If you're ever able to spend one or two weeks in London, "flower of cities" since William Dunbar dubbed it that in the Middle Ages, then consider yourself extremely fortunate. An equally great pleasure may be found in experiencing a heady city-country contrast—say, fleeing central London and the Euston-Road traffic snarl one sunny morning and driving immediately northward for half a day to Yorkshire. Stop by York to experience the magnificent Minster, if you must (and you should), but to achieve the full effect, drive on to reach the ribbon-like two-lane roads and find your way to a little Yorkshire village. You can do no better than Helmsley, fifteen or so miles from York. Here you will be able to take the sweetest stock of your non-urban surroundings.

Let me say from the outset that it is important, once in an English village after a stint in the city, to resist the natural impulse to dismiss all of London out of hand, and everything you have been so deeply enjoying there for the past few days. After a while, it is true, cities can begin to wear down their visitors. A mere thread of cultural interest or spark of curiosity will translate in a place like London into obligatory activity, happy drudgery as you plan the day's route from this landmark to that church, to this lovely park or square, and on to that theater venue in the evening, and maybe a punk-rock lunch in Camden Town or Indian feast at Brick Lane thrown in somewhere.

No, let London be what it so clearly is—a pulsing museum of English history and culture as large as the city itself is large, and simultaneously a teeming cosmopolis today. A friend who works in London recently told me that the old cockney accents are passing away, being replaced by a global fusion of imported words and accents that all London youth increasingly speak, no matter birthplace, neighborhood, or social background. London is one of the noblest illustrations of the millennia-long experiment that is urban existence. I as much as any visitor aspire to The Knowledge—the taxi driver's codified awareness of London's seemingly infinite streets, squares, mews, and closes.

That said, after enjoying the endless web of London roads and taking in the city's innumerable sites, there was something very satisfying about pacing off, in fifteen minutes or so, the few streets of Helmsley: its town center, with a World War I memorial, quaint shops, and space often filled with market stalls, and onto the quickly reached periphery, lined with stone and brick homes, most sporting little summer gardens meant to look as if no effort were involved in their creation. North or south, the English make an art of this. A little farther along, we encountered a tiny elementary school with the sort of playground equipment usually found in family driveways, and tires of various sizes dotting the football pitch—an obstacle course, maybe? My daughter was so quickly enchanted with the environs that she began to imagine what student life in such a small school would be like. My son, on the other hand, when he learned that English children were still in school in early summer, said simply, "Good thing I don't live here." We also happened upon a lovely playing field up the hill a bit, like a resting green sentinel for the village below. The find of this first night was a zip line, and a well-designed, swift, daring zip line at that. We saw a little building nearby, which was, as a local soon informed us, an indoor pool—a popular place, I imagined, during a bleak northern England winter.

The next morning we hiked the three miles along Cleveland Way to Rievaulx Abbey, or what remains of this Cistercian settlement long ago inspired by the great heart of St Bernard and his fellow monks at Clairvaux, and Citeaux before that. The ruins there are some of the most picturesque in England, and if you've ever read anything about the country's monastic heritage or the Dissolution of the great religious houses under Henry VIII, then you've probably seen an image of the solitary stone foundations and haunting fragments of nave or transept at Rievaulx. The sight reminded me of Jane Austen's cheeky assessment of Henry VIII in her short history of England: "nothing can be said in his vindication, but that his abolishing Religious Houses & leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general." This must have been his main motivation in abolishing the monasteries, she continues archly, since he showed no signs of true religion himself.

The community's first monks, novices, and lay brothers showed both practical smarts and an appreciation of natural beauty when they planted their little holy community at this particular spot in the Rye valley, with surrounding hills defending against the weather, and pasturelands and stream conveniently nearby, just below. We think of these Cistercians as contemplatives, sometimes mystically inclined, and that is correct, but the reputation makes it easy to forget how active they were in the wool trade, how busy they were with iron smelting, glass blowing, and the tanning of leather. They read the Old Testament allegorically with literally dirty, toughened hands.

