Christmas in York: Festival tours set up by Blue Badge Guide and storyteller historian

York historian, storyteller and Blue Badge Guide Sarah Cowling laughs: “That’s a bit of a surprise, isn’t it? Good old Arthur, noted for his chivalry, and his roots in the West Country, getting involved in what seem to have been some spirited shenanigans in Yorkshire? It’s all there, in a book of 1527, written with great authority and solemnity by a Scots historian called Hector Boece. He claims that the mythical Arthur turned up after he had defeated all the southern tribes, and he wanted to celebrate. I think that we can take that story with a very liberal pinch of salt!”

The yarn, however, features prominently in a new attraction set up by Sarah, Tales of a Christmas City. She’ll be taking folk on a specially-devised ramble down the streets and passageways of York, and telling the story of seasonal festivities over two millennia – with the reasons and yarns behind them. She begins with the Romans, looks at the Vikings, the medieval community, then the Georgians, Victorians and Edwardians, and into modern times.

Sarah’s tours will run every day until December 24, and begin at 4pm, at the statue of Emperor Constantine, in Minster Yard. They take around an hour and a half, and guests will discover a few facts and even more fascinating fables en route.

A Knaresborough lass, Sarah admits that school and she never really “worked well together. I couldn’t wait to get out into the big wide world, and to leave. It wasn’t a case of having my imagination fired by the teachers, quite the reverse. When I left, in my mid-teens, I headed off for London, and I studied music for a while, as working for a greetings-card company, and as a sales advisor for Harrods. But I also developed an inquisitiveness about the buildings around me, and I studied to become a Blue Badge Guide. They are the official guides to historic places, and to be

officially accredited, you must do a heck of a lot of research – and have a very good memory, as well as a way with telling a story. I passed all the exams, and I’d found something that I really liked doing – bonding with people and sharing my new-found enthusiasm with history”.

The Guides were first set up in the early 1950s, as part of the celebration of the Festival of Britain, and entry to their (limited) numbers is very hard won.

Sarah returned to Yorkshire eight years ago, and has established herself as one of the very few Blue Badge Guides in the region. But she insists that “I never pass myself off as a specialist, I am a tour guide, offering information – and frequently getting a lot back for the people who follow me around. All I can do is to offer a snapshot of times gone by, some interesting glimpses, and to open a few doors into the past.”

She laughs: “There are certain subjects that I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. Harry Potter is one of them. Every child and teenager – and quite a few adults, too – knows far more about Harry and his world than I do. They are true specialists, immersed completely. But I never cease to be amazed at the breadth of people’s interests. Only recently I was asked to put together a tour, spread over a few days, which looked at the extraordinary life of Anne Lister. It was requested by an American lady, who had seen Gentleman Jack on TV, and she and her husband were fascinated by her. So, they flew over, and together we explored Anne’s world, and the places that she had known. For a few, it’s a case of ‘money is no object’, and the chequebook is ever open. One gentleman insisted that he didn’t have time to go anywhere by car, so he went from one venue on the tour to the next by helicopter. Finding appropriate landing sites was quite an interesting process, let me tell you!

"For big clients like that, I work in close collaboration with an agency, and they know the contacts to go to.

"There was another gentleman who was obsessed with Richard III, and another for whom we were able to open the doors to a huge private collection of paintings by Turner, right here in Yorkshire. If you had something like that, would you wish the location to be known by all and sundry? Of course not!”

Much less “exotic”, but also immediate to us all are Sarah’s tours of Leeds, and of York. Sarah laughs: “It’s not been hard filling the ninety minutes of the tour – I could have led the visitors around for hour after fascinating hour. All you want to do as a Blue Badge Guide is to whet the appetites of the curious – and to know when enough is enough, and where the nearest mug of good coffee can be found. Or, perhaps, something a little stronger!”

Information at: www.yorkchristmaswalkingtour.co.uk