craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

This is the final article in my running series about our trip through the British Isles. Earlier articles include the Introduction,Stonehenge, Oxford, Driving to Wales, Anglesey, Crossing the Irish Sea, Dublin, Northern Ireland, Ferry to Scotland, Falkirk & Bo'ness, Edinburgh, Loch Ness, Driving to Cumbria, and Hadrian's Wall.

I broke day twelve into two articles not only because I had a lot to say about both halves of the day, but because while the stop at Hadrian's Wall was probably for me personally the high point of the trip, the visit to Craven was unquestionably the most heartbreakingly disappointing. Not that it was in any way catastrophic, but it was simply a let-down instead of the triumphant grand finale I had planned for.

The whole purpose of this trip, for me, was to get better acquainted with the land of my English and Irish ancestors. True, I enlarged this basic theme into a comprehensive tour of the British Isles, but visiting Craven, the location where I know my direct paternal ancestors lived, probably for centuries, was always at the centre of my plans. And Craven is a beautiful place to visit: at the heart of the Yorkshire dales, our French guide book described it as le paradis vu par un Anglais: the English vision of heaven. I made plans to visit the county archives in Leeds and trace my family tree, but today was to be the big day in which we visited the Craven museum, which traced the history of the region.

Finding out about the local history of Craven was something I was very eager to do: in all likelihood my ancestors lived there for many centuries, so knowing the exact history of the region would help me to get a much better picture of who they were: Celtic Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Danes? The early archæological and ethnographic evidence around Skipton would probably provide important clues, but I had found nothing on the internet. (It is a pretty specific topic, after all.) But here was a museum dedicated to the local history of the area—exactly what I wanted to know about.

Well, long story short, we got to the Craven museum about two minutes after it closed. The attendant was actually still there, but despite my begging he wouldn't open it back up for us, saying that he had already turned on the alarm and everything. I was extremely disappointed; the worst of it was that we would have made it on time if we had not stopped to take so many pictures on the way, and mail our post cards, but neither we—nor, apparently the lady at the tourist information office—had any inkling that they closed so early.

Just so I can keep my bad news all in one article, I will say now that I missed my appointment at the archives in Leeds the next day, too. Our GPS system was no match for Leeds' incomprehensible roads, where being in the wrong lane at the wrong moment sends you right back out of downtown. We never found our hotel, and it took us three hours once we reached Leeds to eventually find a hotel with vacancy where we could stay. The lane directions change too fast for the GPS to keep up, and so although we were probably within 500 yards of our hotel multiple times in those three hours, we never found it. (Despite, in three hours, having tried endless permutations of "how about if when I get to this intersection I go in this lane", and asking for directions.) What I should have done is reserve a hotel outside the city as I had done elsewhere on the trip, but I had not expected that things could go so badly. Especially by this point in the trip when I was quite used to British driving, and had been through much larger cities including Dublin and Glasgow. But I just could not find my way in Leeds. I joked afterward that I understood why my great³-grandfather (who was born in Leeds) left to go to America—clearly this city has a curse on our family!

The bright side was that Skipton is certainly worth visiting again, so someday I will make it to the Craven museum. (And kill that attendant!) We did get a lot of good pictures (password required); practically everything has Craven in the name, which is a treat. Leeds on the other hand I will never try to visit in a car again—if I ever go there again it will be by rail!

So, that was the real low point of our trip, but except for not being able to find the hotel, it was more a problem of being disappointed than of anything bad actually happening to us. I missed the two things that had the most personal importance for me to visit on the trip, true, but I did get to see Craven, which for someone who grew up over 4,000 miles away, was still pretty special.

The disappointment also came from the fact that this was supposed to have been the grand finale of the trip, since from then the rest of our trip was just going to be heading back south in order to make it home on time. So we could not re-arrange our schedule: the car had to be returned the next day in Oxford, and we had a ticket to cross the chunnel at 4:00 pm. So there was no room to fit in a return to the Craven museum the next morning. For a trip where everything else went pretty much perfectly, it was a let-down to end on a less than perfect note. The 2007 Patriots know what I mean.

So ends my series of articles on our trip to the British Isles. I am as sorry that they couldn't end on a high note as I am that the actual trip didn't end that way. That doesn't change the fact that, overall, it was a hugely successful trip, and one of the best vacations of my life. This may not be my last article about our trip, however. At some point I think it will be useful to do one on how driving on the left worked out, and provide some other tips that may be of use to anyone else who plans a motoring vacation in Britain or Ireland. But I will close by saying that it was a wonderful trip, one that I thought was crazy to try to pull off—fitting so much into so short a time (five countries in two weeks), and driving on the left to boot. I'm proud of myself, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and I'm so glad we took the chance to do it before James got old enough to say "are we there yet?"