Thursday, August 6th we drove from Conwy to a hostel in York, which is in north-central England. It has a long history, with a particularly important role as the center of Viking culture in Britain from 800-1000ish. There used to be a large and prosperous abbey called St. Mary's, but Henry VIII closed it down in the 1530s. The town suffered for a while, but it's gotten better. Charles I used a building we walked past as his headquarters during the Civil War, and Cromwell used York as his center for government in the north of England.
After a short walking tour with our whole group, we split up according to what we wanted to see there. I and a few other girls were all still exhausted from our hike the previous day, so we walked to a park and enjoyed the nice weather by taking a short nap and doing some journaling. Then we went on a kind of self-guided tour around the Shambles, a little street that nowadays has lots of cute shops and historic plaques, but used to be the street where all the butcher shops were. It was pretty cool. We also stopped at Greggs for some pasties (of course) and just took it easy after our demanding few days.
In the evening, some of us met up with a group to do a "Ghost Tour". If you know me, it was a pretty gutsy move, but it turned out to not be so bad. It had more historical curiosities than really creepy tales, and The Ghost Detective (the guy giving our tour) was really funny. We stopped at a few places that I thought were interesting. One was where an old workhouse/orphanage used to be, and the guy who ran it was nasty scum and basically didn't take care of the kids like he was supposed to, and when they died he would lie to the government to keep getting the money to take care of them. Well, he was a heavy drinker too, and one night thought he could hear the dead children laughing at him. He went kinda berserk, and you can fill in the rest. Anyway, that used to be in the slums of York, and now that area is really well cleaned up and pretty and suburban-looking. Another story that interested me was about The Plague House, where a rich merchant and his family lived. He and his wife caught the plague, and the town found out and quarantined the house. However, their little girl was one of those few people who is immune to the plague, though the townspeople didn't know that, and she lived for weeks by herself in that house. Sad story. We ended the tour at the Roman column discovered in an excavation of the area in the early 1900s, which of course is placed in the center of the town, right next to York Minster. What they didn't really think about was the fact that the column was upside down. Whoops.
After the tour was over, we wandered back to the hostel, where I discovered that everyone in my room was already there and already asleep - at 9:30 pm. Awesome. I tried to get to bed somewhat early, too, because we had to get up early to catch the train to Edinburgh on Friday!
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