Yesterday (Wednesday, September 10) was our day to explore the Yorkshire Dales, the land to the east of the Lake District, where All Creatures Great and Small was filmed. We decided to drive on larger roads all the way to Ripon. Mary and Elaine were raised in Ripon, Wisconsin, and my great-grandfather grew up there as well. We were surprised by how lovely the town was, and how impressive was the cathedral!

The weather was rainy and cloudy enough to make it difficult to take pictures of the beautiful landscapes. Gone were the towering hills of the Lake District, replaced by tidy fields of green, criss-crossed with sturdy stone fences. There were many more cattle here than we have seen before, and more trees. (The Lake District hills are curiously barren, save for heather.) In many ways it reminded us of Wisconsin, minus the corn fields.

The cathedral started as a monastery in 627, and has been functioning ever since. It has seen fires and a tower collapse and expansions, so it is a mixture of different styles. A lovely guide told us the most wonderful stories. She showed us the carvings in the choir seating, including an elaborate one of an elephant with a church on its back. She explained that in medieval times, the people (who had only heard of, but never seen elephants) thought elephants reproduced by “chaste reproduction.” They couldn’t imagine two elephants having sex. So when Oliver Cromwell went around ordering all churches to take out representations of the Virgin Mary, they carved elephants instead. Fascinating.

After wandering around Ripon, lunching at a sweet old cafe and touring the cathedral, we got back in the car to drive to Grassington. It was fun to walk the cobblestoned streets, see the old stone buildings and pop into the Drovers Arms for a quick ginger beer before heading home.

Driving was again quite a slog, seemingly impossible to get anywhere without being on one lane roads, where you have to pull over onto a cutout every time another car comes by. And then we got stuck in a lot of construction, where the speed limit was sometimes 10 miles per hour. By the time we got home, it was after 8 and we were too tired to go out for dinner, fixing pasta and cheese and crackers for dinner instead. We have another long drive today, to York, but then we will park the car for 2 days and walk everywhere. That should go a long way towards soothing our nerves. We are ready to stop sitting!