Pic spam and Birthday greetings.

[curiouswombat]

Happy Birthday to wisemack.

Under the cut are some nicely historic pictures of York, which I know you will appreciate!


In the centre of the city of York are The Museum Gardens - a public green space, one of a good number in the city.




The Museum Gardens date back to the 1830s. They contain the ruins of St Mary's Abbey, first built in 1088, all that remains of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Benedictine monasteries in England - 'dissolved' when King Henry VIII banned all monasteries in England in 1530s. The monks at St Mary's were pensioned off in 1540 and the abbey buildings were converted into a palace for the King when he visited York(!).

Gradually they fell into ruins so that now they make a romantic setting for familt outings and picnics if my walks through the gardens are anything to go by.





The hospitium remains in one piece - this is where the monks offered hospitality to visitors -


I was most amused to see that these days you can hire the Hospitium for 'Weddings, Family parties and Hog Roasts'!!

Much to my amusement and pleasure the Museum gardens are home to squirrels -





We have no squirrels on the Isle of Man so to me they are cute and unusual!

Comments

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

You have no squirrels! That's just wrong! I had an amusing squirrel encounter today, a small black squirrel barrelled across the street while being chased by a large robin and Nutsy dived into a row of bushes to keep the robin from pecking at his/her backside.
And York is quite lovely, it was one of my favorite places when I was in the U.K.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

No - neither red nor grey - we are a squirrel-free zone!

You'll understand one of the reasons that I was so happy for K to get into York uni - sucha nice place to visit her!

[ayinhara.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the pictures of York. No squirrels on the Isle of Man, how unusual. I wonder why or how that happened. What kind of rodents do you have?

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

We have mice and rats, polecats, pinemartens, and hedgehogs. We don't have badgers, or voles, or squirrels.

We are big on birds though.

[makd.livejournal.com]

As you know, I love the pics.

Much appreciated.

York is lovely - and the ruins....wow. That'd be a terrific setting for a mystery....

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Thank you. The whole city is a series of terrific settings for mysteries, to be honest.

[keswindhover.livejournal.com]

Cue me mentioning the York Mystery Plays, which I'd love to go and see one July. You should take advantage of D-D having accommodation, and go along.

And I went to those gardens last year - they're lovely!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

The gardens provided a short-cut between my B&B and the middle of town on this visit, so I saw rather a lot of them. We even went to the museum.

D-d is home in July - but next summer she will be home leaving an empty flat....

[keswindhover.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, they don't seem to be put on every year, having looked it up. They were performed in 2006, but no firm plans for another until 2010.

Pah.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Hmm - I shall have to hope for her to decide to do a post-grad then...

[spikesdeb.livejournal.com]

Great pics! I love squirrels myself, even though we're told they're vermin. You must have a really good camera, so sharp.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Cute vermin, though!

The camera is a Sony - not a terribly expensive one.

[jerusha]

We have squirrels all over the place here, but I still love them. They're so cute! Thanks for posting the pictures!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Squirrels always make me go 'Aaaw!' If I'm in Edinburgh I like to sit in Prince's Street Gardens because there are squirrels - not to admire the view of the castle at all!

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

Very cool!

No squirrels? Really?? How odd! I have one little gray one that like to sit on my back fence and scold me; he considers my fence his personal highway!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

We are a bit low on wild life diversity, but have a good volume of those that we have. We have quite a lot of interesting birds - if birds are your thing - but me, I just go 'It's a bird'!

We do have polecats, just not quite as cute as this one. Oh and a colony of wallabies that have lived wild for about 40 years now!

[kathyh]

We have no squirrels on the Isle of Man so to me they are cute and unusual!

Next time the squirrel family that live in the large tree near our garden are being particularly obnoxious I'll try and lure one into a box and send it to you *g*. Seriously, they are very cute but they like to dig up plants, which is annoying.

Lovely pictures. I've been to York several times but never seen the Museum Gardens.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

The gardens provided me with a neat short-cut between B&B and the city centre this time - a lovely place for a picnic, as indeed are the Minster gardens where we sat and picnicked one day.

I have a feeling we aren't allowed to import squirrels, in case they unbalance the local wild-life, otherwise I'm sure someone would have. I'd be in favour - I'd like squirrels living in my pear tree, it would at least make it vaguely useful, which currently it isn't, much.

