Shadows of the past (UK blog 4/9)

Hawes, Wednesday 28 June 2006
This morning was cool and overcast, but brightened up into a beautiful day for a drive...
We left Hawes around 9:30 and drove to Fountains Abbey, a large Cistercian abbey outside of Ripon. The abbey is in ruins, but the remaining skeleton shows how very large and wealthy it once was. We spent a good 2 hours just exploring all of the old stonework. The abbey ruins are on a large estate that also has a water garden and manor, so the grounds are well kept.
There is also a deer park on the grounds, but the area around the abbey is free of large animals, so I enjoyed walking barefoot in the grass and clover without fear of either fire ants or sheep mines.

I thought Tintern Abbey in Wales was nice, but Fountains is even better! One certainly has to hand it to the Cistercians...

Near Fountains is the tiny town of Studley Roger, another place for an amusing photo op with the guys.

After Fountains, we drove into York. DD got carsick on the way over, to her embarrassment, but we got everything cleaned up without too much trouble. Half of our purpose of going to York was to find Internet access, but a remembered location had gone out of business. We had lunch at a tavern in the Shambles, then got clued in to another Internet café.
After a quick check to reduce the amount of spam in our inboxen, we proceeding to York Minster, which we'd seen before. This time we saw the undercroft, which had a museum, as well as the rest of the cathedral. It seemed much more commercialized than the last time I was there, so that was actually a little off-putting. Still, it is an impressive and beautiful place, and very rich in history.

We left York and drove to Knaresborough, a small ruin sitting in a little park overlooking the River Nidd. The keep was fairly well kept, but for a castle that once had 12 towers, very little remains. The siting was truly beautiful, though, atop a cliff overlooking the river, and with the surrounding garden park, it was a very peaceful place to relax for a bit.