Visiting Ely Cathedral

Sorry for not updating this for awhile but it has been a pretty busy week since my last entry. Last weekend the students (or most of them) went off on thier first three-day weekend to London. About twenty students and four of the faculty stayed back and either enjoyed having the manor to themselves or they took off on their own adventures. I chose the later option. On Friday, I took off south to see Ely Cathedral, where the Trinity Church choir would have been in residence this summer. Ely is in the "Fens," that lowland to the south and east of here that is as flat and featureless as Illinois. The Cathedral, as you can guess, dominates the landscape and is said to be visible to every parish church in its diocese. You can see the unusual th unusual "lantern" tower on the east (right) end. But more about that in a minute. In the Dean's meadow you see stretching down the hill below the Cathedral there used to be a castle and later medieval vineyards. Now a small herd of horses graze there.

To the left you can see the quire of the Cathedral in front of the high altar. A wedding was taking place within the hour so that is why the candles are all lit.

The most amazing part of the tour was going up into the octagonal lantern tower. The group was limited to 13 people and one needed to be on the smallish side given the narrow spiral stair we had to climb up. When it was constructed in the 14th century they had to build an oak scaffold to support the central tower structure. From this set of supports, the builders found 60-70' oak trees in Bedfordshire that were perfectly straight. They sailed these down the river and used them to build the rest of the tower. This is what you see in that picture to the right. The guide said these trees must have already been several hundred years old when they were cut so the wood is likely to be close to 1000 yrs old!

The Victorians tried to restore the church to what they imagined it would have looked like in the middle ages when all the stone and woodwork would have been polychromed.

You can see the view down into the transcept of the Cathedral from where we were at the base of the tower.
But from here, we had to go outside. The next few pictures can't communicate how awesome it was to go out of the roof of the Cathedral. It was a very windy day so this was not for the faint of heart.

The picture below looks out on the first tier of the roof. The part of the building to the left is the Lady Chapel, reputed to be one of the largest in all of Europe. This is where Evensong is typically sung each day at 5:30. Sadly I couldn't stay that long.

I asked a very sweet couple on the tour is they would take a picture of me on the roof. You can see the west tower in the background. Then comes the up close view of the tower itself. The wooden framework is covered in lead which was redone in 1991. And finally there is another picture just out toward the west tower. It was beautiful. It was also amazing to move to the south side of the tower and you could just make out the spires of King's College at Cambridge. Like I said...it is flat!

I headed back to Harlaxton after wandering around the town for a little while ready for my big day at the Burghley Horse Trials in Stamford the next day. More about that in just a little while.

Cheers!