English Summer 2010 #6 - From the York Minster and Shambles to Herriot's House to Hadrian's Wall

We drove north from Huddersfield in a hired car--that's Brit-speak for a rental. About an hour later we reached the ancient city of York. If Manhattan, Kansas is the "Little Apple" and Manhattan, NY, is the "Big Apple" then this walled town must be the old apple tree. We wandered down the Shambles, a cobbled footpath between a row of shops and tea rooms, some of which were built before Columbus sailed. (Note the irregularly shaped stones in the street behind Carol-Jean.)


The interior of the York Minster is vast. The photo shows only one wing of the complex. A "minster" is a church that was considered a missionary post at one time, which includes even London's Westminster Abbey as a Christian outpost in Roman times. If some of my students are considering the option of pioneering a new church, I guess they could call it a minster... which is not too far removed from the common Unity practice of calling all centers of spiritual service a "ministry".

After dodging raindrops at York we headed northwest to the small town of Thirsk, made famous by its best-known citizen, the veterinary surgeon J. Alfred Wight, best know by his pen name, James Herriot.



Nice doggie...







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Upon entering the surgery, I was fortunate to be able to say hello to Mrs. Pumphrey –whom all Herriot fans will instantly identify as the owner of an obese Pekingese named Tricki Woo. Apparently, she stopped by and refused to leave until Uncle Herriot himself attended to her pampered darling.



This was one of my favorite stops. CJ and I are great fans of James Herriot, who practiced veterinary medicine in the vicinity of Thirsk and other Yorkshire towns until he retired. We sat in a cafe eating scones, then walked the streets he traveled not many years ago before going to the building which served as the model for "Skeldale House" in Herriot's books. We were actually able to book a B&B across the street, so for one night the Herriots were our neighbors so to speak, a few decades removed.

In the evening we ate at the Darrowby Inn (see picture), a nod to fantasy by the tourism-savy locals, who recognized the benefit of identifying their village with Herriot's conflation of several Yorkshire locales into the fictionalized town of Darrowby. The food was basic pub fare, wholesome and tasty and bad for you, but the highlight to the evening came when I began casually chatting with a few older gentlemen sipping beer at the next table. They knew Alf Wight the vet, and you could tell they were respectful of this man who had so much money yet continued to work in the profession he loved. "Aye, that man were a gentleman," one of them said gravely.

During our tour of the Herriot House that afternoon we had seen a clip when Alf Wight was interviewed on American network TV at the height of his popularity. At that moment several of his books were on the New York Times Bestsellers List, and his BBC/PBS TV series was wildly popular. The interviewer asked what Alf would do now that he had all this money and noteriety. He said there wasn't time to do anything special, because he was a veterinarian, and that was a 24/7 job. It was the life he loved, and he never gave a thought to abandoning it just because he had wealth and fame.

I thought--what an fantastic prospertity lesson! Here was a guy who already had everything he wanted, so he was already prosperous. It isn't about quantity of stuff, or the amount of money in the bank, or how many admiring fans you have. Happiness and prosperity are about balance, about quality, not quantity. What fool would abandon a perfect life for mere money?

The next morning we visited the Thirsk church where Alf Wight and family worshipped and were treated to an impromptu pipe organ concert as the musician practiced for Sunday. Then we drove north to Hadrian's Wall (see pictures, below).


Carol-Jean and I have always wanted to see this 70-mile-long attempt to keep the Scots from conquereing Roman British towns. It was a masterful achievement in its day, built by soldiers and not by slaves or abducted locals. The guidebook says there were "Romans" stationed along the wall that came from every part of the Empire--Germans, Spaniards, even a detatchment of Arabs from the marshlands of the Euphrates valley. I stood on the wall at one point, near the ruins of a Roman fort, and said a silent prayer for the soldiers on both sides of this line who faced the terrorism of their day.

The Scots saw the Romans as foreign devils; the Romans saw the Scots as barbarians at the gate. Good thing we don't think like that any more, now that we're spiralized and civilized.

We've got minsters of consciousness to build, my brothers and sisters...

More later, from Windsor Castle.