York at Night

I know I said I'd give you the photo tour of my room, but I'm not anywhere near unpacked, so there's stuff all over the floor, and you really don't want to see that anyway. So some other time. Instead, I've got a few pictures to share from my nighttime stroll through my immediate neighborhood.

This is just a fountain and statue. I thought the picture came out pretty well, so you get to see it. Yaaaay. Ok, now for some more historically/culturally significant ones!

Here's my dad pretending to be cool by a medieval bar. Yes, that's right, a bar. In "medieval speak," a bar refers to a gate, while a "gate" refers to a street. Hence, Bootham Bar was once a gate along the perimeter wall of York, while Marysgate is really just Mary's Street. Many of the roads and intersections of medieval cities have preserved these names. Although these may be confusing for us modern folk, they make perfect sense if you know the history behind the names. Ok, I'll stop prattling on about my fascination with language change. Moving on!


Here we have a not very good picture of a plaque from the bit of original medieval wall right across the street from that arch pictured above. I'll try and replace this with a photo taken during the day soon. In case you can't make out the text, it reads:

"Roman Fortress: This plaque marks the site of the Porta Principalis Dextra or North Western Gate of the Roman Fortress of which the foundations as rebuilt circa A.D. 300 lie just below ground."

Pretty neat, huh? Bet you don't have Roman ruins under your feet. I also came across the Roman Bath Museum during my wanderings today; I'll have to go see what's there sometime.


This is part of a bronze model of city centre (i.e. the Medieval heart of York). Pictured is the York Minster, the second largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe, and the largest in England.

In case you were wondering, Cologne Cathedral in Germany is the largest. Fun factoid blatantly stolen from Wikipedia, Cologne Cathedral was the tallest structure in the world until the completion of the Washington Monument in DC.

Anywho, back to the York Minster. Considered the Heart of York (and only partly because the main stained glass window features a prominent heart shape), the cathedral is a treasure trove of medieval art and architecture and really something spectacular to behold. I haven't gotten inside yet because I've been running all over doing errands-- more on that in a later post perhaps-- but I wanted to at least check out the outside. I can see the very top from the end of my street, and it was illuminated by floodlights and was really, really cool. But a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Well, here's a few thousand then.