2006 Letter from Ely: Only a short distance from Peterborough is another cathedral that was on our list. Ely is in The Fens – an area of absolutely flat land that is almost all farmed, with very few real villages to be seen. We looked around and decided we didn’t want to see the inside of the cathedral, but we would go see the house where Oliver Cromwell and his family lived in the 1640’s. On our way, we found a sign for the Thursday morning coffee at St. Mary’s Church, which was right next to Cromwell’s house. It advertised a very inexpensive cup of coffee, so we stopped there. Ron asked the lady who served us a few questions about the cathedral, and she said, I’ll get someone who really knows to talk to you. Another volunteer was also a guide at the Cathedral, and she told us enough about it to change our minds. We’d go first to Cromwell’s house and then to the Cathedral.

We didn’t go into the museum part of the house, but were interested in seeing the rear window of the "cottage" (it was pretty big for a cottage). Ron has been reading a history of England. One of the things he discovered was the fact that before Cromwell went to war with Charles I, he had been Collector of Tithes for St. Mary’s Parish Church, a post he inherited from his uncle. Apparently he collected these donations by leaning out of the window of his house.

We paid the entrance fee for the Cathedral, and were delighted that we’d decided to go in. Ely is a highly decorated Gothic building, as beautiful as any other cathedral, but it suffered less damage to the building than many other churches. The damage had been done in two parts. Henry VIII’s campaign against the monasteries had damaged many churches, especially those that were associated with monasteries. The lady who told us about the Cathedral said that there were only seven monks lefts in the monastery in 1540, and all seven decided to become Church of England officials. The Bishop of the time was also ready to convert and was apparently friendly with the officials in charge of destruction. Under those conditions, they destroyed only statues and decorations, and left the building intact. Damage to Ely by Cromwell’s army was also minimal. The volunteer who told us about the church said that the bulk of the Parliament Army was largely from the area near Ely, and no one wanted to deface the church and then have to face his grandmothers. As a result, these two incidents did not really hurt the church, though there are still a lot of headless statues.

When we left the town of Ely in the early afternoon, we began our lon-n-n-g journey to Stonesfield, near Oxford. (We are getting very lazy about driving.) It would have taken us only about three hours, but Adelle made a slight miscalculation as we were ready to switch to the last local road to take us to a lovely campground on the grounds of Blenheim Palace near Woodstock, causing us to take twenty minutes more. Up till then she had been all excited about not having directed us to "the scenic route" for a while!

In the morning before we left the campground, we walked through the town of Bladon to see the burial ground of the local church – where Winston Churchill and much of the rest of his family are buried. Then we walked back to the campground, had our lunch and were off to drive the five miles to Stonesfield where our friends expected us for the weekend.

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Intrepid Traveler
 
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