Part Six – The River Ouse

  South

 The Foss nowadays flows into the Ouse via a slightly complicated collection of gates.  These were installed after the Great 1982 Floods to stop large amounts of water immersing the city and to push them into less picturesque places instead, preferably Selby.  The barrier has had some success but there is only so much that humanity can do.  In 2000, for example, the city centre was drenched not because of some chain reaction of melting snow running off from the hills – which the barrier was intended to check – but simply because it rained shit-hard for forty days and forty nights.  Turn right at the barrier and walk down Kings Staith for an accurate record of past floods.  The Kings Arms is a fine old pub with seating out front so you can drink by the river on summer evenings if you can find a free table, which you never can.  The Kings Arms is also a yardstick for measuring floods.  Basically, if the waters haven't lapped over the doorstep, it's nothing more than a bit of damp.  A ruler is chalked on a wall inside, like the notches which record a child's growth, displaying the extent to which the pub has been inundated in the past.  A nice virtue out of necessity, basically removing the embarrassment of having built the pub on what is actually a flood meadow.

 Anyway, head back to the Foss Barrier and continue by the Ouse.  The two waterways are very different in character.  The Foss has a slightly shrill charm, desperately wanting to avoid being a stream and sometimes slipping into a trickle.  It varies wildly according to the seasons.  In winter downpours it becomes a swollen torrent, along which occasionally rushes a worryingly large percentage of a fallen tree.  Come late summer, though, the level drops dramatically, the surface becomes choked with lilies and you can only assume there is still some water in there somewhere.  The Ouse only varies between full and very full.  It knows its importance, knows it will eventually form the greater part of the vast Humber Estuary and rests complacently.  It even allows itself great and unnecessary curving detours, confident it will eventually reach its destination.  The river is also, frankly, a little monotonous.  For about fifty miles outside the town, it all looks the same.  A wide stretch of slightly muddy water, large trees and bushes fighting for supremacy on either side.  Pedestrian and cycle tracks have been constructed on both banks of the river after the Foss Barrier.  Shaded by trees, tranquil in the extreme and not especially long, they are the tourists' first choice of venue for strolling.  Linking them at the far end, in a rare example of a perfectly placed structure, is York's Millennium footbridge.

 The Millennium was wonderful.  The evening itself was great, at least for me.  We had, in the form of the Y2K Bug, a new hi-tec addition to the Book of Revelations.  ("And lo, the machines shalt not acknowledge the supremacy of 00 above 99; and there was much tumult and wailing; and sheeted computer programmers from the 1970's rose from their graves.")  The various successes of the Dome and the London Eye proved once and for all that nobody cares about all that virtual reality crap if they can have a damn big ferris wheel instead.  And nearly every town and village in the country got some smart new present; and most of them were actually quite good.  York's contribution cannot compare to the 'Winking Eye' of Gateshead, for example, but is a rare example of an impressive modern addition to the city.  Finally opened in 2001 – no Millennium project worth its name was completed in time – it is a white steel line which gently curves over the river.  What distinguishes it, however, is the arch.  A slender semi-circle supported by radial ties, it also bends at a 45 degree angle away from the main body.  The impression left is that somebody erected an ordinary suspension bridge and then sat on the top.  Perhaps that really did happen to the original design model and the architects liked the appearance.  Our footbridge quivers a little just as the one in central London did, except we never fixed it.  And rightly so.  After all, that old parable about the willow and the oak in the gale shows that a little yield is not necessarily dangerous.  And now boys can jump on the centre of the bridge in an effort to pitch it and themselves into the waters; and half-arsed attempts at self-destruction are an essential part of childhood.

 You can continue along the Ouse's eastern bank for quite some time.  It's best to cross the Millennium Bridge, though, and not just because of the fun this brings.  The eastern path is pleasant for a while.  It runs across a nice little meadow and through a small patch of woodland.  Then, however, it starts approaching the York Yacht Club.  And nobody ruins a path like a rich yachter.  (Which surely has to be Cockney rhyming slang for something rude).  They have churned up both banks south of Bishopthorpe, turning the whole area into a wasteland.  If gypsies did the same there would be outrage.  But these people are permitted anything because they are rich yachters.  Thankfully, the western bank remains unviolated for a time.  Walk along it, musing why even a stockbroker or a banker would be stupid enough to buy an ugly white lump to moor up and forget about for 364 days a year.  Especially when it's moored up over a mile outside York city centre, which is a declaration that he can't afford anywhere better and removes all status from the status symbol.  Anyway.

