Knaresborough and Mother Shipton

30 June 2000.

A family outing to Yorkshire. With Mum and Dad we call off first at Knaresborough, an extremely pretty town on the River Nidd.

An afternoon on the River Nidd is a very popular pasttime in summer. Rowboats, punts and canoes are available for hire and there is plenty of scenery to be enjoyed.

The building shown here is the entrance to the home of Mother Shipton. She was a foreteller of the future - England's Nostradamus.

She lived in the 1600s and left a legacy of prophecies including cars, telephones and World War II. She probably wasn't as pretty as Nostradamus though... A hunchbacked hideous crone, she would have been burned at the stake anywhere else, perhaps proving that the people of Knaresborough were more enlightened than those of places with similarly disfigured women who were promptly ducked in the river - "Look, she's not drowned! Burn her!" or "Oh... that's a bit of a bugger... she's drowned... must have been innocent then... ah well, mistakes happen..."

On the other hand it could be an indicator that the people of Knaresborough were scared out of their wits by her. "Try to duck me, you buggers and I'll call up all the demons of the Underworld to nibble on your privates!"
"Is that bad, Dad?"
"Aye, Sarah lass, it means... er... well you just concentrate on your tatting..."

In any case, just to add to her air of mystique, (if a hunchbacked, warty-faced, wrinkled old crone needed to add to her mystique) instead of living in an unspeakable hovel like anyone else, she lived in a cave.

Caves were known to be entrances to either Fairyland or the Underworld and it was a brave and somewhat reckless chap in the 1600s who decided on a spot of adventure caving for an afternoon's diversion. Besides, the cave that Mother Shipton scattered her few belongings around had a somewhat strange property. It still has.

A cascade of water falling from a rock face and known as The Dropping Well contains so much mineral content, coming out of a spring fed by an underground lake, that anything it falls on, as long as it stays still for long enough, acquires a coating of minerals that over a few months - 5 to 6 months for porous items such as soft toys, clothes etc., "turn it to stone".

It is England's oldest tourist attraction, being opened to the public in 1630.

Absence of large versions of the photos: From 1999 to 2001 I'd started to go digital but the quality of photos was such that I only saved them at small sizes.