The Lost Village of Wharram Percy

You approach Wharram Percy across the Yorkshire Wolds, so this is not rugged, gritty Yorkshire but chalk country with smooth slopes dipping into the valleys of small streams. The landscape seems large in scale, with expanses of upland, big cornfields, and long distances between villages and farms. The place-names on the signposts around Wharram – Wetwang, Grimston, Duggleby – indicate that you are in Danish England, only twenty miles from York, a tenth-century Scandinavian capital, and for the rest of the Middle Ages the trading and administrative centre of the region.