Ripon Cathedral

Our friends live just outside Ripon in Yorkshire so we went to see the local cathedral.

Somehow I can't get my mind around the idea of a Saint Wilf, but no doubt he was a good man. Apparently he became famous for his speech advocating that the Roman method for calculating the date of Easter should be adopted. So you can blame him for the date being all over the place.

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It's quite an impressive cathedral from the front. 

Rogue's gallery.

Some of the graves must be incredibly old. 

If you look about half-way down this article you will see that he endowed a school for poor boys in 1672.

We went in this side entrance instead of the main door.

Lovely big old trees.

When we entered the church we could hear a woman's soprano voice singing Purcell. She had one of those pure voices with very little vibrato.

The singer's name was Rachael Little and the pianist was Greg Smith. They were preparing for a lunch time concert. The cathedral hosts a whole range of musical events.

This appeared to be copper.

There was a long row of these cushions along a bench by the wall.

Down in the crypt which is quite small.

A modern piece of stained glass installed within the cathedral.

This is worth clicking on to enlarge it. 

This cathedral rivals York Minster in some ways though the Minster is much more famous. 

The Dales

Our hosts Catherine and Aaron took us for an all day drive into the Yorkshire Dales.

The red flag was raised for live firing at an Army shooting range.  They had shooting ranges for all kinds of weapons, including tanks.

It was mostly gloomy clouds but occasionally the sun would peek through.

There are sheep everywhere, often in the road. In Australia when you see sheep they are mostly Merino. Here they are all sorts of different breeds. Usually you get photos of the front end, here the back end.

Some wool.

Thistles.

There must be thousands of miles of stone walls like this throughout England. Imagine the effort over the centuries to build and maintain these walls.

The red trucks taken from the car window as we whizzed past.

A church that had been converted into a house. Catherine had read about the church in a book and had eventually found it. The front door was was open and she managed to get inside to take a look at the place which she said was a fabulous conversion.

While Catherine was inside the conversion, we stood outside and looked at the view and this duplex. The right hand side part was for sale. 

The clouds were magnificent at times and moved through very quickly. You get the sense that this is a wild and woolly place. Winters must be very hard, the sun gets up at 9 am and goes down at 3 pm.

It is all very deserted with the occasional village or group of farm buildings.

If you watched 'All Creatures Great and Small' you probably saw countryside like this since much of the series was shot in this area.

This is a famous view and as Catherine said, 'I can show you the holes where the professional photographers put their tripods'.

I liked the zigzag path and the straight wall.

It's incredibly beautiful up there and all you can do is just take more and more photos. The weather is very variable so you would never know what to expect when you get up there.