Yorkshire Museum

The Yorkshire Museum is, coincidentally, in the Museum Gardens. The Gardens are a wonderful place just inside the walls of York: there's a possibly Tudor house that's now available for wedding receptions etc; the ruins of St Mary's Abbey; a bit of an old Roman tower; and lots of lovely gardens, beautifully landscaped, complete with squirrels (and nasty fat pigeons).

Unfortunately, I was disappointed with the Museum itself. Having paid my five quid, I wandered around an exhibit on how to date stuff; then through rooms of Roman, Saxon, Viking and medieval artifacts. I think my main problem is that I expect or hope to learn something new in places like this; but they're not designed with historians in mind, they're designed for the general public (which is probably how it should be). I have to change my attitude and expectations, I think! Aside from the info panels, there were some pretty cool objects, most of them found in and around York itself (although why they also included replicas of stuff from Pompeii and elsewhere is beyond me). My main issue here was that the displays were quite poor: it was frequently impossible to figure out which description went with which object, and some objects had no information at all. Anyway - whinge whinge - I still walked around for 45 minutes or so; possibly the most interesting bit overall was the little snippet of video they played explaining that the museum had got in local tradies etc to look at Roman artifacts to figure out how they would have worked: butchers, builders, hairdressers - all helping archaeologists and historians understand the objects better.



New shoes: old shoes
Waterproof: not so much

The other thing I've done in York is buy new shoes. After riding with mobile puddles (aka sneakers), it dawned on me that my choice of footwear - which occasioned serious angst before leaving - had been flawed. So now I have to decide whether to keep the sneakers - will we go running on days we're not riding? - or send them home. Stay tuned to discover the resolution of this captivating dilemma...