 The path turns from tarmac to earth when the Selby cycle track curls away but is usually still passable.  Go under some trees and over a style and you could to a wide, open pasture called Middlethorpe Ings.  You have left York behind entirely here though, sadly, not the sound of the main road.  Somebody used to put a bull in the first field of the Ings, largely for comic value.  Nowadays there's rarely anything more terrifying than some sheep and, in the right season, carpets of buttercups.  Turn after a while and you will get good views of the two structures which dominate the southern perimeter of the city: Terrys factory and the main grandstand of the racecourse.  They stand close together and seem to be competing.  If so, Terrys is the apparent winner.  The grandstand has two impressive brick towers but much of it seems flimsy and ephemeral.  A temporary marquis, maybe, erected for the summer.  Terrys is a colossus and will stand forever.  An illusion, of course.  Terrys, as mentioned earlier. is empty nowadays.  It may continue to stand but not as anything useful; and one possible fate is the racecourse reaching out and grabbing it for yet more corporate hospitality suites.

 The Ouse makes one of its wide, indolent curves around Middlethorpe Ings.  As it curls back the blare of the traffic starts growing louder.  Eventually you find yourself walking right under the bypass.  Which is nice.  Grit your teeth, though, and press on.  The slightly oppressive open spaces of the Ings are soon replaced by a small patch of natural woodland.  Wild flowers and bushes abound.  A fallen and mysteriously split tree lies in a sea of them, looking like a stranded octopus.  The tress close in further and on one side become a fence.  Over it are the grounds of a crematorium, which goes on for rather longer than you might prefer.  Another fence then appears on the other side once the path squirms away from the river.  This protects a large stagnant pond, inexplicably but ferociously guarded by the York Amalgamation of Fishermen.  (A name which speaks of going through the thesaurus for synonyms for 'union' and picking the fanciest they could find).  Suddenly you are shot out of the woods onto a main road.  Turn left, perhaps in slight bewilderment, and you soon come into Bishopthorpe.

 If you live in York you will meet more Bishopthorpe folk than you might expect, considering that the place is the size of a beer mat.  All seem to have been born in the village and all intend dying there, possibly of boredom.  And they are emphatically Bishopthorpe folk, not York folk.  the place is even more detached in spirit than Acomb.  With better cause, perhaps.  Bishopthorpe has nice ivy-covered houses; though many of them seem quite new and one can only assume the plant was sprayed on the walls, possibly with a giant cannon.  It has nice lanes and a quaint high street which wouldn't look out of place in the Dales and a general air of serenity.  It doesn't have any jobs, however, which is possibly why one meets so many of the inhabitants in York.  They all have to come to the foul metropolis to work.  Including its most famous resident, the Archbishop.

 It was the visit of the then primate of Durham, David Jenkins, which got York Minster burnt down in 1984.  God was so enraged by us inviting a man who questioned the physical practicalities of the Resurrection and the virgin birth that he threw a thunderbolt at the Rose Window.  Or so I have been told, even if this story doesn't explain why God didn't just burn down bloody Durham Cathedral instead.  But the Archbishops of York, while not quite so controversial, have sometimes been a little different too.  The last incumbent, David Hope, abruptly packed it all in to become a vicar somewhere near Doncaster, ministering to two ex-miners and a dog.  (Or something like that).  His replacement, John Sentamu, is a Ugandan once put under house by Idi Amin.  His past achievements read more like a veteran socialist's than an archbishop’s; anti-racism crusades, campaigning against the closure of Rover's Longbridge site, panels which scrutinised the police force following the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor.  He is, incidentally, one of the few black men currently living in York and almost certainly the only one in Bishopthorpe.  I personally like the idea of an African coming over here to preach Christian values to us white heathens.

 Bishopthorpe Palace is a suitably eccentric home.  It isn't open to the public most of the year, because the archbishop does live there and doesn't want us wandering in while he's doing the crossword in his dressing guard.  But you can get a good view of the entrance gatehouse from the road and that should be enough.  Completed in 1765, the stone and elaborate turrets of the gatehouse make it seem a distant relation of the Minster.  It has almost been hollowed out, though, all substance undermined by the wide gateway and row of windows just above.  They seemed to have started to build a truly imposing gatehouse, then remembered who would be living in the Palace and hurriedly changed it to something more welcome.  Throw in a large clock which belongs on a church and a grey conical roof supported on legs which doesn't really belong anywhere, and you have something pleasantly idiosyncratic.

