Whitby Abbey - Early History

 The Abbey ruin we see now is not the first religious building on this site.  In the 7th and 8th centuries the headland it stands on was known as Streaneshalch and was the site of  an Anglian settlement and Minster church established  in the 5th and 6th centuries by the peoples who had settled on this side of Britain - the Angli or Anglians.

The Minster was founded some time after the battle of Winwaed in 655 when the forces of Oswiu of Northumberland beat the pagan forces of Penda of Mercia. Oswiu married King Edwin's daughter Eanflaed.  Oswiu gave his infant daughter Aelfflaed into the care of Hild the Abbess of Hartlepool.   In 657 Hild founded a new Minster for both men and women at Whitby.  It is assumed that the first settlement and minster was destroyed sometime in the 10th century by Viking raiders who burned and sacked many of the Christian establishments along the North East coast.  The name of Streaneshalch all but disappeared from the records and the Danish name of Whitby appeared.

The foundation of the second monastery at Whitby came in the aftermath of the Norman invasion of 1066.  A second Romanesque church was built in the early 12th century and this in turn was replaced by the Gothic buildings, the remains of which we see today.

Although the weather looks sunny and calm it really wasn't.

The wind up on the headland was so strong and was buffeting us about, it must have been quite bleak living up in the settlement in those early days.  Through the arch you can see St Mary's church.  I'll write about this in a later post.

The building below was the home of the Cholmley family who leased the site of the abbey after the suppression or dissolution of Whitby Abbey in 1539.  At this time Henry Davell was the last abbot of the abbey and at the time it was handed over to King Henry VIII's commissioners there were twenty two members of the community and the estates were worth £437 2s 9d.  Whitby was one of the poorest Benedictine Monasteries in England.

It now houses the museum, gift shop and cafe.

All for now, more to come over the next week or two.

Two Wartime Tales

 Carrying on from my last post where I promised more information on some of the photos I'd taken.

The sculpture above by Ray Lonsdale is on Scarborough's North Bay.  It's called Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers.  It was sited on the North Bay for a four week period but a petition was set up by a local resident, Maureen Robinson, to keep the sculpture in place.  With a short time  to go before the removal of the sculpture she purchased it and gifted it to the town.  It is now cared for by the local council.

Freddie Gilroy (1921-2008) was born in County Durham to a mining family.  He went to work at the local mine but also joined the Territorial Army.  In 1939 at the start of war he was called up to be a gun aimer for the Royal Artillery.  Towards the end of the war he became a Regimental Police Officer.  On the 15th April 1945 he was part of the force sent to Hamburg to liberate Bergen Belsen.  The horrors of what he experienced stayed with him for the rest of his life.  He spent his 24th birthday within the camp and when interviewed by a local newspaper in the 1980s he confessed that he had cried on every birthday since then.

That's Scarborough Castle in the background, shrouded in the morning mist.

In the Canadian Memorial hanger at the Yorkshire Air Museum at Elvington is the Halifax Bomber called Friday 13th.

We watched a small film in the on site cinema about how it came to be named.  Bomber Command 158 Squadron flew Halifax bombers from nearby RAF Lissett each plane having it's own unique call sign.  By 1944 all Halifax Bombers given the F for Freddy designation had been lost so when the new one arrived it was deemed to be unlucky.  On it's first mission in March 1944 bomber LV907 F broke that run of bad luck.  That night 95 aircraft were lost but LV907 returned.  The Canadian crew decided to call it Friday 13th to 'jinx' it even more, they painted many images of bad luck onto the plane and defiantly embraced the F for Freddy superstition.  LV907 Friday 13th went on to return safely from 128 more missions before the end of the war.  This particular Halifax was held in great affection by its crews and of course they all wanted to fly on missions in this aircraft.

Here is a - link - to more about this plane.

The Workhouse Museum and Gardens, Ripon

We left the Cathedral (see my last post) and  followed the signs to The Workhouse Museum.

