Usually good and level.
IV
YORK AND THE SOUTH
No man knows the spell of York till he has approached it by road in the evening. Of all the fresh experiences that the motor-car has brought to us there are few from which the imagination gains so much as from this way of entering old and beautiful towns. We have too long accepted the roof of a railway station as our first view of such places. It is not an inspiring view. But to see York Minster from afar, shining under the evening sky and lifted high above the city; to watch it growing larger and larger, rising higher and higher, increasing in beauty every moment, until at last one drives slowly into its huge shadow; to pass under one of the great gates that have survived so many centuries, so many wars, so many pageants, that have welcomed so many kings, and dripped with the blood of so many warriors; to see the ancient streets for the first time idealised by the dusk of twilight, will help us, if anything will, to recall and realise something of what York has been during the eighteen hundred years of her history.
The past is very insistent here. Here are the walls, encircling the whole city, that were built by Edward I. and repaired after the Civil War. We may drive round them, and pass in and out of the four gates that were once so hard to enter: Monk Bar, by which we come in from Kirkham under the arms of England and France quartered together; and Bootham Bar on the Newcastle Road; and Micklegate Bar on the Tadcaster Road; and Walmgate Bar, where the restored barbican reminds us that it was undermined during the long siege of the Civil War. All these bars are turreted and ornamented with painted shields and statues or helmets of stone; three of them still have their portcullises; three still bear the arms of France.
WALMGATE BAR, YORK.