Peaceful Winter Walk in Hidden Gem Village | BISHOP WILTON, ENGLAND.

Join me on this peaceful late afternoon walk around the old Yorkshire village of Bishop Wilton in England, as we follow Wilton Beck from the countryside and through the village before visiting the historic church of St Edith and get up close and personal with the village donkey. If you enjoy this video please consider subscribing to the channel    / @walktheworldaway   Bishop Wilton is a quiet unassuming village with a lot of history and charm which was voted 5th on the list of 20 desirable areas to move to by national newspaper The Times. The village is mentioned in the Domesday Book in the 11th century when the land was in the possession of the Archbishop of York. The history of Bishop Wilton can, in fact, be traced back even earlier. In his history of 1736, Francis Drake described how the Manor of ‘Wilton’ was amongst the lands given by Athelstan, King of Northumbria, who died in 939 AD, to Archbishop Wulstanus of York. To the east of the village, in a field named Hall Garth or Hall Garth Close, there was once a palace believed to have been built by Archbishop Grey in the first half of the thirteenth century and, most probably, destroyed towards the end of the fourteenth century when Archbishop Neville of York, amongst others, had his lands and good seized in the political turmoil of the reign of Richard II. The manor at Bishop Wilton remained in the hands of the Archbishops of York until 1544 when it passed to the Crown. Although the present church at Bishop Wilton was restored for Sir Tatton Sykes in 1858-5 by J. L. Pearson, a Gothic Revival architect whose other work includes Truro Cathedral, much remains of the Norman church. Indeed, St. Edith’s Church is a fine example of what could be achieved by an architect who sought not to destroy the medieval fabric but rather to preserve as much of it as possible and to incorporate it in the new design. A good example of the way in which Pearson used original material is to be found in the south doorway. About half of the re-built doorway consists of the original Norman carvings. The new carvings – discernible from the lighter colour of the stone – are in keeping with the Romanesque originals. The south doorway is richly decorated with carvings of animals, human figures, beakheads, fantastical creatures and abstract designs. Beneath the tower is a font of Caen stone surmounted by an elaborately carved cover. The font is richly carved with figures of eight saints. The mosaic floor of the nave is another striking feature of St. Edith’s Church. This dates not from the nineteenth-century restoration but from 1902 and is the work of Salviati & Co. of Italy. The design is a copy of a floor in the Vatican which, in turn, replicates an earlier original from the second century AD. The story told locally is that the mosaic in St. Edith’s was shipped from Italy and later transported from Fangfoss Station by horse and cart to Bishop Wilton. The elaborately decorated roof is another striking feature of Bishop Wilton Church. The entry for Bishop Wilton in Bulmer’s Directory of 1892 records that around eight thousand gold leaves were used to decorate the roof and that this part of the restoration work alone cost in the region of £700. Above the communion table is a handsome triptych, a copy of two triptychs held in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum Cologne. It was the gifted to St Ediths by Sir Tatton Sykes (5th Baronet) in 1883. They were painted (copied) by an artist called Peter Hoegen in 1882.