 Just before the Palace, incidentally, is St Andrew's, an impressive if austere church with a monumental graveyard.  (The determination of Bishopthorpers to never leave has filled the village with places to dispose of bodies.  I've heard rumours there's a huge pit somewhere too.)  Just after, on the left hand side, is Chantry Lane.  Turn down this, walking past the Palace's grounds on one side and some grand, nondescript hoses on the other.  Chantry Lane ends with another impressive church façade.  Which has absolutely nothing behind it.  There must have been once, I assume, because you can just about make out the foundations.  But it must have been a tiny structure, far too small for its entrance; and the sight always puts me in mind of Portmerion's lunatic mock-facades.  A path leads past this weirdness back to the Ouse.  But it doesn't go much further before being swallowed by caravaners and rich yachters and assorted other crap.  Best to turn here, on the whole.  You could even get a pus back to York from the high street.  Providing it's a Tuesday or a Friday, a driver can be found and the augers look favourable.  That's how sophisticated Bishopthorpe is nowadays.

 On the way back into the city centre, unless you can't resist crossing the Millennium Bridge again, you may as well continue along the west bank.  Soon you come to some vast iron gates, framed by two ancient and corroded statues set on stone posts.  Some old aristocrat estate, apparently, though actually just the entrance to Rowntrees Park.  Another product of Joseph Rowntree's philanthropy, of course, though by putting it so close to his rivals Terrys, I think he was also establishing a beach head in enemy territory.  This is what I've given you, he was declaring to Terrys' workers and customers.  What have those mean fuckers ever done?  (Although a Victorian Quaker like Rowntree would probably say something like 'scurvy wretches' rather than 'mean fuckers.').  The park is perhaps the largest and most diverse in the city.  There is a gargantuan playground, considerable lawns and flower beds, a duck pond, some of those BMX/skateboarding ramps that nobody in Britain can go up more than twice without falling over.  And some dove cotes.  Yes, some dove cotes.  Ask not why.

 The track eventually deposits you at Skeldergate Bridge.  Prominent from this is the old Bonding Warehouse, another of York's numerous deserted edifices.  Originally it was what it said, in those distant days when York still had a small commercial docks.  Then it was converted into a winebar and finally a very smart pub which sometimes put on live music.  This closed about fifteen years ago.  Since then, nothing.  The brick building is still rather beautiful but I suspect it's fit for nothing now save demolition if anyone ever buys it gain.  Aptly, the first 'N' on one of the Bonding Warehouse signs has fallen off.  Or perhaps it was removed by the same literate vandal responsible for 'St Nicholas? Fie!'  The warehouse is indeed boding, and boding no good for other riverside establishments.

 North

 The northern walk up the Ouse begins at Lendal Bridge.  An elegant structure with decorative iron parapets boasting assorted City of York and Yorkshire badges, it looks like it should be the oldest bridge in York but only comes a paltry third.  (Behind Ouse Bridge and Scarborough Railway Bridge, in case you care).  Lendal Bridge only has one drawback: the two ghastly mock-medieval toll booths which supposedly guard it at both ends.  These awful things could only be Victorian, a civilisation which failed to face up to modernity architecturally just as it failed in so many other ways.  A riot of over-elaborate decoration and twee turrets, the toll booths are a particularly sickly fairy tale transformed into rather unpleasant beige stone.  Both are tea houses nowadays and deserve no better fate.  Look away from them with a shudder and focus on Lendal Tower, on the right as you head away from the Minster.  Built in 1300 and about as basic a structure as they come, Lendal Tower has had various purposes.  Originally designed as a vantage point to throw things at invaders, it later fulfilled the less obvious function as a sewerage pump rooms.  Now, if the Helmsley Group's plans go ahead, you can soon cross 'crumbling medieval towers' off your dwindling list of 'things which can't be converted into poxy over-priced flats'.  Head through a gap just before the tower and descend a steep winding lane.  Two old and abandoned houses, probably about to be converted into more flats, stand next to Lendal Tower.  A notice in one plaintively asks "Why can't we paint the already finished wall at the zoo?"  Which is really what we've all been asking.

