I've spent much of the past few weeks wandering around the English outdoors. Leeds is circled by a calm riverwalk that leads to the Docks; parks are littered with reddening leaves and small memorials; the quickest way to get from home to the grocery store is to cut through a forest. The walk to my new favorite coffee shop is a leafy ten minute ramble.
Nature feels more integrated here. I don't have to wander far, even from the city center, to find a shaded green area huddled against the noise of mid-week activity.
But sometimes it is nice to take that extra step away. Last weekend we explored parks in York. This weekend we spent near Yeadon, exploring narrow trails and looking for otters in along the riverbed. Many walks had us stumbling upon old stone walls and bridges, and fields of sheep content with their grass, and magpies traveling in even numbers.
This weekend we stayed fairly close to home, visiting Kirkstall Abbey. The 12th-century site has been a ruin for longer than it was a monastery, and it has an abandoned but organized look to it. What struck me most were the gaps where doors and windows used to sit. Some of the openings are massive, and I found myself thinking that the absence of stained glass was more striking than if it had been present. It had a feeling of potential. I started to read its history and ended up down a rabbit-hole of links. There's so much I don't know.
I'm looking forward to hearing the wind whisper over the moors, to seeing the broad hills of the Dales and the large bodies of the Lake District. I've been flipping through a few local guidebooks (Yorkshire: A Literary Landscape; Yorkshire Folk Tales; Yorkshire: A Lyrical History) and it's not hard to see why this portion of the world has been the source of such inspiration.
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