Absolutely love Yorkshire.
It’s right next to Lincolnshire where most of my family live and my sister and I took a long drive through Yorkshire when I was over there last October.
I wanted to find a very, very tiny village called Marrick, as Richard Marrick came over to Australia and the suburb which is my stomping ground, Marrickville, in Sydney, was named after him.
We drove and drove through all these tiny villages; for me the miles of hand built
drystone walling just blew me away. And the instant waterfalls that sprung up from the hills after a heavy rain.
The nearer we got to Marrick, the more excited we became about our mission.
I was going to buy postcards, and a Marrick mug, and a Marrick T-shirt and get cool stuff for the Marrickville Library as I was very friendly with the historian there.
Well, lots of drystone walls later we come to a farmhouse or two. There is a phone box, (I phoned my mum), and a postbox in the wall. And that was it. No shop, no post office, no pub, nothing.
There was an air of bleak desertion, rather than the romance one associates with the moors out there. And a strange lady in a landrover who kept following us about. We took a wrong turn onto a property with lots of cars and buildings, but not one person to be seen.
It was all very spooky and fun and we went and had a curry after, sans mug and T-shirt.
As my mum said, “Can’t blame him for moving to Australia then”.
I still yearn for a farmhouse on the moors. Just not in Marrick, I guess.
