York (day 2)

The guesthouse we ware staying at has breakfast included, so I start my day with a full English breakfast. I know the English only eat this on special occasions, but if it's being offered, what's a girl to do? After breakfast we go back to our room to get ready, because we have a bike tour scheduled today. 

The starting point is pretty far away, so we decide to take an Uber to the starting point, do the bike tour and slowly make our way back on foot. We meet up with our guide Cecil, a dapper little man with a big passion for York. He takes excellent care of us and makes us feel safe while biking. Later on during the tour we find out that he used to be a fire fighter. That explains a lot, also his way of talking. He is quite factual, but the passion is there. No extreme embellishments or bad jokes, just sharing the stories and information with passion, I love it! We happen to be the only ones taking the tour today, so we're getting a private tour. No complaints there either. 

One of the first stops is between two gates. That gate is a very special gate, because it is the only one in York where there is like a double gate. Visitors could enter through the first gate, they would enter the barbican (the area between the two gates). The portcullis (the iron drop gate) would be closed until the guards had determined whether the visitors were friend or foe. If they decided you were friend, the dropgate would be raised and you could enter the city. If not, you were in trouble. 

Cecil also told us how important chocolate was (and in a way still is) in York. There used to be two big manufacturers of chocolate. Rowntree and Terry's. The first is best know for KitKat, the other for the chocolate oranges. Cecil even brought one of those oranges. My daughters love them, so I'm familiar with them, for Sophie it's a nice way to get her first taste of one of those. We may keep the chocolate orange, so we can keep enjoying it during the rest of our stay. The cacao beans were brought into the city by boat. On the photo is one of the wharfs where they offloaded the beans in days gone past. Cecil also told us some lovely stories about how firefighters were treated if they were called to the chocolate factory. Oh and not to forget: the owner of KitKat built a whole town for his employees. It had almost everything a person would ever need: houses with every convenience, shops, a library, a school, a hospital, a gym, a pool to swim in, lovely parks etc. The only thing was that Mr. Rowntree was a Quaker, so guess what wasn't to be found in his town? That's right! No pub!! Until this day, the town is a pub free zone (highly unusual for the UK I have to say). The Terry's factory sadly was moved away a few years after Kraft's bought it, so that was a loss for York. 

We are also introduced to a new word: snickelway. That's the name York has given to tiny alleyways that lead from busy streets to quiet courtyards and vice versa. There are a lot of snickelways in York if you know how to look for them. Until now, those alleyways felt like they were something private, not to be entered, but now that we know they are there, we are introduced to many wonderful sights (more on that later).

It's impossible to remember all the stories of a 2,5 hour tour, but I'll try to add some of them. Like the story of Harry Martindale, the last person to see Roman ghosts in the basement of the Treasurer's House in 1953. Harry could give details of what the soldiers were wearing that he wasn't likely to have known back then. Cecil told us there was an interview online and we found this link: The Most Famous Ghost Story in the World!. It truly is an amazing story. I'm honestly on the fence whether I believe him or not, it's credible with all the details he could give historians (not the standard information, but actual information about a certain period of time) and he became a policeman later in life, in a way we want to believe that all policemen tell the truth. But on the other hand: ghosts? Really? Then again, there are things I've never seen for myself that I believe in, so who knows, maybe he really did see ghosts. 

Something else that really made an impression of my were his stories about the flooding of York. I should have take the photo from another angle, because a lot of the years aren't visible, but you can see the top two clearly, the worst floods (apart from the 2015 one, that's not on there somehow, it was way worse than these floodings). York is situated between two rivers. The Foss and the Ouse. Especially the Ouse is a big river. Sometimes one of them will flood, but in 2015 both flooded. To make matters worse, the system that was supposed to protect part of the town from flooding of the Foss, failed, so a wall of water entered the city. The water level was 5,5 meters (!) higher than usual. Cecil later took us to a bridge and said that the spot we were standing on was pretty much the only bit of York that hadn't flooded at the time in that area of York. All the houses, shops, restaurants, parks etc. that we could see from there were flooded. Scary stuff. Back at the hotel I found this BBC news article with some photos: 'Nightmare' flooding hits York after rivers overflow - BBC News. Those photos reminded me of the stories my father's family used to tell about the 'Watersnoodramp' of 1953 (when a large part of south-west The Netherlands flooded). My father's family had a farm in Brabant and my grandmother had to go to the roof with her children to stay safe from the water. After several hours a boat come by to rescue them. At the time my grandmother was pregnant with my father, so it's a strong part of family lore.

Some snippets of other stories: how every king (or queen) has to enter York through the Micklegate and how King Charles got egged when he visited York (the culprit had to do community service for a year, wasn't allowed to come within 500 meters of the king again and may not have eggs on his person in public anymore). He pointed out a snickelway that we should explore after the tour, which led to the gorgeous building you see in the photo above this paragraph. Oh and he told us the story of how a Russian rocket got to be inside the building of an insurance company (photo of the building below, it was pretty much impossible to take a photo of the rocket). The building is right next to a very old building. Even though it is a really modern building, they've tried to incorporate the old as well. I have to say it looks better than one would expect it to. 

Maybe more of the stories will come back to me later. If they do, I'll add them. We ended our day in a historic pub, Ye Olde Starre Inne, an inn since 1644. We sat in one of the beer gardens, a lovely spot in the sun, out of the chilly wind.