Word of the Day: Pasty or Pasties. Not at all what you're thinking. A pasty is a pastry encased pie. For lunch today I had a corned beef pasty.
This was sooo good! Rich brown gravy, English peas and corned beef hash in a flaky pastry.
Almost every dish around here comes with peas. I guess if you have a national vegetable, you're going to include it wherever you can! They are very tasty!
We started off the day with a visit to the York Minister.
In 71 AD on this site, the Romans establish a fortress - the headquarters of the northern Roman Empire. And in 306 Constantine is declared emperor here and decides that Christianity has a place in the world...the Romans will no longer be feeding the Christians to the lions. Part of this Roman fortress was still standing when the Normans built their church on basically the same spot in 1080. Finally in the 1200s, work on the current structure was begun - it took 250 years. It wasn't until the 1960s - when the tower began to crumble and was in danger of collapsing - that the previous fortress and church were discovered...unearthed in the tower rescue operation. Part of the visit to the Minster is devoted to the undercroft - where you can see the remains of the Roman columns, streets, and walls. It was amazing...and totally bizarre. At one point, we were standing on the spot where Constantine was coronated.
The architecture of the Minster is almost as amazing. It's a beautiful gothic church with lots of gargoyles, carved limestone rosettes and pinnacles...unbelievable artistry and masonry. The stained glass windows themselves are (some of them) more than 600 years old. Here's the rose window at the south end:
So pretty!
The great East Window was under restoration, and there was a detailed exhibit about how painstaking that effort was. Even without it, though, the church was beautiful. Not as many tombs as Westminster Abbey, but the Roman ruins alone put it at the top of our must do list.
After we'd had our minds totally blown by the exhibits and wonderful collection here, it was time for a beer. That's when we hit the Yorkshire Terrier (suggested to us by our friends at the York Brewery yesterday) and learned what a pasty was.
Now, today and yesterday, I've been trying to solve a puzzle. The Yorkshire accents around me were more a country or rural English than what we heard in London, And I just couldn't place it. Until we were sitting at the bar in the Trembling Madness Ale House. The voices we were hearing were the same ones as the chickens, Mrs. Tweedy and most of the other characters in the movie Chicken Run. I swear to god.
Tomorrow we're off to Edinburgh!
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