My good friend Tony is recovering from COVID. It laid him low so thank heavens he had been fully vaccinated. Now testing "negative" he felt well enough today to undertake a recuperative eight mile walk. We met in Howden this morning near Howden Minster with the ruins of a much older church in front of it...
Once again I was in flat country where rivers and an intricate man-made drainage system funnel water eastward into The Humber Estuary and from there into The North Sea.
This picture was taken from Howdendyke by The River Ouse. In the distance you can see the arc of The Ouse Bridge which carries The M62 motorway into East Yorkshire. It opened in 1972.
Before the motorway opened, moving south out of East Yorkshire was a tiresome affair. Vehicles had to use the swing bridge shown below. It is called Boothferry Bridge and it opened in 1929. I well remember queues there and how leaving that bridge often felt as if you had just left an island.
Below you can see the underbelly of the M62 bridge - taken as we walked along the river bank.
It was a pleasure to walk with Tony again. We plod along at the same pace and though we could converse for ever, we also enjoy periods of silence together. He had brought sandwiches which we ate while sitting on a bench in the village of Asselby.
That was a village my parents knew well because a short time after World War II, my father became the headteacher at nearby Barmby on the Marsh and as Asselby didn't have its own school, its children went to Barmby. My parents lived in the school house next door where they began to raise two little boys. I arrived in the next school house a year after they left there.
Tony and I got back to Howden Minster at 3pm and sat in a cafe for half an hour, sharing a pot of tea. I think that circular walk in the January sunshine will have been just the tonic he needed.
The tower of Howden Minster seen over allotment gardens
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/3nzYlTt
