Never travel on a Sunday .

The hotel dog sits at the garden gate and observes us as we head off for our morning 10,000 steps. He watches us go in silence. Hotel dogs can become quite blase about comings and goings. For them it's all part of the job.

We've stayed a bit longer than we originally planned but later today we shall be heading North to Scotland on the 'fast' LNER service. I've always said that anyone who travels by rail on a Sunday, when the train companies repair the tracks, is mad. We'll soon find out if that's true. Let's hope any delays are 'manageable'.

The Minster is quiet. The colder weather means the tourist numbers have thinned down. On top of that Sunday morning visitors are nervous that they might get caught up in a religious service and tend to delay their visits until later. We pretty much have the place to ourselves apart from some quiet American couples who are consulting a well thumbed Pevsner guide. This is the time of the year when those in the know arrive in the UK to enjoy the combination of better pre-equinox weather and off season hotel rates.

The 15th century sculptor who carved the Kings on the altar screen presumably thought he was making them look like old testament prophets. On the far left William the Conqueror certainly looks the part whereas Rufus in the adjacent niche looks out at the world with what seems to be abject boredom. Maybe that's a trait of old testament prophets ?

In a little church facing Bettys tea room a memorial stone to two maiden sisters who each died at the age of 98. They'd lived through the reign of seven successive monarchs. That was considered memorable by the standards of those days. Come to that it would be memorable at any time. If they'd lived a little longer they'd have seen the American colonies opt for independence.

I'd always thought Lowry just did 'factory' pictures. Unusually, this one in York Art Gallery shows his trademark match stick figures milling around the Castle.

The sounds of the Western Isles :https://substack.com/home/post/p-213973149

Scroll down. The B&W photo of the original makes the dogs face much more understandable :https://x.com/Chori__Vegano/status/2100980883633078435

Our local professors weekly update :https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-203-a-week-which-demonstrated

The old window.

The church we're looking for is found hidden in a side street behind the 1970's era Radisson Hotel. On one side is an empty lot left by the Luftwaffes bombing of the town in 1942. A few doors further down the street is a gastropub called the Whippet Inn which is popular with young officers from the Parachute Regiment entertaining their girl friends in somewhere that's convivial and 'reasonably' priced. Not, you would imagine, a neighbourhood where a rare unique medieval window illustrating the end of the world is to be found. 

The windows were made and installed around 1410. An extremely turbulent time in English history when the truly awful King Richard III ( untrustworthy was the best chroniclers of the time could say of him  ) was deposed by Henry IV. This was a shocking development in an era when Kings ruled by divine sanction. Plague, political violence and rebellion added to the unsettling mix of events. People found it hard to keep up with the speed and enormity of change.

There has been a church on this site since well before the Norman Conquest. The current one has bits from the 11th and 15th centuries with some makeshift repairs from the Civil War and some bizarre Victorian restoration work on the roof that, as you can see, is heavy on gilding.

The window we've come to see is set off to the side of the church in an unremarkable little corner. The signs of doom that precede the end of the world are set out in 15 panes that run from left to right. 

Underneath each pane there's a description written in middle English. This was highly unusual at a time when you could be executed for owning an unapproved English language version of the Bible. The descriptions were there for a tiny elite who could read and write while the garish glass images with their tales of politics, climate and pandemics were for the illiterate masses. To see written English on stained glass must have been the equivalent of being introduced to AI.

Here is a description, with some good photographs, of the weird and wonderful window :https://www.exploringbuildinghistory.co.uk/all-saints-york-pricke-of-conscience-window-morality-in-stained-glass-15th-c-style/

Floods bring sea monsters that walk the land. Fires devour fruit trees. Stars fall from the skies. It's all very Hollywood.

The family that were the benefactors of the window are shown on the very bottom level. Their faces seem to show they were suitably impressed.

The whole place is very human and domestic in scale. We're there for the better part of half an hour without anyone else so much as peeping through the door. I'd reckon not one in a thousand, possibly ten thousand, visitors even know it's here. A DaVinci Code thriller could be written around it.

Dinner last night was excellent although the wine list was again dominated by exotic offerings from lesser known parts of the Balkans or Latin America. This presumably appeals to a younger and more adventurous palate.  We opt for a Pouilly-Fuisse which is usually  a safe standby but which, this time, isn't. 

A quiet town.

The view from the street outside the hotel can't have changed much in five hundred years. There is something rather special about York. Life in some cathedral towns outside London moves at its own pace. That's true here. History is woven into every nook and cranny. Come first light clerics can be seen hurrying around on their way to open up the Minster or prepare for Matins.

The hotel we've chosen does indeed have three columns in its downstairs vault. As to whether they're Roman or not I wouldn't like to say. To all but the most expert of eyes one column looks pretty much like another. However, the claim that it's the oldest British building in continuous use seems justifiable.  'The Font' loves the sound of the bells right outside the bedroom window. Angus thinks you might very soon tire of their quarter hourly chiming. 'Tire' may be an understatement. I shall render a judgement tomorrow after another night of atonal four bar snippets of 'Jesu love of my soul'. Thankfully the bells stop sometime after dinner.

The food last night was good. The wine list by contrast was a disappointment. The mark up on the bottles was at least four times, possibly five. Outlandish. A 2019 Pauillac at an eye watering  £195 was the only Bordeaux on offer and not even a good one at that.  We opt for glasses of what might politely be described as a zesty Argentinian Malbec. 'The Font' makes do with one and I don't finish my second. We toy with the idea of drinking a bottle of champagne with dinner but decide against it as being the wrong solution to the problem.  Tonight we'll eat in the hotel.

In the Minster garden a bench with a life sized Paddington bear on it must have been photographed a million times by the European school kids and Chinese tourists that throng the place in the summer. Today, we're alone apart from two or three groups of bored looking and uniformly blonde Swedish adolescents waiting for the Minster ticket office to open. The Swedish teenagers fool around. A verger tells them to be quiet and sheepishly they all say 'sorry' in unison. 'Sorry' has become one of those catch all words that every European knows. Inside the Minster there is one of those slightly embarrassing pre-opening announcements where visitors are reminded that this is a house of God and to behave accordingly. It is suggested that everyone say the Lords Prayer in their own language. To our surprise the young Swedes do. Who'd have expected to hear 'Helgat varde ditt namn' being recited in 2026 ? The teens don't seem to suffer from the self consciousness of older folk.

Two workmen are touching up heraldic shields. York is the sort of small city where this sort of civic activity is not unusual. They work at an 'unhurried' pace and to a standard that hints they're happy to be stewards of the place.

Half an hour later , after we've had a reasonable coffee, the workmen have moved on and are touching up another shield.

A woman lifts her dog up onto the bench and plonks it unceremoniously next door to Paddington. She arranges the dogs fur and then proceeds to take a picture. All the time she keeps up a steady stream of conversation with the mutt. The poor thing sensing this strange ursine presence next to it needs some reassurance.

We thought we knew York but there are so many treasures we didn't know about or had passed on prior visits. This plaque in a church restored after being wrecked the Baedeker Raids refers to the church as 'she'. There is something rather other worldly about the concept of a building being so well integrated into a town that over a millennium or so it develops a persona all of its own. 

It is a little jewel box of a place unnoticed by tourists. Purists might argue with some aspects of the restoration , but not us. It works well and emits warmth and friendliness in that way some old buildings do. It also follows from this, and is equally true, that some buildings don't. It is undoubtedly a 'she'.

The old place battles with pigeons.

Later today we will head off in search of the DaVinci code window about which more tomorrow.