Walter Daniel, in residence during the rule of Aelred, wrote a life of Rievaulx's most famous abbot. The Cistercians were known as the "white monks," Daniel explains, "after the colour of their habit, for they were clothed angel-like in undyed sheep's wool, spun and woven from the natural fleece." His description of the abbey's location remains vivid:

High hills surround the valley, encircling it like a crown. With their motley mantle of trees they offer pleasant retreats and ensure the seclusion of the vale, their wooded delights affording the monks a kind of second Eden. Spring waters come tumbling down from the highest rocks to the valley below, and, threading their way down narrow clefts and gullies, they widen out to rivulets and rills, uniting the murmur of their softly purling voices in a sweet concert of harmonious sound.

(Daniel's Life of Aelred and Aelred's own wonderful On Spiritual Friendship are available in modernized English versions in a handy Penguin Classics volume called The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century, edited by Pauline Matarasso.) On the way to the grounds, we passed a handsome stone farm, Rye House, presumably a private residence with one of the best kitchen-window views in the entire nation. In the small back yard, a single bottle of ale sat on a round table. I would put this residence up against any of the tony townhomes of London, inhabiting their exclusive space in Mayfair, Belgravia, or Bedford Square.

The hike itself, taking us through various rural English topographies, was the more memorable part of the excursion. We were in a fairly large group, and so pleasantly straggled ahead or behind to take part in this or that conversation. I later heard from a friend, up at the front, about my nine-year-old son's suburban Chicago bearings being challenged. As we followed the trail, passing through a kissing gate, we soon shared a field with a number of sheep, all fairly well-behaved. My son, though, was a little jumpy: "What are we doing? This seems dangerous!" Later, as we descended a valley, with a view of a slight hill just beyond, he sounded an exasperated city boy's note when he said, "Why don't they just build a bridge between these places, so we don't have to go up and down?" I hope even this brief visit will ground him, so to speak, in a different kind of land, new ways of enjoying the land.

Returning to town, I noticed a prominent sign atop one of the commercial building that offered "All varieties of Hamper," and I appreciated anew how we were now somewhere far different from London. And yet Helmsley, too, like the great city, consists of a group of people trying to make a life amid one another, and doing so by a multiplicity of livelihoods, and salting that living by various diversions, seizing upon items—like hampers—that make the community function smoothly and help to identify its productions and pastimes.

In the square that day there was a steam engine on display, and my son was glad for our good timing. He avidly took in the dense presence of this oversized tractor, spouting steam and hissing like St George's dragon vanquished, tamed, and brought to Helmsley. While he marched with other kids around the steps at the war memorial, using a walking stick as a makeshift rifle upon this shoulder, I noticed a man in mechanic's coveralls with heavily oily hands, holding up his newborn daughter, trading raspberries with her so tenderly. I pictured one of the great scenes in Homer's Iliad, where the Trojan warrior Hector, enjoying a too-brief reprieve with his family on the besieged walls of Troy, frightens his young son with his crested helmet. There was no fear in this scene in Helmsley—just a small-town mixture of true grit and unembarrassed love.

My son and I had the evening to kill, so we set out in search of dinner, and went as far as across the street from the steam engine, to a little tavern named after the Tudors. We ordered some pub grub, and took in the setting—playing cards, old fair tickets, and tea bags all attached to the rafters, faded posters and small military gear displayed here and there, including a few red jackets that struck me as possibly being from the time of the Revolt of the Colonies. Nearby, a jolly tableful of people were talking of—did I hear that right?—dog wieners. Ah well, they were enjoying their jokes, and who was I to begrudge them that? Across the room, an older couple was enjoying a carafe of wine, he smiling with elbows on table, and she sitting in a sunlit window seat.

