At York’s Gate… Braveheart Was Waiting for Me

I left London in the morning aboard a fast train bound for York. About two hours later, the train stopped, and I stepped down, dragging a large, heavy suitcase behind me, with another bag on my back.

I emerged from the station while the morning was still young. Before me was the taxi rank, and directly opposite the station stretched York’s magnificent historic wall, as though it were the first to welcome me to the city. The air was many times clearer and purer than London’s.

The signs inside the station and along the street caught my attention, with their old lettering and antiquated appearance. The city did not conceal its age or try to look new; history was present in the details of everyday life. It seemed to me that the English did not preserve their heritage only behind museum glass, but kept it alive in the streets—walking alongside it and passing through it. From the very first moment, I felt I was among a people who knew who they were and took pride in what they had inherited. The American city of New York was named after it—meaning the new York!

I walked along the pavement, pulling my suitcase, with the wall on my right, heading towards the hotel I had booked inside the city. I had to pass through Micklegate Bar, a gateway whose outer arch and much of its passage date from the early twelfth century, while the storeys above were added in the fourteenth century.

I was astonished that a gateway of such age was still part of an everyday route. Cars passed beneath it as though the past were making way for the present.

The closer I came, and the more I raised my eyes towards its stones, the more the sound of my suitcase wheels faded from my ears. In its place rose the cries of warriors, the clash of swords and the neighing of horses. In my imagination, I saw William Wallace and his men as the film Braveheart had fixed them in my memory, having conquered and seized York.

It was not history as it had happened, but history as cinema had fashioned it in my imagination. Even so, the scene was vivid; the warriors remained at the gate until the cars passing beneath it returned me to that York morning.

I continued onwards and passed through Micklegate Bar.

I entered York…

I was not merely crossing through a city gate; I was entering the true world of studying abroad: a world of learning, separation from home, and life among the English.