Blogs from Ripon, North Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom, Europe

My first trip to Fountains Abbey was a few years back. I was 11. It was a school trip. At that time, I was arguably more interested in what was in my lunchbox and who I ended up sitting next to. The Other Half has never been before, so we decided to take to have a detour from our normal routes back down south and paid a visit. Ripon Racecourse was being spruced up ready for the flat season and Ripon Cathedral was as dominant as ever. The rest of town was I had remembered. A traffic jam. We pressed on without even an opportunity of a photograph of the Cathedral. I turned off the Pateley Bridge into the grounds of Fountains Abbey. If you search on the internet for Fountains Abbey, you will see it ... read more

RIPON RACES After yesterdays excitement it was a later start and a quiet breakfast to kick off the day before we headed to Ripon (about an hour north east of Skipton) for the Ripon Races. The drive over was very pleasant lovely green rolling countryside and not too much traffic – just the odd tractor to hold things up! We got to Ripon about an hour before the gates opened so collected our tickets and headed off to have a look around the town. It was Bank Holiday Monday so not many shops were open but it was a nice town and it wasn’t difficult to fill in our spare hour. We also filled the car up for the first time since leaving London – only took 40 Pounds to fill so looks like upgrading to ... read more

Hackfall Woods are located between Masham and Ripon, just outside the small village of Grewelthorpe in Nidderthorpe, North Yorkshire. In 1731 John Aislabie, member of parliament for Ripon and notable for his involvement in the South Sea Bubble financial scandal in the early 1720s, purchased the woods from a local land-owning family called Hardcastle for the sum of £906. Aislabie also owned the nearby Royal Park at Studley and wanted the woods to provide stone from the quarries on it’s southern edge as well as timber. After John Aislabie’s death in 1742 Hackfall Woods passed to his son William who transformed them into an ornamental woodland landscape in the mid 18th century with follies, waterfalls and fountains dotted throughout. The walk started from the recently built car-park just to the east of the woods on the ... read more

We had not had internet for a while so this blog was getting very behind. We also had a mountain of washing to do and since the site had now quietened down we decided to grab the washing machines while they were free. I sat down to a day of typing up our notes and Andy very generously offered to do the washing. I watched him disappear off up the hill laden down with washing and thought ahhh bless. Quite some time had passed since I’d seen him and I wondered where he had got to. But to honest I was enjoying a bit of peace and quiet so no need to investigate! Some more time passed and as I was gazing out of the window looking for some inspiration, I saw him trundling back down ... read more

Ripon So today we went on a road trip to York with Dom and Christoph which is about 2 hours drive from Newcastle. On the way, we stopped off in Ripon which has a massive cathedral... which according to Dom in comparison to others around the place, is actually incredibly small. The town itself was small and all the roads were real narrow. We struggled to find somewhere to park, but eventually we managed to get to the Cathedral. The place as massive. It was amazing to imagine this had been built by humans. It was so big I had to walk halfway up one of the side streets just to capture it all in a photo. Fortunately I was allowed to take photos inside for the mere amount of £2.5 ($6.5). While we were ... read more