Vale of York

*Image "Dance of Spring " by Franz von Stuck

The Environment Agency has issued storm warnings for tomorrow, Monday. Not sure if these are for the North of England, as the North doesn’t usually figure much in national calculations and I heard that it was Devon and Cornwall that people are being advised to secure everything, nail down their pets , children, old folk and sheep , inflate their rubber dinghies and stay inside, doors appropriately sandbagged.

However, it was warm enough and sunny enough to explore the Vale of York for today’s house hunting reconnoiterings , or rather area assessments and house envying, because of course, the perfect house in the perfect setting is always occupied by some other people who are likely not nearly as deserving of it as we are. Bastards.

Although the Vale of York ticks a lot of boxes for us, the fact that we have had to wait for a day to trawl this area when the weather was good enough to see it in its full glory should not be forgotten when the prettiest cottage with the most lush garden which could double up as a grade I archaeological excavation site of interest ,and the most excellent range of outbuildings, requisite number of bedrooms, bathrooms, reception rooms all renovated, restored and redecorated in the most sympathetic manner and the best possible taste, presents itself at the most tempting price.

Being a geological plain , a lot of which was once marshland drained over the centuries, a lot of which floods regularly as a matter of course, and even more regularly either as a result of global warming or not enough consideration and knowledge about just exactly where it is unwise to build new housing developments, service roads and all the things associated with developing land which has been under plough or water for thousands of years. Consequently flood alert is endemic and the difficulty in obtaining buildings and contents insurance a problem not to be sneezed at lightly.

The Vale of York is evocative of its homophone. It is as changeable and mysterious as a woman with the light and the season, the weather and the mood of the land. Often swathed in mist , a teasing veil that has concealed the Minster Towers, the soaring spires and the city walls from friendly traveller and warlike enemy alike as they have traversed the fertile plain since the Romans built Eboricum , and probably before that, back into the miasma of time when Ugg and Akha the Neanderthal couple tramped across the tundra seeking the mighty aurochs to fill the winter larder and clothe their band of hunter-gatherers. On a clear day, however, as they say, you can see for ever and ever across the Vale, up to the rolling Wolds and to the purple horizon of the moors. The red brick cottages, the grey spires of smug churches, the outcrops of tree lines stunted wind breaks, the emerald- greening- spring -breaking spikes of flailed white-thorn hedges, silver streams and water meadows retaining shallow lakes that bring the sky to earth all conspire together to make you forget to breathe. The huge skies, nimbus clouds streaked with mother-of-pearl subtlety , or castled with blowsy cumulus Camelots put every living thing, every timeless brick and stone and clump of earth into its place in time and space, makes you feel that there is indeed an order to the universe.


The snowdrops nod thickly in Manor House woodland, blossom blushes neatly in planned avenues, ubiquitous roadside borders of daffodils richly sickly yellow; there comes a point where it all suffocates you, where you are looking at yourself through the wrong end of a telescope- where you are outside of yourself and see yourself inside the landscape and the timescape, a distant spire on a horizon hazy with swirling mist of petal fragrance on the wind, a minuscule speck of miserable humanity. You have absorbed as much beauty as is possible without exploding like a ploughed fieldful of gulls disturbed by a shotgun blast, like this blossom will when the coming storm rips it from the twig.

At this point in our outing we hit the military garrison at Strensall. I had never imagined I would ever feel particularly nostalgic enough about the Army Camps I lived in or near for the first twenty years of my life, to welcome the memories the brickwork of the married quarters, the squareness, the grey and red, the white lines , line and lines , everything in lines brought tumbling into my consciousness. Even the heathland was the same as at Leipzig Barracks, the fences, the warning signs, the Scots pines. No, I had never imagined ever feeling fondness for the concrete grimness of it all, but today, after the surfeit of beauty, I positively embraced it and looked favourably upon the village as a possible future home with echoes of my distant past. The odd and unexpected symbiotic symmetry pleased and soothed my spirits.




Heading into the outer city, we took a wrong turning, if there is such a thing when exploring, and drove round and round an estate the like of which is not mentioned in the tourist brochures or guidebooks of York. Crumbling, chip boarded up, the people are poor, the streets threatening in a blank staring kind of way. We pulled up at T junction, escape in sight in the form of the Bootham Bar, gateway through the ancient city wall rising before of us . A lollipop sign read STOP in the red circle. Under this someone had written in fat black marker pen:

"POETS".

I have no idea what it means.