S. Worthen | Weblog

I've never been a tourist in York before. I've lived there, I've visited friends there, I've gone there for very specific persons. This time, however, I ended up with a whole day free to see parts of the city I've never seen before.

• Castle Museum: Somehow I never made it there before. In two hours, cliosfolly, irisbleu, ladybird97, and I made it through half of the museum, recreating a mishmash of decades from the past two hundred years.


• Holgate Windmill: The best of the surviving York windmills - except it's entirely shrouded in scaffolding right now.


• Treasurer's House: The York equivalent of Toronto's Casa Loma, only technically a "restoration" not new-build. Both owners thought they required a medieval great hall, however, and so built one. The best part of the house is the photos - ask the room stewards if you can't find them. Most of the rooms have laminated copies of photos of that room from the 1900s and 1920s for visual comparison with how they are now.

York Minster now charges admission (although they do the GiftAid yearlong membership for UK tax payers), so I went to evensong, which had the added bonus of glorious music. The Minster may well be my very favorite religious building.