also immediately thought of the Wars of the Roses and Kingmaker. Did you get out to Marston Moor?
Apparently Anglican cathedrals are usually comparatively high church - which, when I think about it just now, makes sense. A Gothic cathedral doesn't really lend itself to low church behaviour or sensibilities, does it?
Looking forward to seeing the rest of the Yorkist photos!
The cathedral is inspiring architecture and I can see how it fit in with your games and with the Wars of the Roses.
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