Pubs within a 15-minute stagger of my flat #2: The Ackhorne

The Ackhorne

 Website: http://www.theackhorne.co.uk/

Walking time: Two minutes 38 seconds

Real ale: Yes

Food: Yes

Pickled eggs: Yes

The Ackhorne is one of my locals. (As a resident of York I am allowed to have more than one.) The Ackhorne is on St. Martin's Lane, a snickleway between Micklegate and Bishophill running next to the spooky (is there any other kind?) medieval church of St. Martin-cum-Gregory. A snickleway that, alas, can sport more than its fair share of pavement pizza. While the pub is neatly tucked away, its proximity to Micklegate leaves it vulnerable to visits from the wasted and scantily clad. However, it is far more likely to be used as a pre-club warm-up rather than the scene of irritating hen night shenanigans, and weekday nights tend to be quiet. There is a resident black cat, who, while she does not express interest in you, graciously does not mind if you sit in her pub.

The Ackhorne is open from noon and serves food, so it makes a nice place for a break. The afternoons see a handful of regulars who stop in for a pint and a skimming of the papers. There is usually a copy of The Press (York's local rag) around, and also, unfortunately, the Daily Mail. And I am not the only person to sit with Old Rosie and do some writing.

I don't think I've actually ever had a beer at the Ackhorne. This is only because they always have Old Rosie on tap. Old Rosie is my favourite scrumpy in all the world: cloudy, not too sweet. A half of that makes you feel like everything is going to be all right. More than one and you are ready to take on the world. Geoboy has had the real ale here and gives it the thumbs up. He recommends the Roosters Yankee.

The food is standard hearty pub fare, nothing special, but good value: generous portions for not much money. A giant bowl of vegetarian chili with chips set me back a fiver and kept me sated for many an hour.

The popular Ackhorne pub quiz is held on Sunday nights. I've done it once, and found it a bit hard, but it was fun. They put free food out which is a nice touch. Anyone caught using his phone to cheat gets the pub cat thrown in his face. And the team with the lowest score wins a pickled egg. With an incentive like that, why try to win?

Stairwell of Doom

We have our own front door these days. When you open it you are greeted by these stairs.

Please admire the dirt-coloured carpet.

The stairs are steep, and for whatever reason, the steps themselves are small, forcing you to descend at an angle. Maybe folks had itty bitty feet in the 1880s.  Fortunately, there is a handrail for clinging on to.

The stairwell was intimidating when we first moved in. The bedrooms are upstairs, while the bathroom is on the ground floor where it no doubt began life as a haunted, unheated outhouse. These days it is a fully tiled part of the flat with all the mod cons, including a particularly useless heated towel rack I wish I could turn off some way besides removing the fuse.

So there you are, your first night in your new place, trying to get used to the new sounds and smells and debilitating feng shui and what have you. Then you have to get up to go for a pee, which involves getting down the stairs without taking a tumble and snapping your neck and you start thinking how, really, chamber pots make an awful lot of sense when you think about it...

I am used to the stairs now. They are less scary, although it will always be a challenge to take a cup of tea up, and if I am using legs fatigued from running, the trip down makes me consider completing the journey by shuffling on my butt.

There is a loft at the top of the stairs, and in theory, if we could reach it, it would be a good place to store camping gear and suchlike. But this is York, so you just know it's packed with slumbering night-gaunts waiting for some fool to free them to raven and slay. And for once that fool ain't gonna be me.

The Spoken Word

I went to an open mic called The Spoken Word last night at the Exhibition Hotel, just outside Bootham Bar, very close to some big church the locals call the "Minster".

I hadn't been to this pub before. It seems a popular place (location location location!) and they serve food til late. Unfortunately there was only one bartender on and he was a foetus at that (if you're out of Golden Pippin, turn the clip around, you fool). The open mic was in the conservatory in the back.

The crowd was almost entirely white, middle-aged and middle class, but it's not like people can help being these things. I was one of four people with North American accents. Everyone seemed to know each other and they were welcoming to a new face. The atmosphere was that of a salon in someone's glass-walled parlour.

I seem to be meeting a lot of retirees. Not that this is a bad thing, but I think I would like to meet some people my own age, if only for the shared pop culture references. How do you meet people in their thirties, anyway? Or in their forties, for that matter? Are they all busy hatching children and only make friends with other parents?

