299: Boroughbridge

OS Explorer map 299, Ripon & Boroughbridge: Easingwold – I do not own this map, and had not visited before starting this blog. Visited for this post 8th January 2018.

So. [1] My last post ended with the seven of us in a car on the way down from Scotland, where we’d been for the last few days on the ASNC Society trip to Argyll, which my last seven posts have concerned. This is the eighth and final post about that trip.

Leaving Escomb, we drove south, soon joining the A1, and eventually the time came for a lunch break. As we’d been deprived of our pub dinner the night before, we thought we deserved one today, and so we did my usual travelling lunch strategy of getting off at a random motorway junction and looking for a pub. We soon entered the town of Boroughbridge, and parked in a place where we were possibly not allowed to park, but the signs were unclear enough that I thought we had a reasonable case. Millicent revealed that he was familiar with Boroughbridge, it being a place where he used to routinely stop on drives north with his parents to see his grandmother in Scotland.

We then entered a pub/hotel thing and duly ordered and ate lunch, which was pleasant. Their panini portions were enormous, a large sandwich being accompanied by an even large pile of chips and salad I think.

While inside we discussed the significance of the brown tourist signs pointing to Roman Town that we’d seen outside, in case that might be an interesting place to visit briefly before carrying on south. Further investigation however, revealed that, the attraction consisting of a museum of local Roman archaeology, a bit of preserved Roman city wall, and some mosaic floors, it sounded pretty much exactly the same as every other British Roman site. (The Uncontestedly Virile, though, thought that this sounded quite exciting, he being American.) Furthermore entry cost £4 or something, so we decided against it.

Our lunch done, we got back in the car and started driving south once again. A brief stop was made in Newark, to drop off Vesper at the train station (we also had a brief gawk at the castle from a distance), before we reached Cambridge at about 5:30pm. The trip was over!

I’m now up to date in terms of posting about the maps I’ve visited, so there’ll be a short hiatus until next time I go to a map I haven’t yet posted about – this will probably be about Oxford, where I plan to go on the 17th February.

[1] Since reading Heaney’s Beowulf translation several years ago I can’t see “So.” as a single sentence without thinking “Hwæt!”…