A Funny Thing Happened...

by Helen Matthews

It happened in Harrogate. A car halted at the zebra crossing, music blaring at full volume from the stereo. An elderly man stepped onto the crossing, did a little dance to the throbbing beat, grinned, waved at the driver, and shuffled off on his way.

We were not supposed to be in Harrogate. We had not planned an exact itinerary for our driving tour of Yorkshire and Northumberland, though we had worked out a rough list of places we might visit. However, wet weather had dampened our enthusiasm for the water gardens at Studley Royal, and Neil refused point blank to go to ‘James Herriot World’ at Thirsk. So we had decided to break our journey north at Bettys Tea Room [and no, dear reader, there is no apostrophe in ‘Bettys’ – Ed.] in order to plan our next move. This holiday was in the nature of an experiment. It was the first time that either of us had spent our main holiday in England for about twenty years and we were not sure how it would work out.

Little Bettys Cafe, York

Tea shops were to be something of a recurring theme during the trip. This was partly because they offered a refuge from the rain of an English summer, but also for novelty value since, National Trust properties excepted, tea shops are a rarity in Buckinghamshire where we live. We had earlier sampled ‘Little Bettys Café’ in York, but the Harrogate branch was the original home of the ‘Swiss-Yorkshire’ business. In Yorkshire and Northumberland we were to find a huge variety of tea shops.

As a contrast to the slickly efficient and excellent (but pricey) Bettys, there was the cosy ‘Grannies’ in Alnwick, hidden away in a basement, with home-made cakes and an interesting style of décor, complete with the eponymous relative’s bloomers hanging from an drying rack. The Tea Cosy in Alnmouth was not quite so quaint, but had delicious home baking. I was reassured to hear a customer who asked for carrot cake being informed that the last slice had just been sold, but that there was another one in the oven. The National Trust tea room at Cragside had hungry ducks outside. The Lakeside café at Castle Howard had aggressive hungry ducks outside. The tea room in the main house had aggressive hungry ducks and hungry peacocks which were clearly learning their technique from the ducks. And excellent home-made coffee and walnut cake that was far too good for ducks or peacocks.

Hungry peacock, Castle Howard

But tea shops were not the only recurring theme. Northumberland’s history of border skirmishes with the Scots left a lasting legacy on the landscape. The Northumberland County Council’s tourist leaflet lists fourteen castles (not counting the Berwick town walls). In order to avoid castle fatigue we attempted to limit ourselves to an average of one castle a day. This policy did rather remind me of a more than usually vacuous tour rep we once encountered in Florence, who remarked that “there are more than forty museums in Florence, but we recommend that you go to two of them”, though. The castles of Northumbria range from romantic ruins to stately homes via an Edwardian country retreat. The most famous is probably Alnwick, the home of the Percy family since the fourteenth century, and more recently seen on screen as Hogwarts. The cardboard cutouts of Harry Potter were fortunately not too intrusive, though I would have liked to buy one of the broomsticks on sale in the gift shop. Externally, Alnwick looks very much the medieval castle, but inside, the state rooms, redesigned in the nineteenth-century, are those of any grand stately home, though the table football table and bean bags in the library remind visitors that it is still very much a home.

The Duchess’ famous gardens will no doubt be impressive when they are finished, but our enjoyment was rather marred by the fact that much of the site was still under construction. I saw Alnwick described on one website as ‘the Windsor of the North’, which is neither an accurate nor, in my opinion, a desirable comparison. Alnwick is smaller, friendlier, cheaper, and despite the Potter connection, less crowded than Windsor.

Lindisfarne Castle

Bamburgh Castle is another example of the stately home interior, with a good collection of fine porcelain on display, but is situated in a rather bleaker position by the coast (at least it was bleak the day we visited, in July).

Lindisfarne castle is very different. Lindisfarne was an early seat of Christianity, and despite its key location the castle was not built until the sixteenth century, after the dissolution of the monasteries. It was bought at the turn of the twentieth century by Edward Hudson, the founder of Country Life magazine, who employed his friend Edwin Lutyens to turn it into a holiday home, complete with garden designed by Gertrude Jekyll. As castles go, it is small and rather homely.

Warkworth castle is conveniently located at the end of Warkworth’s main street. But from its other aspects it commands views of the sea and the river Coquet. Now a ruin, enough remains to trace different periods of building, including the new fourteenth-century keep, which formed a castle within the castle. Like Alnwick, Warkworth belonged to the Percy family and bears the family emblem of a lion, though rather the worse for wear. Other romantic ruins such as Dunstanburgh and Edlingham we saw only from a distance as a result of our castle limitation policy.

I must not mislead you. We managed to find time to see some other attractions than castles and tea shops. By my count we also visited, in the space of 9 days, five historic houses, ranging in size from Washington Old Hall to Castle Howard, two cathedrals, one Minster, two abbeys, three parish churches and a priory. Yet despite this apparently hectic schedule we did not feel rushed, as we came and went as we pleased. We even found time to spend a morning in the huge second hand bookshop in Alnwick, which had the added delights of comfy chairs, coffee and biscuits, and a model railway running round the top of the bookshelves (no bookshop should be without one).

Workhouse Museum, Ripon

We also saw a few less obvious attractions, which we encountered by chance. Harrogate, with its dancing pensioner, was followed by Ripon, where we discovered a Workhouse Museum where we were invited to smell the authentic carbolic soap, and a Police Museum, where we could try on police helmets and convicts' uniforms. The former I found particularly interesting as I was born in a workhouse (well, it had been converted into a hospital maternity ward by then, but they still had to lock the doors at night to keep out vagrants who had not heard about the change of use). In Malton we found Eden Camp, a former World War II prisoner of war camp that has been turned into a museum about the war. Here, we were able to experience the blitz, or living conditions on a German U-Boat.

Despite the weather, we felt that the experiment had been a success. We might well holiday in England again. We never did make it to James Herriot World.


First published in VISA issue 58 (December 2005)