Participants can read pretty much anything that takes their fancy; it doesn't have to be one's own work. There is a sort-of theme (this month's was "goodbye summer, hello fall colour"), but it's only a suggestion. There was a lot of poetry and a few short stories, but there was also a reading from a musty old book of observational essays about trains by Hamilton Ellis. I live with a train geek, and try as I might, I just don't feel the pants-peeing excitement at the sight of a Deltic like some of these people do. But it added to the variety of the night.

The Spoken Word wasn't the late, lamented Freed Up of Manchester's greenroom (R.I.P.), but it was very good in its own way. The quality of the original writing was high, although naturally some of it grabbed me more than others. Mostly I was impressed by the voices themselves: these people are skilled orators.

It was a friendly crowd and I was encouraged to participate. "I write, but I don't speak," I explained feebly. That's ok! you can read someone else's work, or someone else can read your work! they said. I get a lot out of attending performances (beats watching tv, or it would if I had one), but I really don't have any interest in performing myself, so I will have to give it some thought. 

For some reason, several plates of lovely greasy pub food arrived at the interval (a couple of pizzas, chips, cheesy chips (woo!), sausages). As the night was free, this was all the more surprising. A gift from the creative writing gods? Alas, I wasn't hungry so I didn't have any. There's always next month.

York, Cycling City: Skipwith Challenge

As someone who needs to meet people, learn the area and maybe shift a few pounds, I could do worse than join a guided group cycle through the countryside. I've been on a few group rides organised by the city council with support from Sustrans. Many of these are shorter rides aimed at less experienced riders. Saturday was a longer day out, the "Skipwith Challenge".

The total distance was about 30 miles. I even got Geoboy to go with me, although the pace was very slow for him and his skinny-tyred racing bike that weighs about two ounces. It's more of a steady social ride than a training session. It was very friendly, and it was refreshing to spend a day in the open air.

The first place to receive funding under the Cycling City project was Bristol. On the one hand, they didn't meet their target of doubling the number of regular cyclists. On the other hand, they have increased it by a third. Is this really failure? (Read the BBC article here, and marvel at the density of the logic-challenged Tory councillor quoted at the end.) Mostly, the schemes seem to make people who already cycle happier and encourage them to cycle more. Reaching non-cyclers is more difficult.

I certainly have been doing more cycling in my short time here. There are good places to do it, and drivers are much better about sharing the road here than in Manchester. This may be further confirmation of the research suggesting that places where more people cycle tend to be safer for cyclists. Or it may be evidence supporting the idea that, as another cyclist put it, "York is a very civilised place". (He then went on to ask if I'd been to Evensong at the Minster.)

There were nine of us altogether including our two stalwart guides, Colin and Jenny. We had mounts of many species and riders of all ages. Colin gets a lot of miles in, and is apparently in his seventies, although you'd never guess it by his fresh face and sinewy calves.

The original plan, as the name suggests, was to stop in Skipwith at the Drovers Arms. It was temporarily closed for reburfishment, though, so we went on to the Jefferson Arms at Thorganby. The address is Main Street, to which I can only say, "Main Street? It's the ONLY street!"

It was a bit posh, but, as this is Yorkshire, also relaxed. On the wall next to the fireplace in the bar area hangs an autographed photograph of the cast of Coronation Street. (I guess Emmerdale hasn't made it in yet.) The staff didn't seem to mind having a group of grotty cyclists slouch over their linen tablecloths. The food was a little pricey. I had a mozzarella sandwich and fries while Geoboy ordered a plate of meat. Er, breakfast. The Golden Pippin was in fine form.

The route took us through a sizable nature reserve called Skipwith Common. Unfortunately, the road surface was terrible, so instead of admiring the scenery I was busy watching the ground and listening to my brains rattle around my skull. I will have to go back and take a walk there. But that is another post for another day.

Castle, prison, law court, tourist attraction: Clifford's Tower

Over the river from my neighbourhood, Bishophill, rest the remains of York Castle. There was a small motte and bailey castle on the corner of Bishophill as well, Baile Hill. It's an odd feeling passing a mound of earth erected by William the Conqueror on your way to buy potatoes. Such is life in York.

Postcards of Clifford's Tower tend to leave out the street. Not only have I included the street, I have gone one better and captured a park 'n' ride bendy bus for you. A nice photographic reminder that bringing your car into York is an  utterly stupid thing to do.