 The path running beside the river is nowadays called Dame Judi Dench Way.  Not perhaps the most graceful title ever, but unlike Geldof Road and Ferguson Way (after Bob and Sarah respectively) in Huntington, a well-deserved tribute.  Because the Dame Judi is one of the few modern celebrities to emerge from York.  Frankie Howerd was born here (in the house of one of my old Sociology teachers, you'll be fascinated to know) but whisked away at a young age.  Perhaps that was just as well – it's hard to imagine him exclaiming "Ooooh, MISSIS!!" in a broad Yorkshire accent.  The hole he left has since been filled by Berwick Kaler.  To most people Kaler will be barely known, and then as a bit actor in the occasional piss-poor comedy.  To York residents he is a legend, an unbroken line to our youth and the least feminine pantomime dame ever.  Our attitude is: you can keep your Bobby Davros and Frank Brunos.  If it doesn't have Kaler striding onto the stage in hob-nailed boots exclaiming "Eeeh, me babbies, me bairns!" then it isn't a pantomime.  He should be knighted for services to cross-dressing; and to Wagon Wheels, the sweets he always scatters over his adoring flock.

 One can't boast about him without getting blank looks, however.  And, as his curious slang suggests, he's actually from Sunderland originally.  Judi Dench, though, is the works.  She won an Oscar for speaking about five lines in Shakespeare In Love, almost won one the next year for doing rather more work in Chocolat.  Her roles have included three icons of English history – Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria and M.  In 2001 her ubiquity so exasperated Private Eye that they ran a headline 'Dame Judi Not In Film – Public Outraged."  And though she had to move always from York to achieve all that, intrinsic parts of the city are in her background.  She used to hang around Berwick' current stomping ground, the Theatre Royal.  She was educated by Quakers, at the Mount School.  And her professional debut, such as it was, came in the Mystery Plays, the aptly-named medieval re-enactments staged each year to general bafflement.

 Anyway, back to Dame Judi Dench Way.  Dog walkers and cyclists infest the path in their usual numbers.  So to, for some reason, do joggers.  I would say that there's a danger of being run down by a gang of them, but of course you're unlikely to even be passed by any.  With jogging, all effort seems to be concentrated on making the arms and buttocks swing in the required manner.  The whole business of propelling oneself forward is often forgotten.  Try not to actually overtake any joggers, however.  It's embarrassing for both of you.  The path itself is a pleasant, tree-lined one which initially runs behind the Museum Gardens, all the various curios therein occasionally darting into sight.  The most notable is the Multiangular Tower, a ten-sided slab of ancient stone.  One of the very few Roman relics still standing, it formed an end piece of the walls built by the omininously named Septimus Severus.  On the far bank is ( hotel? ), an impressive new building.  Asymmetrical in shape, large pillars stand on its four crooked corners.  They topped by circular penthouses with conical roofs, each looking like one of those revolving restaurants.  The walls in between are a jumble of poles and glass, giving it the endearing look of being half-complete and still draped with scaffolding.  A little way on is the new extension to the National Railway Museum, another pleasing sight with prominent blue girders.  And in between them is the main postal office, looking like a How Not To of modern architecture.  Pass under Scarborough Railway Bridge, which does exactly what it says on the can and is equally utilitarian to look at, and a nice field opens up on our bank.  Just visible in the distance are the fine houses of Bootham and, boo hiss, St Peter's School.  The less pleasant parts of Bootham pass over the river a little while later via something that wants to be a motorway bridge.  Beyond, however, is Clifton Ings.

 Clifton Ings is basically a great open flood meadow, the river curling around the far side.  The ground is absurdly flat; and with cattle often ambling in the middle distance, it seems like a slice of the American Mid-West.  Reinforcing the illusion is what appears to be a series of large grain silos across the Ouse.  They are actually part of the sugar works, which also incorporates a tangle of chimneys and rusting sheds and generally looks like a restrained version of the Billingham ICI works.  The chocolate factories were built to resemble a cross between a cathedral and a castle.  By 1955, however, people were deciding that you can just put a lot of men and machines in a damn big barn and it will have the same effect.  The result is hideous, of course, but then honesty is rarely very pretty.  In the winter, the only time the factory is fully operational because of the sugar beet season, it also pumps out a unique aroma.  This can be smelt for many miles around, depending on the winds.  Some find it vile, others delicious but it is undoubtedly the most characteristic scent of York.

