I booked a bus tour of the Yorkshire Dales to see the countryside. The “dales” are valleys located in the western part of Yorkshire and primarily in the Yorkshire Dales National Park in the Pennine range. I went for the scenery, but I got much more. Which makes for a good opportunity to give a shout out to Mountain Goat tours https://www.mountain-goat.com/Yorkshire. I did two different tours with them from York and had a comfortable seat and a knowledgeable guide on both.
One unexpected thing from the tour were the cultural references of which I am woefully uninformed. I may have been the only person on the bus (only 10 of us) who wasn’t familiar with every scene of All Creatures Great and Small. And apparently Wallace & Gromit fame saved the Wensleydale Creamery from insolvency.
The other bonus was the ties to my current reading, The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson. The West Riding of Yorkshire figured prominently in the Industrial Revolution. I could see the evidence of Enclosure in the ubiquitous dry laid stone walls. Many of the towns and villages were familiar as wool mill towns.
I found the re-use of the telephone box pleasing.
I’ll close out with Bolton Castle, built by Sir Richard le Scrope, the First Baron of Scrope, in the late 14th century. Despite several Scropes that were convicted, and if caught, executed for treason, the castle is still owned by descendants of the Scrope family. Bolton Castle was the involuntary residence of Mary Queen of Scots for a time.
Sir Richard is my 16th great-grandfather but I didn’t realize that until after the visit, so no favorable treatment on the visit.
The Journey 