Fortunately, I was not wearing high heels this day.

After coughing up £3.50, I am admitted to the interior.

The discolouration on parts of the walls happened after the tower accidently-on-purpose went on fire in 1684, which is why it has no longer has certain homely amenities such as a roof.

On to the main reason to visit Clifford's Tower: the view.

Looking towards the Minster.

Unless you're a gargoyle on a certain local landmark, the views of the city from here are hard to top. I can (almost) see my flat!

Looking towards Bishophill. You can see a bit of the River Ouse on the left.

After the wordiness of the Mickelgate Bar Museum, it was refreshing to visit a place that keeps signage to a minimum. Unfortunately, this also meant that a placard recounting the horrific suicide/massacre of 150 Jews in 1190 failed to include much of the context of the event (you can read more about it here). I remember it every time I pass the tower, and experience a melancholic dissonance when the ramparts are plastered with tourists lazing amongst the buttercups. I wonder if they know what happened there.

A walk from Malton to Malton

On Saturday, Geoboy and I took a walk out of Malton. I have a soft spot for Malton because it is the home of Clear Spot organic tofu, the one with the picture of Captain Bean Curd on the box. He navigated (Geoboy, that is, not Captain Bean Curd, although considering the way things went, we might have been better off with the seafaring soya product in charge).

We began by taking part of the Centenary Way , "a route devised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Yorkshire County Council" in 1989. An odd thing to commemorate if you ask me, but at least it's not yet another gruesome blood-soaked battle, plus it gives ramblers another walking path.

Between the railway and the River Derwent.

The weather was pretty good most of the time, giving us views of the Yorkshire Yorkshire-people like to think of when they think of Yorkshire.

Ee, by gum

The route took us through a small nature reserve called Jeffry Bog, a designated Site of Scientifc Interest.

The plan was to be in the pub by the time a predicted afternoon shower arrived. Alas, everything seemed to be a bit further away than our navigator thought, and we got rained on good and hard. We did eventually make it to the Stone Trough Inn for a rest and a couple of pints. I can heartily recommend the cheesy chips.

Just down the hill from the pub is the spectacular, ominous ruin of Kirkham Priory.

We crossed this suspension footbridge on the way back. It bounces! (Time to lay off the cheesy chips? Nah.)

Near the end of our walk, we found a new form of life. 

Either that or an old discarded hoover.

Back where we started, we hobbled into The New Malton, a recently refurbished pub and restaurant on the marketplace. I may have mentioned that our navvy kept understimating distances. Part of our route was on one side of the map, and t'other on t'other. Apparently this caused a few miles to fall out of his head. In the end, our six to seven mile route had become twelve and a half miles. Whoopsie! We made it back in one piece, though. More or less.

Where are the heads? A visit to the Micklegate Bar Museum

My flat is about five minutes away from Micklegate Bar.

They don't display the heads of traitors on it anymore (although I know a few people who wouldn't mind seeing Tony Blair's bonce up there). People used to live in the rooms in the barbican above the gate. This was also where they housed condemned criminals before they were carted off to Knavesmire and hanged. I imagine that made for some awkward moments as far as neighbour relations go.

Micklegate Bar now houses a museum. I got in free with my York Card, which does all sorts of wonderful things, including keeping milk from going sour, warding off spectres in snickleways and freshening one's breath. After crossing a room full of museumy tat, the staff acknowledged my card and suggested I start at the top and work my way down.

The top room is largely devoted to the Battle of Towton, a big bloody messy battle fought during the Wars of the Roses in a village southwest of York. A large screen plays a movie of historians talking about how awful it was over images of Towton today, a bucolic piece of quiet Yorkshire countryside.

It's quite a wordy museum on the whole, with lots of placards and not many artifacts, although there are hats you can try on. There are also a few items of fake food, in order to, I don't know, make the place looked lived in or something. Maybe in the past they gave prisoners phony bread just to taunt them.

There are probably several ghosts that haunt Micklegate Bar and its surrounding environs, but the one I read about was Sarah Brocklebank. Her father was keeper of the keys, a very high position for a commoner. He was in charge of locking the gate up at night and unlocking it in the morning. One day his kids were playing with the keys -- you can probably see where this is heading -- and lost them. I guess Sarah felt bad enough about it to haunt the place after her death. My favourite part of the story is that after the keys were lost, they just didn't bother to lock the gate anymore.

