Hyperballad: Where Streets are Gates, Gates are Bars and Bars are Pubs

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Streets in York are generally called Gates, which might sound a little strange but it rang a bell of familiarity with me; when we visited Iceland, streets there were Gatas. And there, surprisingly, is the link between our song inspiration and our chosen destination, between Bjork and York. Having seen the song direct us to Hull and then change our minds because it didn’t look very interesting, it almost felt like cheating the system by picking York, but in the end it was more justified than ever, because the connections to the Viking days of old are everywhere. Apart from the Gates, there are the archaeological digs, the museums, even the name York comes from the Old Norse Jórvík (‘Bay of the Chieftains’), not a million miles from our Icelandic connection to Hull, Vík í Mýrdal (‘Bay of something Iceland-sounding’).

Still full from afternoon tea, Mark took us on a walking tour of York for the sights we hadn’t already seen, eventually reaching ‘Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate’, the shortest street in York with the longest and most strange sounding name. The name translates as ‘what a street’ or ‘neither one thing or another’ depending what source you use, the tourism opportunities probably nod towards the first and the length of the street to the second.

By the time we had walked off a little of our civilised gannet-fest, the time was approaching five o clock, and the sun, glorious as it was, was falling low in the sky. Now was the time to head back to the car and check in to our hotel. Having booked a hotel outside of the city in the name of saving a bit of money, we knew we needed to drive there but hadn’t a clue where it was. After a fight with the Sat-Nav which resulted in it stubbornly refusing to show us where to go, we took an educated guess and found that we had parked on the same road as the hotel, purely by chance. We were nearly there by the time our modern, time-saving navigation systems kicked in. Grimston House was, despite its not so appealing name, quite a nice little country house just entering the countryside outside of the city. It was also the scene of the quickest check-in in recorded history, as our host opened the door, ushered us to our room and ran off in the space of thirty seconds. Presumably our arrival had interrupted whatever Saturday night TV highlights were currently showing. This suited us just fine, as all we wanted to do was drop our bags off and head back to York.

Trevor Rooney is, as far as I’m aware, no relation to thuggish footballer Wayne. He does, however, claim to be the ‘original’ in terms of offering ghost walks around York, although most of the ghost tours in York seem to make this very same claim, so like ghosts themselves, we’ll probably never know what is true and what is an elaborate hoax. I’d like to say we picked Trevor for being the original, but in truth it was mainly because we liked his hat and arrived too late for the tours that left at 7.00. We paid our money and were led up a darkened alleyway before discovering it to be a dead-end, useful only to pen us in while Rooney took everyone else’s cash. Once done, we were quickly led in the direction of the minster, where the thirty or so people in our tour walked right into the middle of another tour, this one filled with a huge mass, maybe a hundred people or more. It was clearly a lucrative business, and thankfully we didn’t choose to come a week later as originally planned, for on Halloween weekend Rooney expects up to a thousand people to join him. The accountant in me pointed out that a thousand people at £6 a throw was a lot of money for an hour’s walk in the dark. That hour was highly entertaining though; like our Edinburgh ghost tour a few months before, this was more about history than ghosts, and a city that has been amongst the most important in the country for two thousand years has enough history to pick the best bits with a loosely supernatural feel. Tales of Romans, of Vikings, of plague victims and of grave robbers filled in the time as we trekked around the edges of the minster, skilfully avoiding the crowds of other tours and cleverly beating most of them to the best bits, Rooney doing his best to annoy the other ‘original ghost tour guides’. The tour ended in a slightly smelly alleyway on the edge of a reasonably modern housing estate, formally the site of a Victorian workhouse where the children had allegedly been murdered and buried once their usefulness (i.e. they were suffering from malnutrition) had expired. On the way out of the alley, we had to force our way through a crowd of yet another tour, the host of which looked slightly annoyed at being held up. He didn’t look like an original, and obviously wasn’t quite up to the speed of Rooney in picking his locations.

The rest of the night was spent frequenting the pubs of York, starting in The Olde Star, the oldest pub in the city, and ended sharing the bar with a skeleton and a lady dressed entirely in red velvet, who appeared to be a close friend of the skeleton, but was probably just another tour guide. By the end of the night, we remembered that we hadn’t eaten since our afternoon tea, and while I still wasn’t particularly hungry, we opted to go in search of fish and chips. Saturday night or not, York appeared too classy for kebab houses, but we eventually found a shop selling nice hot pork sandwiches. With midnight gone and Mark with an hour or so drive home, we opted to call it a night, or at least we went back to the hotel and drank hot chocolate in the dark while we watched the stars outside.

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