On the Train to York

My time in England is nearing an end, and looking back I realize that precious few adventures actually made it from my brain to the computer screen. I suppose no one who knows me will be surprised that I’ve been a bit busy.

I am pecking out this essay on the train, the earliest I found leaving Kings Cross Station for York. Outside the sky is turning from gray to pale blue and the morning mist is clearing. From time to time we pass fields of startlingly vibrant yellow – the rape plant, from which we get rapeseed oil (rebranded as canola oil in North America), is in bloom. Last spring I had to ask a nice church warden what this plant was and I think he was quite startled by my inability to recognize it. But I’m a North Carolina girl – I can identify tobacco, soybeans, cucumbers or cotton while driving 70 miles an hour in the rain, but I’ve not seen the crops of the upper Midwest.

The train pulls into Grantham and I look up to study the church spires. One particularly tall one is currently swathed in scaffolding. My first thought is a desire to visit the church, and the second a wish to climb the spire. Whenever given a chance to climb up and take in the view, I say yes.

Today is only my second long train trip north. Though on a few of my driving trips out of London I’ve been rather envious of the rail passengers speeding past me as I trundle up the M1 at a mere 70mph, it has usually made more sense to just drive. This allows me to bring my step ladder (a really useful tool when photographing table tombs) and carry as much food as I need (I never take time for a lunch stop – daylight is too precious to waste in a shop or cafe) plus large rolls of paper for drawing the hats on effigies or for making brass rubbings.

This will be my last big trip. I’ll get a car in York and drive all around Leeds today, venture far further north and east tomorrow. Last stop tomorrow should be the final effigy on my “most important” list, the last one with an early gable hood and the frontlets worn long. I can’t believe I’ve done it, traveled the length and breadth of England (and just a tiny bit of Wales) but I have. My beloved map, my indespensible tool both for explaining and planning research, is covered now with the white dots that mark places I’ve visited.

I even made it to Morchard Bishop, a place so far out in Devonshire that it was an hour and a half drive from anything else (church, castle, or historic site) that I wanted to see. I justified the drive by sandwiching it in on a family trip to Cornwall that I’m sure I wouldn’t have undertaken (fun and interesting though it was to drive 769 miles over 3 days with three children wedged into the back of a too-small rental car) had I not known of the effigy’s existence.

I just passes a large sign beside the tracks that said Edinburgh 250 miles. Sorry, Scotland, but I don’t think I’ll be visiting you during this Adventure in London. Perhaps if you told me about some effigies I should visit….