 The cycle track leaves the Ouse, bending right while the river swerves left, and soon comes across Rawcliffe Meadow.  A sign will proudly tell you that this was cunningly created in the early 1990's, a hay meadow regularly harvested to apparently encourage a diversity of natural life.  'Traditonal' harvesting techniques are used, incidentally.  These appear to involve setting fire to most of it, leaving the whole thing covered in what appears to be tar.  There's reasons why some traditions have died out.  A small diversion also takes you to Rawcliffe Pond, where you might see dragonflies, water boatmen and other things with far too many legs.  Peer especially closely through the lillypads and you might also detect some actual water.  There are two ways through the meadow; the cycle track meandering through the centre and a footpath running atop an embankment to the right.  The latter is best.  The embankment is about ten feet high and so, this being York, you get views equivalent to standing on a mountain summit in normal parts of the world.  A style at the far side brings you into a series of other fields.  They have not been lovingly fashioned and don't seem to be used for anything in particular.  A layman's eye might believe that they are just as pleasant and diverse as Rawcliffe Meadow, albeit a little more infested with nettles.  Which are an indigenous plant, of course; but because they've got that stinging thing going on are treated as the flora equivalent of the BNP.

 A detour worth making is into Clifton Park on the right. This isn't so much a park as another little slice of wildnerss.  Though far more riven with tracks and paths than it needs to be, it is otherwise impressively unkempt.  Grasses, trees and paths are allowed to grow in an apparently adhoc fashion and the effect is pleasing.  Turn left at the first of the many paths and you quickly come to the edges of Rawcliffe.  The only sign of this suburb from the river is an imposing church.  Walk up to it, though, and it becomes obvious how hidden the church actaully is from Rawcliffe.  It tries its best, being a high and rather daunting structure.  But they’ve stuck it righ on the edge of the houses and planted some very high trees around it for good measure.  Like the inhabitants of Summer Isle in The Wicker Man, it seems these people don't want to know Christianity.  Shake your head at the godless heathens of Rawcliffe and head back to the main path.

 Though not for long.  As you emerge into another open prairie, the rumble of traffic starts becoming louder.  A large and hideous bridge appears on the horizon.  Isn't that nice to see – it's our old friend the Outer Ring Road again!  You might be tempted to grit your teeth and walk under it once more.  But appearing on your right is a rather extensive sewerage works.  I personally am generally prepared to let this be the straw which breaks the camel's back.  Recommended here is traversing the field and walking back alongside the river.  This initiatally involved dodging between a phenomenal amount of cow pats (in a field which almost never contains cows, incidentally).  But it does mean you get to see the Ouse for what is, after all, supposed to be a sodding river walk.

 Incidentally, distance alone hasn't swallowed the Ouse hitherto.  Another high bank runs in front of it, rather mysterious in its function.  The first is clearly some sort of flood defence but what is this one supposed to do?  Then truth dawns – it's also a flood defence.  Built to protect Rawcliffe Meadow and Clifton Ings, which are both pretty much the quintessance of flood meadows, from inundation.  Because these aren't wildnesses, you see, they are 'managed' wildnesses.  Nothing can be left to chance.  And we all know what a rubbish job nature does in creating, well, nature.  I'm sure the people of central York fully understand this when the Ouse is forced to flood their houses instead.

 Think these an other pompous thoughts as you stride along the bank.  Think something, at least, or talk amongst yourselves.  Big, flat fields are impressive to look at initially but you can be walking through them for twenty minutes without the view actually changing.  And God knows, the Ouse itself doesn't offer many diversions.  The only variety comes from the bleak jumble on the far side; the desperate signs forever advertising vacant office space on the Millfield Lane Trading Estate, the grim houses running off Boroughbridge Road, the sugar works' melange of sheds and towers.  The northern Ouse walk, in fact, is something of a dark parody of the southern one.  There's the vile sugar works instead of majestic Terrys, the ostrasiced church in Rawcliffe instead of the dominance of Bishopthorpe Palace, an old rail bridge istead of a shiny new foot crossing.  This isn't a criticism, incidentally.  I rather like dark parodies.  And currently at Clifton Ings there is perhaps the finest improvised swing I've ever seen.  A rusting bike has been tied to a branch protruding over the river.  On an evening, presumably, boys swing out over the waters hanging on for grim life whilst, purely for effect, peddling like lunatics.  Once, when the world was younger and kinder, that would have been me.

 The Ouse, incidentally, is slightly tidal.  Several tiny beaches appear as it curls back at the far end of Clifton Ings.  So on a fine day, if you are prepared to blank out a great many truths, you can put on your costume and save yourself a trip to the coast.  Don't laugh.  You generally find a few frugal families doing just that.

 (to be finished)

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