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SNCR
2007 - NORTH YORKSHIRE, 13-14-15 July
- from Peter Watts |
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The
SNCR Weekend started on the Friday evening with a Noggin and Natter at the Crown
Hotel in Boroughbridge. By the time Sara and I arrived, I think that with
the exception of Secretary Paine, all |
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those
who had travelled from the East, West and South were there, Simon Bishop,
Bill Haverly and Sandy looking very smug, as clutch failure and a jammed
gearbox respectively on their Singers had forced them to come in their modern
cars. Knaresborough turned out to be very picturesque, and Mother
Shipton’s Cave was not just the tourist trap we half expected. The story
of an illegitimate child, Ursula, born in the cave in 1488 during a violent
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thunder
storm, and turning out to be something of a witch or prophetess, was fairly
believable, but there was no doubting the magnificence of the natural rock formations
adjacent to the River Nidd. The spring forming the Petrifying Well, the water
of which has such a high concentration of calcium salts in |
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solution,
that objects placed in the waterfall become covered in a thick coating of |
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calcite in months, was not only very pretty, but also fascinating.
The cave itself was formed by the same waters that now supply the
Petrifying Well, the mineral deposits over 1000s of years collapsing |
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about 6000 years ago, thus forming
the cave. A life-size figure of Mother Shipton stands in the cave, and there
is another in the Museum, where some of her legendary prophecies spin around
her head.
The museum also has the rather
gruesome heads of the Duke of Suffolk, Lord D’Arcy and the Earl of Northumberland,
who were executed in a Royal rebellion and who she had earlier prophesied
would be ‘dead upon the pavements of York’.
The whole area is set beside the
River Nidd and beneath the magnificent viaduct, which opened in 1851. The
first viaduct, built in 1848 for the East & West Yorkshire Junction Railway
Co, had collapsed when it was almost completed - even that was attributed
to one of Mother Shipton’s prophecies!
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