Summer Holiday - Day six

July 28 – Pickering Church 

Today we stayed in Pickering and had a lazy day wandering around the town.

One place worth a visit is the church of St Peter and St Paul. It has some 15th century paintings on the walls.

They were covered in plaster during the reformation and were re-discovered in 1852. The vicar of the parish at that time decided they were a distraction for his flock and had them whitewashed. In 1876, they were uncovered once more and restored. It was not unusual for churches before the reformation to have similar paintings, but they were often destroyed and lost forever.

I believe this is the beheading of John the Baptist

These, typical of the times, show various saintly goings on to emphasise the sermons preached in the church. These edifying images consist of various scenes, such as the torture and death of St Edmund. A lovely thing for the kiddies to have nightmares about.

I am not sure if these are souls entering or leaving hell, certainly pretty scary stuff

One part of the church which was of interest to our American side of the family is that there is a connection with Pickering and the USA in as much as two people who emigrated to America from Pickering were responsible for some of the planning of Washington DC and this connection is commemorated in the church.

Today was also my birthday, so later that day I was taken to the Coach House Inn for my Birthday meal, a place that boasted lamb shank, one of my favourite meals.

This was a few miles outside Pickering and we were able to find it fairly easily, but in the pub, we were told that a quicker route existed that went straight across the moors and so on our return trip we decided to take this route. The first thing we were presented with was a really steep climb which took the form a series of very sharp hairpin bends that took us up several hundred feet to the top of the moors. A soon as we reached the top, we entered low cloud and so could see very little of the wonderful Yorkshire moors we were hoping to see.

The Yorkshire Moors, not at their best

The third thing to happen was that we encountered a flock of black sheep. That in itself is fairly unusual, most sheep are white in the UK with the odd one or two black ones, but these sheep were all jet black and had decided the road was their territory where one of them decided that nothing would make it get out of my way. In the end I pulled off the road and wove around it hoping the grass was firm enough to support us. It was and we continued down until we were below the cloud and into normal visibility once more.

Jaywalking black sheep