My Yorkshire Adventure

For the next week, I'll be staying in York, wandering around and taking photographs of whatever I find up here.

Each evening I updated this post with what happened that day, and show a quick selection of the photos I've taken.

Day 0: Saturday 3rd Nov

I arrived at the guesthouse after a five and a half hour journey. The room is fine, and what I saw of the surrounding area as I arrived looks nice.

Obviously with it being dark, I wont be going out tonight to take photographs. The plan instead is to figure out potential areas to go for the rest of the week... I'll probably visit the city of York, and I'm hoping to amble around the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors, but beyond that I'm not really sure at the moment.

Day 1: Sunday 4th November

I started today with a walk around the local area. It is a nice place, I found a bunch of fungus, but after that there was little else other than some pylons, cables, and a big coal power station.

I got back and went out in the car, and after accidentily driving down a country lane to get an idiot driver off my back, I decided that it would be a good idea to top up with petrol, so I pulled over, set my sat nav to take me to the nearest petrol station, then off I went, filled with confidence that I'd soon be feeding the car... until the voice said, "turn right, then turn left", sending me onto a side road and up a dirt track hill, and then along the bumpiest road I have ever seen. There were continuous deep craters probably a foot deep in places! It didn't occur to me at the time to stop and take a photo - I just continued on slowly, hoping I wasn't breaking my car, until it eventually started to smooth out, and then some tarmac appeared, and then at last I was back onto a regular residential road, and after a bit more driving, I found the crappy petrol station my sat nav had sent me to, with a pump that struggled to actually give petrol. At about �10 I gave up, and drove away in search of a proper place, shortly finding a couple of proper petrol stations on a main road, and quickly topped up, before deciding to spend the afternoon in York.

I arrived in York and after eventually finding a space in a packed car park, I set off on foot to explore. It's a nice enough city with an interesting market, but there wasn't much interesting architecture, and I wasn't taking much more than snapshots.

So photos for today consist of fungus, power lines, chimneys, plus the York "castle"...

Day 2: Monday 5th November

I decided I wanted to look for some trees today and try to get some nice autumn colours. I started out with a visit to an RSPB nature reserve, Fairburn Ings. Unfortunately it was rather dreary, and the light wasn't in my favour.

The plan for the afternoon was to visit Bishop Wood, and I was optimistic when the sun came out, but unfortunately the sat nav again got the area around the A1 completely wrong, and by the time I got to Bishop Wood the sun was setting and I didn't really get any worthwhile shots.

Tomorrow the weather forecast looks promising, so I'll be taking a trip down to the north of the Peak District. Hopefully I'll be able to get some more interesting photos to display.

Day 3: Tuesday 6th November

Today, I discovered that I'm probably loosing my mind. In the morning, I decided that I would drive to Holmfirth before deciding what to do next - go west, south west, or south. So, I set out and drove along and reached Holmfirth and found a car park, pulled up, got all my stuff ready, paid �2 for a 5 hour ticket, walked into town, walked back to the car again to change my shoes, then set off heading west. After walking for a couple of kilometres through fairly normal surroundings, I remembered that Holmfirth was not on the edge of the Peak District, but was a few miles away from it, and that my original plan was simply to decide which way to go from there. Hooray. So I walked back to the car, and set off along the south-west route. Annoyingly, it was one with a long winding hilly road which I was concentrating too much on staying on to really think of looking at much else. I stopped at the top, but... well, it was the top and there very little of interest to see there. So I kept going on and eventually reached Tintwistle and Hadfield, where I took some photos, though none as spectacular as I was hoping for.

I then headed back, planning to stop a couple of times, but the nice views never really coincided with laybys, and there was too much traffic to simply stop on the road, so I returned dissapointed - because I know the Peak District is a nice place, but the images I have are nothing special.

Day 4: Wednesday 7th November

On Wednesday, I decided I would visit the Yorkshire Dales. As the weather forecast had predicted, it was extremely windy, especially at the first place I stopped - I couldn't even stand steady it was so strong, and had to take the shots from in the car. Other than the wind, it was only a bit cloudy, but otherwise fine. Driving through the dales was enjoyable, though having a car sit on my rear for a part of it was really annoying. Anyway, I think I got some nice landscape pictures, here are some of them...

Day 5: Thursday 8th November

Today I had arranged to meet my brother, who is at university in Leeds. The day didn't start too well, after getting being confounded by the road layouts and signs, I picked him up, and we went into a multi-storey car park, where I scraped the side of my car trying to turn up one of the levels. After the annoyance of that we wandered through the town and then along the canal a bit, before heading back into town and photographing some architecture, and then we had a look at an interesting but odd Cult Fiction, Comic Art exhibition in the Leeds Art Gallery.

Day 6: Friday 9th November

On Friday I wasn't sure what to do, so I started with a trip into the nearby town of Selby, to look at the Abbey there. However it wasn't anything special and had scaffolding on it, so I didn't bother taking any pictures. Since it was a nice bright day, I decided to return to Fairburn Ings, and although it did eventually cloud up and get quite chilly, the sun stayed out long enough for me to take some photos.