Walking the Walls and Scaling the Spires



August 23rd, 2022 by Diana Coman

The walls and spires in question are those that still stand of that old Roman settlement called Eboracum, known at the moment simply, if not necessarily better, as York. While you might be tempted to call this perhaps the old York in contrast to the New York, resist the temptation as it's leading you astray - the New York was actually New Amsterdam since it started as a Dutch colony, not an English one. That it switched names reflects people and not places - it's New York because of the Duke of York, not because of the town of York. Here's proof of walking the walls though and a willing guide for you to come along, too:
york_leeds_12_640.jpg
york_leeds_14_640.jpg
york_leeds_52_640.jpg
york_leeds_35_640.jpg
york_leeds_37_640.jpg
york_leeds_38_640.jpg
york_leeds_39_640.jpg
york_leeds_40_640.jpg

Punctuated with round towers of various designs and a few gates from place to place, these walls of lightly coloured stone still encircle most of the original settlement that was indeed a camp and a fortress right from the start. That start dates back to around 70AD when the Romans picked the place for its strategic advantage at the intersection of two rivers and set up camp to finally calm down the region and claim -or possibly make obvious, if you prefer- their authority over it.
york_leeds_16_640.jpg
york_leeds_18_640.jpg

york_leeds_50_640.jpg

york_leeds_56_640.jpg
york_leeds_57_640.jpg
york_leeds_8_640.jpg

york_leeds_9_640.jpg

While such authority lasted, the walls stood useful and the town grew and flourished under their protection. Then things changed, of course, as they always do. With time, the once useful walls were found to be increasingly in the way (of horses mainly, in this case) and started to be removed. The authority once claimed with the sword to be held fully and visibly, morphed, fragmented and got increasingly out of sight in a way, too. Still, the battle for the walls happened once more, only it happened in the courtroom this time and it turned the roles around, with the walls facing the town itself as enemy when the Archbishop of York sued the Corporation and won, somewhere around 1800.
york_leeds_51_640.jpg

What angered the Archbishop was however not the loss of the walls themselves but more importantly his loss of the toll that was paid to him at the gates - only for as long as the gates were still standing, of course. In other words, the walls were defended indeed, for the service they still rendered, nothing else. This reason for the court-battle is not mentioned though at all in any of the "information" signs and leaflets and what-not that abound otherwise. I'm sure there simply wasn't enough space for it but don't you get curious as to what else failed to find enough space to be... advertised, properly speaking? Even so, the net result remains that the walls are still standing for the most part while the town found nevertheless ways to expand further without quite obliterating its own past. With time, everything that remained in place still found other uses even if at times not quite fitting perhaps the former glory.
york_leeds_10_640.jpg

Further afield and on the outskirts of the town, there's also a round tower looking down from a hill and a rather squat mini-palace of sorts. With the patience or perhaps indifference of stone, they all wait to find perhaps another purpose and be once again brought to life by it. They look quite dignified to me, even if the length of this waiting is starting to show, too.

york_leeds_46_640.jpg
york_leeds_47_640.jpg
york_leeds_48_640.jpg
york_leeds_49_640.jpg

In the town itself, away from the walls, the stone gets worked upon quite intricately, first by the masons of various ages and then by the winds and rains of all ages. The streets are too narrow for modern cars and as a result, most of the centre is for pedestrians only, making it quite pleasant for walking and taking in all the various quirks of sedimented1 life and ages.
york_leeds_4_640.jpg
york_leeds_6_640.jpg
york_leeds_22_640.jpg
york_leeds_28_640.jpg
york_leeds_32_640.jpg
york_leeds_33_640.jpg
york_leeds_34_640.jpg

Funnily enough for those in the know, of the two rivers that meet at York, namely the Ouse and the... Foss, guess which one is nicely blue and which one is choked full of ugly green algae? What's in a name!
york_leeds_30_640.jpg
york_leeds_31_640.jpg
york_leeds_3_640.jpg
foss_1_640.jpg
foss_2_640.jpg

The Art Gallery sports a spiky outgrowth as modern counterpoint and contribution to all that carved stone, while a relatively small church lacking the fame of the main cathedral stands elegant and uncrowded on a corner of a street.
york_leeds_7_640.jpg
york_leeds_76_640.jpg
york_leeds_77_640.jpg
york_leeds_78_640.jpg
york_leeds_79_640.jpg

