Monks and an Astronomer at Byland Abbey.

It feels like it's been raining forever. Despite that, I've done reasonably well at escaping it over the weekend. On Sunday morning (ish) we went for a walk near Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire.



It's an old ruined Abbey in a tiny village. I don't think much monkery goes on there any more, what with it having no roof and all.

The walk was out of the AA book. This time we didn't get lost (much), partly due to choosing a walk with a map (it was walk number 21, fact fans). It was lucky we missed the rain as certain parts of the walk would have been very slippy and dangerous had there been much water underfoot. There was a steadyish (200m up) climb to the top of a hill where through a forest is an old abandoned observatory. So far, so fine. But the walk down again is very steep and can only be done very slowly with a fair amount of tree-grabbing for balance. Kinda fun, but not if it had been wet. I think we'd have died horribly, impaled on branches after slipping over and tumbling out of control.

After that it was mostly ok apart from the heavily overgrown forest path that was filled with prickles, brambles, flies and bees. And the two fields labelled "Warning: Bull" at the end. I think they just put those up to scare people. I saw no bulls.

Lunch was at The Abbey Inn (next to the Abbey, believe it or not).



It's much more of a restaurant than a pub but the food was tasty and reasonably priced. Good old antique chairs too!

It started tipping it down about five minutes before we got to the pub. Could have been worse.