The source of York’s other river, the Foss, is a hillside hole in a wood about fifteen miles north. A few years ago (as part of my Yorkshire River rides) I cycled to the High-Dales source of the Ouse, the Foss’s much bigger counterpart which swallows it up in the city centre.
But today I took my folding bike on a bus – before the £2 flat-fare scheme expires at the end of the year – up to Oulston Reservoir, where the Foss starts off as a teapot-sized spring.
It’s a lovely and scenic ride, especially beyond Easingwold. Past the splendid ruins of Byland Abbey there was some sort of horse meet. Not hunting. No, no, not hunting, definitely. That would be illegal.
Oulston Reservoir is a couple of miles south of Ampleforth, home of the famous college, accessed from York by the 31X. I stocked up with picnic stuff from the village shop and trundled along the scenic but misty country lanes that rolled up and down the gentle hills.
There were excellent views of the mist obscuring Ampleforth College, nestling distantly below the clouds that blocked sight of the North York Moors’ scenic upslopes. Yes, it was a murky day.
The source of the Foss is in a brackeny, bushy wood just off the lane between Yearsley and Oulston. A dribble of a spring pops out satisfyingly from the hillside in a rabbit-burrow-sized opening.
Some say ‘Foss’ comes from the Norse word for ‘waterfall’, which is unconvincing seeing as there are no cascades of any worthwhile kind in the river’s entire course over flat plains. Others say it’s from the Latin for ‘ditch’, which looks far more plausible given the river’s early stages, as it cuts ditchily through the woods’ soft earth banks.
As always I find it remarkable that the water knows how to wind its way through the hills to York 24 miles of meanders away, downhill the entire way.
Which I didn’t. I had OS maps of course, but paths on the ground are not always clear. I followed right-of-way signs in good faith but, in following the course of the fledgling Foss, somehow took the estate track along the south of Oulston Reservoir instead.
The reservoir – formed by damming the Foss in the 1790s – is no longer used for drinking water, and has renaturalised. It’s a popular picnic spot in summer (which it definitely wasn’t today) for people who correctly follow the path to other side (which I hadn’t).
Some muddy recovery trekking got me back to legality. I took some delightfully remote, quiet and gentle back lanes to Easingwold for my 30X bus back to York, where I explored the last mile of the very urban Foss before it joins the Ouse.
I rejoined the Foss near Monkgate Bar. An information board at the bridgeside picnic site here celebrates the ‘charismatic’ but endangered water vole, which you can spot here along with herons and, if you’re lucky, kingfishers. I wasn’t lucky. Much easier to spot are the delightful pink flowers of Himalayan Balsam, which less delightfully is an invasive and unwelcome menace. The River Foss Society are on the case.
Cycling past the back of a Travelodge, Asda and Zam Zam Supermarket (a glorious place for fans of exotic food like me) I followed the river to Foss Islands. If you’ve ever wondered why York’s city walls stop here, the answer is that they weren’t needed for this bit. The Foss fed impassable marshes which were more than enough barrier in themselves.
However, in the 1700s the marshes silted up and formed islands, hence the name. It became rail sidings and an industrial area, and is now a retail estate, the only survivor of its workaday past being the dark-cherry coloured tower known locally as Morrison’s Chimney.
I cycled through the recent riverside development of Hungate, where shiny one-bedroom city-centre flats cost twenty times what I earn in a year. In other words, they’re really quite affordable.
I pushed through a narrow passageway – one of York’s celebrated ‘snickelways’ – to Fossgate, the city’s socialising hub, where cafe and bar tables occupy the cobbled street instead of than cars. That’s good. Though you can only cycle it in one, inconvenient, direction. That’s not so good.
Anyway, the Foss was nearly finished. Its mouth was just a couple of hundred yards away, at the lock and sluice where it junctions with the Ouse. There’s a tidal curtain here, lowered wehen the Ouse is in flood to stop the it backing up into the Foss and flooding the city centre.
And then it’s the Blue Bridge, a blue bridge, the origins of whose name are lost in the mists of time, where the Foss finally ends. From here there’s only Naburn Lock between you and the Humber. Or Spurn Point. Or the North Sea. Or, well, Australia.
I retraced the towpath a hundred yards or so to where the Foss passes three of York’s most popular attractions: Clifford’s Tower, York Castle Museum, and the Postern Gate.
That last one is a Wetherspoon. Guess how I marked the end of my little trip…