Destination: England –

How I Came to Embed in a Small Picturesque North Yorkshire Village

So a few years back I was driving around the north of England with my son and my old buddy, Jarvis. We did this several times together; we’d fly over to England, eat some Cadburys chocolate bars, take a train up to Leeds, and rendezvous with Jarvis. Jarvis and I go back decades.

Jarvis, who is a Yorkshireman, would meet us at the train station with the hire car that I had paid for, and that he was going to drive. This always seemed an ideal arrangement.

This is because it is decidedly not a vacation if one is figuring out a new car in unfamiliar places, whilst driving around on the wrong side of the road.

But sitting in a new car with a huge stack of crisps (potato chips) in every available flavor, and a large orange Lucozade or berry Ribena drink or both, and some more Cadburys chocolate bars, looking out the windows as someone native to England drives you around — now that is a vacation.

So we kept doing this together. The three of us toured the Scottish border towns, and later the Yorkshire moors, and Hadrian’s Wall. Each time I paid for the car, and Jarvis drove it.

We stayed in tiny old inns, and in rooms above a 17th-century pub, in little market towns, and next door to the ruins of a vast abbey. Jarvis is a retired touring stage manager, and setting up nice accommodations and booking meals in nice places is part of what he did for years for various British theatre companies. In addition to operating all the technical elements for each show.

The first time we went touring, we had to have a serious discussion about what sort of car to hire.

“None of your teensy-weensy toy cars, now!” I declared, “I know what those English cars look like.”

“I’ll see if I can get a tank big enough for you Yanks!” Jarvis replied.

The car sorted out, we just had to pack up our hiking boots and hats, and we were ready.

Jarvis has always been interested in ancient British and pre-British history, so these tours have always included stops to visit Mesolithic and Neolithic stones.

I don’t know what Mesolithic and Neolithic mean either. Let’s just go with “really old,” and move on.

We’ve seen many ancient stone circles, burial tombs with giant rocks over them, enormous standing stones, and various other confabulations of rocks.

These are often located in some farmer’s field, but under British law they remain accessible to the public via the public footpaths that seem to traverse most of rural Britain.

“If we were doing this in the USA,” I noted aloud one day, as the three of us made our way through a clearly private field of sheep to go look at the pair of 12-foot standing stones in the next field, “We’d have been shot by now.”

But the only sign we are perturbing anyone by stomping along someone’s fields comes from the wary sheep, who stop eating flowers and stare at us as we pass.

Jarvis also likes to make comic travel films, or “fillums” as they say up here, so there exist a series of these which record our trips, with music and funny title cards and an awful lot of rocks.

So one day we were driving through many small picturesque North Yorkshire villages, heading north.

And we came to the most picturesque village I had ever seen!

It had cottages, and small pedestrian bridges over a flower-lined stream, an attractive village green with a quaint pub, and more flowers.

The River Leven. Waterfall Park.

And I announced spontaneously “This is the most picturesque village ever! What is this place?”

A gate on a footpath. The Village Green.

“Ooo, aye,” said Jarvis, “This is Great Ayton.”

I had never heard of it. I stared, big-eyed, out the car window.

A typical Great Ayton scene.

Jarvis had not actually finished speaking. He had just taken a normal Yorkshire sort of pause, before continuing his thought:

“Me sistah lives ‘eeyah.”

Floored I was. “You have family here? In this incredibly picturesque village? How did I never know that?” Suddenly it seemed I might be connected to this place by fewer than six Kevin Bacons.

East Coast Americans don’t ever take pauses in thought; in a microsecond I blurted out an entire future plan:

“I wish to embed here in Great Ayton,” I announced, “And live amongst the native people, and learn about their culture, and observe their ways.”

Well, it seemed a fully formed idea at the time. The gist was to somehow manage to find a decent spate of time when I could stay in Great Ayton and find out what it is like to live in a picturesque North Yorkshire village. Because I am a mostly urban person for whom small villages are deeply mysterious.

The challenge was figuring out how and when this was going to happen. But finally I am here. I am spending the summer in Great Ayton.

It is totally, as the young people maybe used to say a few years back, hella picturesque. I already appreciate the slow rhythm and the peace, and the way there is also a lot of interesting stuff going on here.

The mysteries of Great Ayton may finally be revealed. Ooo, aye, I’m on it.