You’d think that once you spend the winter in northern Spain, Yorkshire would give you a bit of peace.
Apparently not.
We discovered this yesterday in a small bookshop in Santiago de Compostela, which we’d wandered into after coming down from the cathedral square. We’d driven in from the house earlier that morning. It’s only about half an hour away, depending on tractors, pilgrims, and the occasional cow with poor road awareness.
The shop looked promising the moment we stepped in. Old wooden shelves, uneven stacks of books, and that smell you only get from places where paper has been sitting quietly for decades.
Patricia disappeared almost immediately.
Art section.
She does this every time. Pretends she’s browsing casually but within seconds she’s already half way through reorganising the shelves in her head.
I wandered.
History first. Then travel. Then a strange little shelf with English-language books that looked like they’d been donated by visiting pilgrims who realised their backpacks were already too heavy.
And there it was.
A book about the North York Moors.
In Santiago.
Now I know Yorkshire isn’t exactly unknown, but it still felt slightly ridiculous. Outside the shop there were people arriving from the Camino, dusty and emotional after walking hundreds of kilometres across Spain. Inside I was standing there staring at a photo of heather and low grey cloud over Yorkshire hills.
I opened the book.
There was a section about Roman camps on the North York Moors, near Cawthorn. Archaeologists believe some of them may have been training camps rather than permanent forts, places where Roman soldiers practised manoeuvres before heading further north.
Two thousand years ago, soldiers training on Yorkshire hills.
And here I was reading about it in Galicia.
Patricia eventually emerged with two books.
“One’s about Galician ceramics,” she said.
“And the other?”
“Sketching villages.”
Naturally.
Bertie had installed himself beside a basket of travel guides like some kind of quality control officer. A French pilgrim tried to pet him and received the standard polite Yorkshire indifference.
We paid for the books and stepped back outside into the afternoon light.
Santiago was doing its usual thing. Pilgrims drifting slowly across Praza do Obradoiro. Street musicians trying their luck. Tourists pointing cameras at the cathedral towers.
The Camino finishes here, of course. Hundreds of thousands of walkers arrive each year after crossing northern Spain on the pilgrimage routes that lead into the city.
But even standing there, with all of that going on, Yorkshire had somehow slipped quietly into the day again.
It does that.
Sometimes it’s a book. Sometimes a conversation. Sometimes just a memory when the weather turns grey and damp in a very familiar way.
Living part of the year in Spain doesn’t replace home.
It just gives you another place to think about it from.
Which we’ve started noticing more and more since we began this slightly odd routine of spending winters in Spain and summers back in North Yorkshire, something I mentioned when we were back in England during Grandkids Visit: Chaos in the Caravan.
Two places.
Two rhythms.
And somehow the two keep bumping into each other in the most unexpected ways.