It was a well kept building and the volunteers, nearly all of them dressed in costume were very welcoming. The first part of the building that you enter is the gatehouse.  People arriving here would be admitted and although their circumstances were pretty dire they would at least be washed, clothed and fed and have a roof over their heads. 

This part of the gatehouse building houses the Guardians' meeting room - above.  Some workhouses were better than others, the monies they received were administered by the guardians and some were less scrupulous than others.

The room where people waited to be accepted for admittance to the Workhouse.

Above the day to day rules and regulations of the workhouse.

The bathing area

Clean clothes and regulation wear.

Receiving ward for inmates.

Vagrant's Cells

Vagrants were offered one nights stay and an evening meal in return for a completed task of work which would be designated by the Master or Matron.  Possibly working in the garden or cleaning out the pigs.

Across the yard from the admittance area and overnight cells was the workhouse proper.  The garden in front has recently been restored.

At the front of the building are the living quarters of the Master and Matron who were usually a married couple.

The kitchen where food was prepared for the inmates.  Food like soup, meat pie, suet and rice puddings, porridge and gruel were all on the list provided for the Poor Law Board in 1866.

The volunteer school master waiting for his pupils.  Children were taught the basics in the workhouse.

The doctor waiting for his patients.

The workhouse was pretty self sufficient growing their own fruit and vegetables in the garden and keeping a pig and chickens.

The present gardens were a joy to walk around, they were well tended and looked very productive.

This museum has some very dedicated volunteers both in the building and the garden.

It seems to have been a bumper year for poppies, where ever we travelled we saw lots of them  along the road side verges, in fields and gardens.

Whilst we were in the kitchen we saw this recipe chalked on the wall.  It was a recipe for Wilfra Cakes which were traditionally made in Ripon each year on August 1st which is the saints day of St Wilfred who founded the cathedral we looked at in my last post.  It was made as a treat for the inmates on that day.

" August 1894 - for some years it had been the custom to augment the normal workhouse dinner on St Wilfred's Sunday by the addition of broad beans in parsley sauce; this year the Master and Matron thought something should be done at tea time and one and a half dozen large fruit tarts were served and greatly appreciated."

I saw this book in the Museum shop and bought it as it looked an interesting read (which it was) and also I was hoping it would have some mention of the Wilfra cake inside,  unfortunately it didn't but I looked it up as soon as we got home.

 I then decided I would try the recipe we'd photographed in the museum.  It's just sweet, shortcrust pastry both top and bottom and a mixture of apple, Wenslydale cheese and sugar as a filling.

It was very tasty.

A few days later I bought a copy of Landscape magazine for August.  I usually only treat myself to two or three copies a year as it is quite expensive.  

Imagine my surprise when I found a recipe for Wilfra Apple cake inside as part of an article on seasonal, local and traditional food. 

Link to more on Wilfra Cakes

Link to more on the Ripon Workhouse Museum

Ripon Cathedral

We arrived in Rippon around lunch time so after a scone and coffee at a lovely cafe just down the road opposite - I had a blackberry and apple scone and Paul had a Wenslydale cheese scone - both delicious, we entered the cathedral.

Ripon Cathedral has a history dating back to the 7th century and was founded by St Wilfred in the year 672, it has been rebuilt several times since.  The Saxon Crypt is thought to be the oldest in the country.

The pulpit designed by Henry Wilson in 1913 in a mixture of the  Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau styles.

 

It is made of bronze and stands on marble columns.  The figures are of four Anglo-Saxon Saints, Cuthbert, Etheldreda, Hilda and Chad.  It was rather impressive.

Above the original stone pulpit which used to be on top of the medieval screen below.

The stone screen above dates from the 15th century although the figures are modern, dating from about 1947 and depict local people of Ripon who have been influential both in the town and church.

The Saxon Crypt is all that survives of the original church and it is where relics brought back from Rome by St Wilfred were housed.

View across the nave - There was a large school party being guided around the church so we set off in the opposite direction but by doing this I'm afraid I missed one or two things and didn't get back to them later.

