YORKSHIRE

We’re back from our most complicated holiday yet. Sheffield, York, and then Whitby, like three different slices of a very Yorkshire cake. It was emotionally complicated as well as logistically difficult, and it’s fair to say that the third slice didn’t go to plan at all. In fact, the Whitby slice crumbled into pieces, but I don’t know how much to say about all that really.

Yorkshire, I think, is wonderful. At one point we were high on the North York moors, flying along over the long bleak road. Sunlight tumbled from the clouds, and the heather ruffled in the summer breeze. Rolling moorland on either side stretched far, over crags and mounds, and the treeless green was lit desolate like the moon. And then, a ribbon of hazy blue gilded the horizon.

The sea grew wider as we twisted and turned. Roads on the moors seem to take you skyward as though you’re riding up a steep wave. Then before you know it, the other side drops you back down and the road reappears. It’s exhilarating. And each time, the sea, and eventually, the stark figure of Whitby Abbey, high above the glinting town, grew a little closer.

It’s also England’s largest county, at least when you collect up its Ridings. That gives it a kind of vastness - like a US state. Sheffield is a different world from Scarborough. York is an island of odd from the Dales, and the sea that stretches down and defines East Yorkshire, seems out of place in the same county as Rotherham or Halifax somehow.

But the greatness of the county will have to wait for next time we visit, which I hope won’t be too long away. Perhaps one of these days I’ll be able to write about our short but unusual time in the cramped medieval streets of York, my journey to the top of the Minster, our reflection of old clashing intensely with the new and trendy. Maybe our next trip will take in a bit more of Whitby somehow, hopefully without the memory of it crumbling into sadness. Perhaps I’ll be able to look out over that wild blue sea again.