On York and Yorkshire

Another day another Minster - the largest in Northern Europe, one of the guides told me - apparently the Spanish have something larger. However, having taken some 260 years to build it would have to be excessively grand. A tennis-court-sized stained glass window is shrouded by its printed facsimiles while conservators remove each panel from its place, and painstakingly clean, re-lead, and replace the glass, so when finished it will be back to its original brightness. A couple of partially restored panels were displayed in lightboxes. An irreverent thought, such delicacy and detail didn't ought to be fixed into lead came, 50feet above those looking at it. Why must we see only coloured patches in a huge backlit window? Perhaps visitors to churches sporting such magnificent glass art should be issued with powerful binoculars so they can clearly see the detail in the large windows. Maybe a bank of (seaside) telescopes, requiring a coin to operate - that would bring in the money!
During my travels I have come to realise that many UK churches' stained glass is donated memorials to family individuals, or members of regiments felled in wars such as the Boer and the Great War. Magnificent stained glass often was installed well after a church or cathedral was built, or sadly, replaced original installations destroyed during the reformation (Henry the Eighth and his rewriting of divorce law at the bottom of that!)
I've had enough of historic buildings so went to Castle Howard yesterday. Yes, another historic building, but one built to glorify the great and powerful of politics and state. (Used as the site of both Brideshead Revisited productions) I was particularly drawn to the gardens, and aspects created by landscape artists - a joy to live in such manicured perfection. The rose garden will be fabulous in a month or so, for now the bushes are producing their leaves.
As I drove south towards Cambridge today I altered my view of Yorkshire, not the dour and sere moors, but fertile farms, many lighting the grey skies with large plantings of bright yellow flowering rape. It really is an uplifting colour, those who plant fields of rape cannot help feel happy when looking on the crop, it surely brightens the day for those hissing along the roads in the rain.
Tomorrow Cambridge. An encouraging weather forecast indicates the sun may show its face, for a few minutes at least. I'm going to do the park and ride, and get myself to the 'backs' where students disport themselves, and many a comic scene has been viewed as punters punt, or not, on the Cam.