Of course, these days, things are made even simpler by just not having a gate at all. Micklegate can be a wild place after dark, though. I haven't seen any ghosts yet, but it isn't rare to see the living dead of the pissed-up variety.

Pubs within a 15-minute stagger of my flat #1: Mason's Arms

Mason's Arms

Website: http://www.masonsarmsyork.co.uk/

Walking time: 8 minutes 4 seconds

Real ale: Yes

Food: Yes

In two words: Pig out

Welcome to the first instalment of a new series here at Once Upon a Time in York where I'll be telling you about watering holes near my flat. Fifteen minutes is an arbitrary figure (who wouldn't walk fifteen minutes to the pub, even in bad weather?). If a place I want to visit is a bit further than that, I'll review it anyway. The walking time is how long it takes me to walk from the door of my flat to the door of the pub. This can of course vary according to the time of day, the day of the week, the time of year, the number of road crossings, the number of hen parties I have to bash my way through, etc.

Mason's Arms is located between the Foss and the city wall on Fishergate. It's on my way to the grocery store. But then there are probably a dozen pubs between me and the grocery store, making it easy enough for me to fortify myself for a mission to the supermarket.

This was my third visit to Mason's Arms. The first was when Geoboy and I were flat-hunting and we stayed at the nearby Blue Bridge Inn. We walked in on a congenial pub quiz that night.

You can, perhaps, judge a pub by its pub quiz. This was a pleasant one, a small crowd who seemed familiar with each other, with a congenial host, plenty of self-deprecation and laughs, and no cheaters on their smartphones (god! how I hate the douchebags who cheat at pub quizzes. Too bad there are no more gibbets left in York).

The second time I came here was with Paul on a Saturday for a pub lunch. The portions are ridiculously large. So large in fact that I probably won't eat there again. Geoboy had the fish and chips, the sight of which prompted him to remark, "Oh, I seem to have ordered the whale". I got a wedge of broccoli and Stilton pie. That came with gravy. And chips. and three piles of vegetables over-cooked in the finest British tradition. It was enough food for two or three people.

There was a family group with three small children in the pub that day. The kids weren't complete monsters, but still, when you're trying to work your way through a kilo of Maris Pipers and enjoy a pint on a Saturday afternoon, the screeching and gymnastics that the Very Young inevitably perform wherever they find themselves does not exactly fill me with unbounded joy.

Geoboy and I were still lingering over the papers and our partially eaten meals when the family left. "Goodbye, pig", said a child behind me.

I should explain that Mason's Arms has a pig motif: pig statuettes, pig paintings, pig gravy boats, pig wind chimes... They're everywhere. So the sprog was not talking to me but rather a shiny brass pig sitting in front of the fireplace that he had grown fond of in their brief time together.

There were a few people around on the Wednesday afternoon I visited. Mason's Arms has its regulars but I imagine it also sees its share of tourist traffic, it being very close to a large car park, a Travelodge and other hotels, and Clifford's Tower and the York Castle museum. And it does, on occasion, get in a dark-haired Yankee who stops for a pint and a scribble on her way to the grocery store.

Cycling to the edge of the solar system

I hadn't been out on my bike for several weeks, so maybe riding out to Selby was a little ambitious. But I'm not totally unfit and I don't find cycling that taxing. I decided to follow National Cycle Route 65 and see how I got on.

I left the flat just after 6 a.m. and followed the signs. Most of the route is on traffic-free cycle paths through the countryside. The paths were in good condition and well sign-posted. I saw rabbits, pheasants, and flat-capped old Yorkshiremen walking their dogs. I always feel a bit weird when I see a walking stereotype in the flesh like that.

Early on the route took me through York Racecourse. And I don't mean I skimmed a corner of the grounds. I went right through the course. As the Ebor Festival starts today, I was glad I was out early and not under the hooves of the runners of the Symphony Group Stakes.

Between Bishopthorpe and Ricall is a scale model of the solar system. A sign near Ricall (a.k.a. Pluto) reads:

The scale of our model is 575,872,239 to 1. So every 100 metres along the track corresponds to more than 57 million kilometres in space. The speed of light is about 1.16 mph, so it is easy to walk at 3 times the speed of light and to cycle at 10 times the speed of light. Every journey down the cycle track ends before it begins and every time you travel on the track you will become a little younger. 

