Queer Heritage · York, North Yorkshire
Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate ('birthplace of lesbian marriage')
Where Anne Lister and Ann Walker took the sacrament together to seal their union — commemorated by a blue plaque as the site of Britain's first lesbian marriage.
Sources
Nearby on the map
Stoker holidayed beneath the ruined abbey in 1890 and set his Count's landfall here — the black hound leaping ashore, Lucy sleepwalking to the churchyard bench for the novel's most transgressively erotic scenes. Whitby has embraced its gothic seduction ever since.
Fact & fictionHot spotLiterary PassionRenishaw Hall (model for Wragby Hall)Renishaw, Derbyshire · EnglandThe Sitwells' Derbyshire seat is widely credited as the model for Wragby Hall in D.H. Lawrence's once-banned 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', the century's most notorious tale of a lady and her gamekeeper
Fact & fictionFolk Rite & FertilityRudston MonolithRudston, East Riding of Yorkshire · EnglandBritain's tallest megalith — over 25 feet of gritstone hauled ten miles and raised, most likely, as a late-Neolithic cult focus; the church was later planted beside it, folding the old fertility landscape into the new faith. Phallic readings are antiquarian tradition, flagged as such.
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