Yesterday afternoon I ended up in the Yorkshire Museum gardens, where I've never been before, even though they're only two minutes off the main shopping street in York. Close to the entrance was a moss-stained stone tunnel; I stepped inside and saw a little churchyard nook filled with yellow leaves on the other side. It was probably only ten metres away but took a long time to reach. I walked slowly between two rows of sarcophagi that lay against either tunnel wall like broken teeth or shipwrecked sea chests.
Beyond the churchyard was a broken archway, a lawn, a round, sloping depression in the ground and a curved, ruined wall. Five cross-shaped windows cut into it showed gleams of white light. There were more stone containers with yellowing grass growing in them. I sat down on a bench, drank coffee from a paper cup and had that feeling you're always hoping for as a tourist, the sense of not being supposed to be there.
The tunnel and archway turn out to be the undercroft and chapel ruins of the medieval St Leonard's Hospital, and the curved wall is what's left of the Multangular Tower. The whole thing was as close as I've ever gotten to the standard Romantic experience of the sublime (though I suspect for different reasons than that link suggests).
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