View across half a mile of country to Ely cathedral, in whose shadow we lunched yesterday. It's a glorious old pile, been a cathedral, school, abbey and nunnery (though not all at the same times or in that order) there since St. Etheldra's day in the early dark ages, though the cathedral you can see, is a mixture of Norman, and later, work.
4 comments:
They built that when I was born...;-)
Beautiful old bean. Very beautiful
Remember looking at it from Lakesend?
13 miles away across the flat fen, it was just a tiny black vertical line interrupting the gentle curvature of the horizon. Wasn't much of the present structure one of Billy Conkeror's first efforts to establish a dominant presence in East Anglia by building over St Etheldreda's shrine erected nearly 4 centuries earlier? Principally to provide a bastion against Hereward's resistance army and to demonstrate his supremacy by taking over Hereward's town and East Anglia's most sacred shrine.
'Pooter says "taticar" - probably means tactical - but I would suggest this was strategic rather than tactical - 'Pooter has so much to learn about human society and culture!
There was also a piece of interesting metreological folklore about it :-
if, away on the horizon you could see the cathedral, it meant that rain was on its way.
Conversely, if you could not see it. it meant that it was already raining.
Most useful.
That sounds particularly Fenland philosophical humour - puts me in mind of the 'legend' of the stone eagles at Beaupre Hall!
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