[bojojoti.livejournal.com]

I love ruins--they seem to have more personality than buildings still standing.

I love squirrels, too. Sometimes, in winter, we'll put corn on the cob out for them. We used to have a little table and chair squirrel feeder. We'd place the cob on a nail in the middle of the wee table, and it would amuse us to watch the squirrel seat himself to eat his corn just like a proper diner.

Squirrels can be pests. We were overrun with them at the last neighborhood. The back yard adjoining ours had two large walnut trees, so our squirrel population was massive. One of the little darlings managed to wedge himself in one of our vent pipes and perished. The smell was atrocious. Another one managed to trap himself in our attic and perished. We didn't know this, though, and I was frantically trying to clean the front closet, thinking it was the source of the smell. I did find a badly decomposed banana (?) in a plastic bag in the pocket of my husband's coat, and once I cleaned out the entire closet, washed it well, sprayed it down, and replaced freshly laundered coats and jackets in the closet, the smell was better and improved as time went on. Years later, we were doing some work in that area, and my husband took down the ceiling in that spot (we were installing a new light fixture and the ceiling needed repair). Out tumbled a perfect squirrel mummy. The terrible heat of the summer had dried and preserved the creature. Then, there was the awful telephone reception because the little darlings were forever eating the insulation off the telephone line... I enjoy squirrels in moderation!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I love the idea of a little squirrel dining table.

Your story about the coat reminds me of being a very small girl. My grandfather loved chocolate. He owned one 'good' suit for going to weddings, funerals etc, which could sit in his wardrobe for years between wears. I remember as a five or six year old the fuss when he went to get his good suit out, only do discover that a mouse had eaten in through three or four layers of fabric to reach the choclate that he must have left in the pocket. Small pieces of chewed Cadbury's wrapper attested to this!

[bojojoti.livejournal.com]

Poor grandfather! He lost his suit and his chocolate.

I must admit to peering all over the photo looking for the "garden." In the States, that green would be a lawn. Our idea of a garden usually involves blooming things!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

He lost his suit and his chocolate.

Oh no - he'd only had it for about 20 years....he got a local seamstress to 'invisibly repair' it for him - I think it lasted him until he died in the late 1960s!

Actually the Museum Gardens refers to the whole area - they were originally proper Botanic Gardens in the 1860s, which is when some of the specimen trees were planted, and there are a few flower beds around. But 'Gardens' in this context means any large planted public space - Kensington Gardens (http://www.royalparks.gov.uk/parks/kensington_gardens/) in London being a prime example. In other words another name for a public park.

[cbtreks.livejournal.com]

All that green is so pretty! The ruins are great - if I were there, I'd have to try my hand at drawing them. (My drawing skill is mediocre - that's honesty, not modesty - but I do get in the mood once in awhile.) Aren't squirrels cute! They're so chipper!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Chipper is exactly the word for them!

I can see the Museum Gardens being a good place to sit and draw for a while.

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

Two of my favorite things: old buildings and green.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

D-d is quite blasé about the age of her surroundings - she said of Berlin that it was 'very modern' - nothing to do with the rebuild since WW" or even since the downfall of the wall - but 'there are no buildings over 300 years old'!

Green we do in a big way, both on the Island and in Yorkshire.

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

Very modern -- hee! She'd be shocked by a typical American city.

Every spring I'm shocked all over again by just how wonderfully green Albion is -- it can be awfully hard to see the buildings through all the trees, which is just how I like it.

[spikereader.livejournal.com]

Beautiful pictures. We've been trying to plan a trip to York - Bethan was doing the Vikings at school - but without much success so far, and she's now moved on to WWII.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Actually there is an excellent exhibition about life in York in WW2 in the Castle Museum....

You could do Vikings and WW2!

[vilajunkie.livejournal.com]

Cor, York has the exact same squirrels that live in my frontyard!

York is probably in the wrong area, but the Museum Gardens look like a nice hiding spot for the vicious lil Red Caps to sneak up on people from behind a wall and murder them. Red Caps supposedly live on the Borderlands.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

York is a bit south of the Debatable Lands...