Day 9 – Traveling North

North York Moors

Today was mostly a driving day as we drove about 250 miles from Coventry to Newcastle-On-Tyne where we are spending the night.  We had two planned stops along the way. As we like to see the US National Parks, we thought it would be nice to see some of the ones in the UK and have several on our list. Today we drove through the North York Moors National Park. The UK parks differ from the US parks in that all of the land in the parks are privately held and not held by the government as in the US. Therefore you can see homes, farms and small towns in various parts of the park. The moors were not at their peak condition as the heather doesn’t come into bloom until late summer so it had more of a “brooding” look today, although there was some yellow Gorse in bloom in various places. By the way, we learned that the moors are actually man-made, caused by deforestation before the Roman times.

Durham Cathedral

Our other stop was Durham Cathedral.  The cathedral was started in 1093 at the direction of William the Conqueror and was completed in about 40 years. It is a massively large church, considering the time-frame in which it was built. It is also the final resting place for St. Cuthbert (c. 634-687) who is regarded as the patron saint of northern England. One interesting sidelight is that the church was closing for several days for filming some scenes from the next Avengers movie and you can see some of the set-up (trucks, tents) outside the church in the photo. There was a lot of green screen material being spread out inside and some kind of large floating balloons being inflated inside.