The Cathedral that is nevertheless called a Minster2 towers over the rest and hosts on its side a greenish statue of the emperor Constantine apparently relaxing even if in a rather unlikely pose. He has great sandals though, the sort one sees worn only at fashion shows and never for any practical purpose, in this case what look like flip-flops with lion heads extending on the shins.
york_leeds_112_640.jpg

In front of the York Minster, the grass truly is always greener on the other side of the fence - only it's not real grass, of course:
york_leeds_29_640.jpg
york_leeds_19_640.jpg

The church itself is quite pretty on the outside and even interesting although not all that homogeneous inside. Apparently its building took long enough for fashions to change even in architecture and as a result, the currently standing construction has for instance gothic windows indeed, but several types of gothic. Which makes the whole approach perhaps not even all that far removed in spirit from the way the houses used to expand in the countryside, too: each couple of years some parts might get added or knocked down depending on new needs or fashions or simply people. Only the York cathedral did it in stone and so it remained long enough for the whole mixture to show as it does. Inside, rows upon rows of carved figures poke out of the walls or attempt to stand neatly in a line while looking nevertheless in all directions - when they have at least heads for such purpose.
york_leeds_21_640.jpg
york_leeds_26_640.jpg
york_leeds_27_640.jpg
york_leeds_82_640.jpg
york_leeds_83_640.jpg
york_leeds_84_640.jpg
york_leeds_85_640.jpg
york_leeds_86_640.jpg
york_leeds_87_640.jpg
york_leeds_88_640.jpg
york_leeds_89_640.jpg
york_leeds_90_640.jpg
york_leeds_91_640.jpg
york_leeds_92_640.jpg
york_leeds_93_640.jpg
york_leeds_94_640.jpg
york_leeds_95_640.jpg

Colourful beads hang from a ceiling at some point for some reason that is entirely unknown to me.
york_leeds_96_640.jpg

Two knights guard the time on one wall and strike their weapons to mark the passing of each half hour interval. On a different wall, a carving shows apparently some traffic jam at the pedestrian entrance to hell - devils on duty try to shove the incoming traffic faster out of the way.
york_leeds_97_640.jpg
york_leeds_98_640.jpg

There's a crypt inside the church, too, all musty and damp but brightly lit by modern light bulbs. And there's the cathedral's spire to scale, quite steep but rewarding, with views from half-away across the church's front two towers and then, from the very top of the church, across the whole town and beyond.
york_leeds_99_640.jpg
york_leeds_100_640.jpg
york_leeds_101_640.jpg
york_leeds_102_640.jpg
york_leeds_103_640.jpg
york_leeds_104_640.jpg
york_leeds_105_640.jpg
york_leeds_106_640.jpg
york_leeds_107_640.jpg
york_leeds_111_640.jpg
york_leeds_108_640.jpg
york_leeds_109_640.jpg
york_leeds_110_640.jpg

Trading stone for the metal and masonry for engineering, one can also see in York a rather densely packed history of trains and railways, at the Railway Museum, aptly located right next to the train station currently in use. To compare and contrast though, even after visiting the Mallard and all sorts of Duchesses on rails, we took nevertheless the modern electrical train leaving the town and getting back to the present that is rather than any other present that once was.

york_leeds_64_640.jpg
york_leeds_66_640.jpg
york_leeds_67_640.jpg
york_leeds_68_640.jpg
york_leeds_69_640.jpg

york_leeds_71_640.jpg

york_leeds_73_640.jpg
york_leeds_74_640.jpg
york_leeds_75_640.jpg
york_leeds_1_640.jpg


  1. Hrm, apparently English has sediments and sedimentation just fine but somehow sedimented is nevertheless not fine at all. The alternative suggested by native speakers would be assimilated but I don't think that's really the same meaning at all: no, it's not about assimilated quirks or anything else but literally about the sediments of different ages and how they build up as time passes and grinds them more or less together, more or less to pieces, more or less into something else, at times. 

  2. This is where the church nomenclature gets utterly but also quite typically confusing: normally a church is called a Minster if it has a priest at all times, performing all the relevant duties including visiting parishioners; to be called a Cathedral, a church needs to be the site of a bishop's throne; since the church in York *is* the site of a bishop's throne, it should be called a Cathedral *but* the very word "cathedral" is basically too... new to be fully adopted - it came into use only after the Norman Conquest and so York's cathedral is still called a Minster as it has "always been". Problem? 

Comments feed: RSS 2.0

Leave a Reply