Welcome back to the City of York, the historic heart of Yorkshire in the North of England. This week we are focusing on the walk around part of the city walls and the Yorkshire Museum Gardens.

If you're in York, and are rewarded with nice weather, head for the City Walls. You'll get great views of the city inside and beyond the walls, from a great vantage point. And best of all, at the time of writing, completely free. So head down to High Petergate street, and climb a few stairs up to the walls. This will not really be an option if you have limited mobility, as the steps are steep and the passage quite narrow. 
Once up on the wall you are rewarded with a view of the rooftops of the buildings around the wall and the city beyond, as I showed last week. But even better are the views inside the wall perimeter to the the great York Minster, and all the historical buildings and gardens that still exist within the protective wall.
You can see the Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Saint Peter in York, more commonly known as the York Minster, in the background of the first two images here. As it tends to happen on our latest travels, the main church of the city we are visiting is in the middle of a major renovation, which means we will need to go back to shoot it, and go inside and also climb the main tower to get even wider views of the city. The York Minster, is the cathedral of York, England, and is one of the largest of its kind in Northern Europe. The minster is the seat of the Archbishop of York, the second-highest office of the Church of England. The title "minster" is attributed to churches established in the Anglo-Saxon period as missionary teaching churches, and serves now as an honorific title. 
Apart from the Cathedral there are some very well kept and pretty gardens, some are part of event venues and restaurants, while most are for private houses. Inside one of those I found this statue of a small girl that imediatelly made me think of Alice in Wonderland. If someone knows if that is really the case, please let me know!

After coming down to the walls, and having a great lunch on one of the many pubs and restaurants you can find in the centre of York, we strolled down to the end of Parliament St. and got to the All Saints Pavement Church, on the Parish of All Saints Pavement with Saint Crux and Saint Michael Spurriergate. Now that is a mouth full. I just loved the church tower architecture, which has a lot of empty spaces within the arches and it's octogonal shape. Having blue skies, scattered with white fluffy clouds, I went for a very steep angle to maximise the contrast with the stone colour and also to isolate it from the rest of the modern buildings that surround it.

York being a city full of history, actually founded by the Romans in 71 AD, then called Eboracum, and having it's great expansion in the Middle Ages, there are multiple examples of this medieval heritage scattered across town. I chose a couple to highlight this here. Above is a detail of a building on Coney St, which today is mostly dominated by shops, that shows some carved heads on the buildings wooden frame facade. On the left is a wooden framed tablet with the last will of Mrs. Thornil, in which she donates money to the Holy Trinity Parish in Goodramgate to the education of poor girls. This can be found inside the Holy Trinity Church, in the center of town.

In the heart of the York Museum Gardens you will find the Georgian building of the Yorkshire Museum, opened in 1830 and one of the first purpose-built museums in the UK. Reopened in 2010 following a nine-month £2million refurbishment project the Museum houses five galleries showcasing some of Britain’s finest archaeological treasures and many rare animals, birds and fossils, in exciting displays. The gardens also houses The Hospitium, a 14th century two-storey building that you can hire as the setting for your ceremonies, and overlooked by the striking ruins of St. Mary's Abbey pictured on the last post.

While strolling through the gardens I found a very interesting geological map of the Yorkshire area made out of colored pebbles. This a copy of a segment of the famous 1815 Geological Map of 'England and Wales with part of Scotland' by William Smith. The full original title of the document is : A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland; exhibiting the collieries and mines, the marshes and fen lands originally overflowed by the sea, and the Varieties of Soil according to the variations in the Substrata, illustrated by the most Descriptive Names by W Smith. This was the first geological map that covered such a wide area, and is only six years older than the first geological map ever produced.

So I'll leave you this week with another sunset image from the shores of the River Ouse, great place to finish the day when in York and have nice weather. Next week I'll finish the set about York, with a trip to the National Railway Museum. 
This week we are getting into a plane heading to Iceland, for a short scouting trip. Hopefully we will be publishing some daily posts with a summary of the day.
Until then, 
Keep wandering this rock of ours...