Last weekend, Sam and I followed the annual York Ice Trail around the City Centre. Various local businesses and charities sponsor ice sculptures and they are dotted around the city for you to “find”. We popped into the City Visitor Centre on Museum Street to pick up a map of their locations and then off we went. There were 35 ice statues to find in total, and the number grows every year. Artists had been working on their sculptures for months and a whopping eight tonnes of ice was used this year.
If you’re going to follow the ice trail, I highly recommend going as early as possible. It starts at 11am and the streets are crowded then, but nowhere near as packed as it gets later in the afternoon. Another bonus to going a bit earlier in the day is that you get to see the sculptures in better shape. York was having unseasonably warm temperatures that weekend, so that coupled with the fact that you’re allowed to touch the sculptures meant that a fair few started melting quite quickly. You could tell the most popular ones because their features were the least defined by the end of the day. Poor Elsa (from “Frozen”) had lost an arm by the end of the weekend.
My personal favourite was Dobby, outside the library, but Cinderella’s slipper by the theatre seemed to be quite the favourite as well. (Obviously, nothing compared to Elsa in popularity.) Last year the Ice Trail included James Bond, Aslan and the Mad Hatter
There was a really fun mix of people hunting out the statues: from families who are starting to do it as part of their Christmas tradition, to tourists, to slightly squiffy university students out for a laugh with their friends.
Sam pretending to be a nutcracker, obviously.
This is probably the most festive thing that I’ve done this year. What about you all? Any ice sculpture experience?