The stairs leading up to the Cathedral's library.

The library is a large, light and airy room built in the 14th century.  It houses many ancient books plus displays of silver communion vessels too.  Also on display is the Ripon Jewel, a gold disc which dates from the time of St Wilfred.  It was found near the cathedral in 1976.

The jewel was quite fascinating.  It is small, about 29mm in diameter.  On the back it is plain gold and on the front it has settings for jewels.  There are pieces of amber still in place but other gems have been lost.  It may have been used as a brooch or as an embellishment for a relic casket.

The Holy Spirit Chapel with metalwork designed in the 1970s by Leslie Durbin who also designed the first £1 coins.

The Font. is part Tudor and the rest Victorian.
 

Two things of note about the cathedral are its literary connections.  The father of Charles Dodgson was a member of the clergy team at the Cathedral in the 1860s.  Charles Dodgson wrote as Lewis Carroll and it is said that the misericord carvings in the Quire influenced his writing of 'Alice in Wonderland.'

The poet Wilfred Owen spent his 25th birthday in March 1918 visiting Ripon Cathedral. Just a few months later he was killed in action at Sambre-Oise Canal in France just days before the end of the war.

Next we'll visit the workhouse and try out a Ripon speciality.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park - Part Two

Continuing with details of our visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture park from my last post about Mister Finch. It has taken me a while to get around to writing this second part as the heat is getting to me, I can't seem to find a cool spot and my brain seems unable to grasp the simplest things.  It has taken me three days in the cooler hours of the early morning to finish it so here goes......

After a quick lunch we set off to see the other exhibitions.  We've visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park a couple of times before and had seen most of the permanent sculptures which are dotted around the parkland so we concentrated on the temporary exhibitions.

In the Georgian chapel was what I thought was a wonderful exhibition -

Beyond Time by Chiharu Shiota.  The installation was made expecially for this space.

It is made from two thousand balls of woollen thread and seems to weave its way quite magically across the extent of the chapel floor and up into the ceiling.

Most of the threads come from the bare piano structure which is set slightly off centre.  I hope the visitor doesn't mind being in my photo which I took from up in the balcony.   I thought she added scale and her face is hidden by the pretty sun hat and she is completely absorbed by what she can see.

Shiota was inspired to use the piano as part of the structure as there wasn't a musical instrument of any kind in the chapel.  She also took her inspiration from a childhood memory of seeing the skeletal remains a neighbour's piano after a house fire.

The sheets of music trapped and woven into the woollen threads represent the scores of all the music that is recorded as having been played or sung in the chapel over the years and also an historic bell ringing score.

We left the chapel and wandered over the parched grass to find the next exhibition.

The Coffin Jump by Katrina Palmer is one of the WWI centenary art commissions by 14-18 Now.

It was inspired by the history of an extraordinary group of women who became the first all female First Aid Nursing Yeomanry which was founded in 1907.   The exhibit is sometimes accompanied by both sound and performance which is activated by a horse and rider jumping over but when we saw it it was quite still in its peaceful surroundings.

The nurses would rescue men straight from the battlefield thus making a direct link between the front line with the field hospitals.  In spite of the nurses' undoubted courage the British army would not support them as they didn't like to be associated with what they saw as  'liberated' women.  The nurses concentrated their efforts and skills in helping the French and Belgian armies by running hospitals and driving ambulances.

The words on the jump are taken from the diaries and other sources of members including nurse Muriel Thompson.  Phrases like 'Woman saves Man' 'Cut to Pieces' and 'Nothing Much Happened' highlight the heroism of these women.

We returned to the main galleries and had a quick look around the exhibition 'A Tree in the Wood' by Giuseppe Penone.  Central to the exhibition is Matrice a 30 metres long fir tree which has been cut in half and dissected along one of its growth rings.  I would have liked more time to explore the outside parts of this exhibition but we had to leave and get on our way home.

 I've put links to all three exhibits in each part if you want to follow up and find out more.