My GT hybrid had become a spaceship. A damn fast one, too.

I was pleasantly surprised to meet this fella at the bridge over the Ouse at Naburn:

He's called Fisher of Dreams. I don't think he's caught anything.

I didn't know anything about Selby except that it was 15 miles from York. So I was pretty impressed when I saw this thing hulking over the joint:

Selby Abbey

Across from the abbey is Selby Park. It's small and pleasant and even has a crazy golf course, although it isn't particularly crazy. Moody, maybe. I took a break, stretched and chastised myself for borrowing my boyfriend's padded cycling gloves but not his padded cycling shorts. I'd succumbed to numb bum. 

I could've continued the route on to Barnsley, but who wants to go there? So I turned around and went back the way I came, arriving home a little after 9 o'clock. Not a bad way to start the day.

Hello, sailor!

I have just moved to York after five long years in Manchester. My partner Geoboy landed a job in Leeds and we decided that it would be much more fun to live in York, where the streets are stuffed to the gills with history, pubs, and historic pubs.

My time in Manchester was mixed. I liked it less and less as time wore on. Perhaps, having moved, it will become more clear to me which annoyances are peculiarly Mancunian and which are simply English. I have lived in big cities before, and while I met many fine people in Manchester, I also met an extraordinary number of assholes. I have never lived in a more unfriendly place in my entire life.

It was wearying. I struggled more and more with anxiety and depression (my constant companions at the best of times), and I became increasingly agoraphobic. Sometimes I would not leave the flat -- for anything -- for up to a week at a time. Other times I would only leave to go for an early morning run. (A side effect of agoraphobia you rarely hear mentioned: it makes you fat. While I was still exercising regularly, I was doing a lot less walking around. So I'm reasonably fit but a bit chubby at the moment.) I became more and more isolated. I stopped going to my writing group (and stopped writing), I didn't do anything with my running club, I didn't go into town.

In short, I wasn't having very much fun.

A move is a good opportunity to move on. And so far, York seems like a good place to do that. On this blog I'll be writing about what it's like to live in this ancient walled city.

Feel free to comment. If there's any place you'd like me to have a look at, let me know. I take requests. I am not a great photographer, so there probably won't be many pictures on this blog (unless I steal them from somewhere else). But again, I take requests, so if there's something you want to see, let me know in the comments. I aim to post at least once a week.

Agnes, by the way, was a ferrywoman on the Ouse in the Middle Ages. I don't what she charged. But I'll ferry you for free.

My kingdom for a respectable loaf

"Acorns were good until bread was found."

-- Francis Bacon

In any new location, finding decent bread is a priority. I'd been spoilt by Barbakan back in Manchester, and I am a complete bread snob in any case. A life with mediocre bread is not worth living.

Pickings were slim. Tasteless crappy Chorleywood process sponges masquerading as bread line the shop shelves. Places that call themselves "bakeries" tend to sell pastries, or pasties, or sometimes both. It started to look like I'd be making my own bread, which I am not unhappy to do, but I prefer to leave these things to the experts.

An internet search revealed a review of a bakery at the top of the Shambles. The reviewer didn't know the name of it and so simply dubbed it "Mystery Bread Shop". It sounded promising so I scoped it out one afternoon. I knew it would already be shut but I wanted to find it for future reference.

I walked right past it at first. It is a small red building. A sign in the shape of a shield sporting a gold saltire hangs over the street, and wire mesh covers the window. There is no writing on the frontage whatsoever, no pictures of bread or wheat, nothing to indicate just what it is. I have since learned that the bakery's proper name is Via Vecchia.

I wasn't sure what time it opened, so one morning after an early run and some breakfast, I left the flat at eight o'clock to see what I could find. It was a lovely time of day to be out; York seemed more like a regular, if exceedingly charming, town and less like a medieval theme park. Without the throngs of tourists saturating the streets, it only took me ten minutes to walk from our flat to the Shambles.

This time the door was open. Sample loaves of bread, all labelled, lined the counter of the small shop. The rest idled on wheeled cooling racks. A handsome, stoic man in an apron served me. I think handsomeness, stoicism and apron-wearing are all admirable qualities in a baker. And damn if the bread isn't fantastic. No more acorns for me, then.