Sloe Time in Yorkshire

Looking for a break, and needing to visit the library on campus, I took a modest bike ride out into the country southwest of York yesterday.  The weather was grey, cool and misty but not actually wet.  I thought I could ride out as far as Sutton on Derwent (about 7 miles from York) and then loop around to the bike path coming in from Selby, directly south of the city.  Along the way, I could visit a few old monuments, and I could let the information my computer has been spitting at me soak in a bit, maybe to the point of making sense.

The countryside around York is slightly rolling to flat and at this time of year it is green with winter wheat or other cover crops contrasting with the dark browns of soil, wet leafless hedges and tree trunks.  The architecture of the villages is shown to particular advantage in wet misty weather, the darkened brick and stone setting off delightfully the brightly painted wood trim.

"Class II historic structure"  An elegant bridge over the Derwent

Approaching Sutton upon Derwent, I crossed the river on an ancient single lane stone bridge.  There aren't a lot of bridges across the Derwent in this part of Yorkshire, so I suspect that this was an important one in days gone by.   The bridge is first recorded there in 1396; earlier than that, there's mention of a ferry.

Sutton upon Derwent, Saint Michael's Church.  Three distinct
architectural styles are represented here.

From the bridge, through the mists, I could make out the Saxon style tower of the church in Sutton which surprised me because I hadn't noticed a church recorded on my OS map.  But there is indeed a very fine church, set on a hill overlooking the river, with architectural elements dating from Norman (13th c) and perpendicular (15th c) periods.  The various periods are blended here as they are in so many English parish churches resulting in an architecture, harmonious in itself, that could never be built in one time alone.  The aging, the age, the ages are essential.

Sloes

Back on the road home, I came across some hedgerows lush with sloes, a tiny variety of plum.  They're too astringent to eat directly off their thorny branches, but the English have learned  over the centuries to pick them after the first frost and soak them along with sugar in gin or vodka for six to twelve months, producing a sweet concoction called sloe gin.  So I stopped and picked a saddlebag full.  They're now resting comfortably at the bottom of a jar, relinquishing, I hope, whatever of the landscape and summer of 2010 they were able to capture, into a liter of vodka.  But I'll have to wait.  You can't hurry sloe gin any more than you can hurry the building of an English parish church.

I returned home tired and refreshed.  I'd ridden about 25 miles in two and a half hours.  I'd had a few ideas about my work that I never could have had sitting in front of the laptop, and I had the beginnings of next summer's sloe gin.  My computer had, in the meantime, performed many billions of calculations.  Good for an afternoon of analysis and reflection.  Slow time.