Another Brick in the Wall

Some of you might have noticed the wall in yesterday's photograph. Well, that's part of the York city wall. These walls extend for several miles around the centre of the city, and it's possible to walk around on the top of them - at least before they shut them at sundown. Though "sundown" is a fairly abstract concept when the sky is so filled with clouds that you can't actually see the sun, so at times it might be more guesswork than anything else.

While they don't completely surround the city centre like in the Chinese city Xi'an and you can't ride a bike around them, they do pre-date those walls by about 500 years, having being built some time around 71 AD. This is the one really weird thing about the UK. Everything is old. Historic. It's not like Australia where something is historic if it's been around for a hundred years or so. Heck, by those standards, there's probably some moldy bread lying on a street that's historic. But I digress, and I could most likely write a whole post about that, so there's no point in wasting good blogging material. So, back to the walls.

Well, it's obvious that the thing have been here for a while, because if you walk on the edge, a loose stone here and there reminds you that you're perhaps not doing the safest thing in the world. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the ground level at points has risen so much that the walls would be unlikely to keep out anything at all. In fact, they could probably be breached by a slightly aggressive squirrel whose nuts have been stolen. Hmmm, squirrel sappers. Now there's an idea.