The fish and chips were good, or good enough, and my son and I were pleased with ourselves. Watching the boy daintly open a ketchup packet and lightly dab his chip, I felt as if I were sitting across from Bonny Prince Charlie. I also felt a too-easy snobbery encroach, but then countered the talk of dogs' private parts and the rugged, patriotic-uncle décor with a few facts. First, one of the posters on the wall advertised a past village production of Carlo Goldoni's La locandiera. A village production! I cannot but think that any staging of a work by this major playwright of 18th-century Europe, even by an ambitious professional or university theater company, would be a rare thing in the States. Even tonight, the other half of our family had gone in search of a local children's theater production—Grimm's Tales, in an adaptation by England's current poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Next, consider the twentysomething man who served me at a tea shop earlier in the afternoon. He was living in Helmsley currently, but was born in York, and had lived for stints in Australia and South Africa. "I'm planning on moving to Newcastle soon," he told me, "because that's where my brother lives, and I can stay with him, make a start." He was better traveled than I, and had places to go.

And then there was the Internet connection in our Helmsley B&B—oh praises be heaped upon the high-speed Internet there! It was bullet-train fast compared to any network I'd had to endure in London, where multitudes of high-tech citizens are constantly logged onto hotels', libraries', and cafes' poor, overworked routers. The Internet revolution, which has digitally connected many villages that still physically remain desirably off the grid of the motorway, is only one reason why we should proceed carefully with any city-country contrast beyond the obvious geographical and population differences. Some impressions or presumptions may hold up, and a villager differs from a city dweller, just as Northern England is far different from the South, but many ideas will be quickly revealed as the flimsiest of gob stereotypes. Truly, there are fewer "rude mechanicals" in the 21st century. When my son and I finished our dinner, we drifted into the food co-op next door, and I quickly saw a flier for a missing cat—its name was Google.

Our mission in the co-op was of the most serious sort: I had talked my son out of an expensive desert at the tavern by promising him a Kit Kat, and he was steely-eyed in his resolution that I pay up pronto. Waiting in the queue, I took in the message board near the till, and the newspaper in the stack below. "Row Erupts / on Faith School Plan," declared the headline. For an American ear, it was colorfully worded, but really, the conflict (how much religion allowed in schools? who's funding what?) sounded very familiar. The phrasing brought to mind the highly apropos sonnet, "Epic," by the Irish writer Patrick Kavanagh, who lived much of his life in Dublin but whose work rarely strayed from exalting and chastising the rural life of his county Monaghan.

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel—
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Finally, next to the lost-cat flier, someone had pinned a promotional postcard for an upcoming concert by the band Peatbog Fairies. Now, the sharp lettering and generally shadowy appearance of the card led me to believe that this was a heavy-metal band, and I felt confident that this was the first such band ever that had thought including the word "fairies" in its name would raise rather than compromise their heavy-metal bona fides. Peatbog Fairies. Now, I might happen upon either of those words in the general course of thought, perhaps when reading another Irish poet Seamus Heaney's "Tollund Man," or, in the latter case, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream or Edmund Spenser's great epic of the English Renaissance, The Faerie Queene. Yet I certainly would not have I put the two words together, or attribute them to a group of rough Yorkshire men, whom I chose to picture with long black hair, possibly the hair of their invader-ancestor Ravenwulf, and with black fingernails and black leather rocker's pants to match. That band, I thought, is definitely something local.

Outside, walking back to our room, my son and I negotiated the dispensing of the Kit Kat as if we were rolling dice for the hall spoils of a conquered tribe. We soon offered the lovely town of Helmsley another local row, but a faint one, one joking in tone and caused by two people barely there, really, transiently passing through the town's thick, home-grown reality. It seemed reasonable to me that we split the Kit Kat's four chocolate sticks fifty-fifty, but to my son, this smacked of the worst sort of liege-lord's feudal abuse. I settled for a single piece, and this hard driver showed no signs of relenting. "At least you got something," he matter-of-factly said. "Well, lucky me," I sarcastically replied, both of us smiling now. "You're lucky I gave you one," he boasted. As it turned out, and in ways we couldn't have recognized in that moment, we both were receiving more, there in quiet Helmsley on that summer night, than either of us could have known.

Brett Foster is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. His first collection of poems, The Garbage Eater, has just been published by Northwestern University Press.

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