Yes, we were heading back to St Andrews… no, not the one in Scotland, sadly… though I would, given half a chance. In fact, I mused, I could pretty much never come home given a camper van and some way to make enough to survive… I should have been a gypsy… I was daydreaming. And while I have nothing against that at all, I probably shouldn’t be indulging whilst driving.
We were going back to St Andrew’s church… the one we had passed the previous evening. The one that had stuff in it. A brief foray on the internet had produced the information that it held “some remarkable Jellinge style Viking/Christian crosses”… I liked the plurality of that… as well as an “internationally significant Anglo–Scandinavian Collection of funeral carvings and other artefacts.” Not to mention a Saxon tower on a Norman church and some intriguing stained glass. As a final stop, it sounded perfect. It was a beautiful morning. And there was an eighth-century cross inset into the wall of the Saxon tower… not that we knew it at the time, I only noticed it today on the photos…
“The church building is open daily from dawn to dusk, and is a beautiful place” it said. Except it wasn’t. Open, that is. And we’d lingered over breakfast… we were in no hurry after all. But the door was shut. The way barred. We were being frustrated at the last hurdle. A local lady kindly informed us that the keyholder lived down one of the back lanes and would probably be along soon, so we lingered a little amid the snowdrops, then drove into Pickering in a futile search for a place to get the headlight fixed. Then we came back… and it was still locked.
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