A Cycle to Ely

Ely: a one-time swamp island, provisioner of freshwater eels, haven for malaria, seat of a Bishop and a cathedral. Between Ely and Cambridge: a river confluence, one or two single-road villages, miles of fen-turned-farmland, a sightline from the Gog Magog hills to the cathedral, a railway line, and a National Cycle Network route. A few months ago a few friends and I with a shared sense of bucket list found a semi-sunny Saturday to do the cycle to Ely. This would be the longest route I’d ever cycled. (Not so for one friend, Amelia, an avid cyclist-explorer who just the weekend before went on a multi-day cycle trip in Wales.)

We could have cycled, as Google Maps suggested, 15 miles along the River Cam until it joined the River Great Ouse just south of Ely and flowed into town. However, I’d also been advised that the route got too rough for bikes beyond the Bottisham Lock, the extent of my previous downriver jaunts. We opted for the less direct National Cycle Network Route 51 and its well-vetted roads.

The first leg is the way to Anglesey Abbey, a cycle I have done before but have yet to post about. Along the river for a bit, turn at charming Fen Ditton, then a jaunt along fields to Stow cum Quy (two little hamlets longtime merged: cum is Latin for “with”), and then a B-road cycle path opening along stunning green fields laced with hazy windbreaks not yet in full leaf and sun sieved through luminous clouds. I was surprised by how soon we passed Anglesey Abbey, right along the road with its inviting National Trust signs—it had seemed a lot longer the first time I made that cycle.

Here we turned at the village of Lode to cross to Cycle Route 11, and into new territory for me. This was truly farm country. The roads were little more than paved pathways between fields, sometimes lined with tall trees that gave them a sense of age. Without the little blue-and-red National Cycle network signs marking turns in the open patchwork of roads, we would have been lost.  This was also wind country, where it became apparent that out of our group, I was the least equal to the headwind. Along with the urgency of a friend with a deadline for getting back, the wind made a cycle that was long but not difficult into something of a battle. I often lagged behind, feeling nearly defeated by the wall of wind as I tried to keep their pace, and didn’t get to stop and appreciate the landscape as much as I would have on my own. However, the landscape offered itself all the same.

Everything was glowing spring-green. I snatched a few photos and tried to absorb the rest. We saw a small herd of roe deer in one field, rabbits leaping athletically and tall-eared through other fields, regal pheasants strolling through grass. We crossed over several Lodes, the long, straight water ditches scored across Cambridgeshire by the Romans (and the namesake of Lode village); passed a barn painted bright green and farm outbuildings built of old brick with caving roofs; spotted yellower-than-yellow seas of rapeseed flowers tantalizing in the distance. At one point we stopped by a field swathed in white plastic that rippled continuously, a standing wave along the rows of whatever crops were sheltering beneath. “If someone told me that was an art installation I would believe them,” Amelia said.

Not long after we entered this alternate dimension of farmland, a compact, white-haired man in fluorescent yellow cycling gear passed between Ruth and me as we were bringing up the rear, and tossed congenially over his shoulder in an Irish brogue, “S’pose you’re going to Ely, are yeh?” We said yes. (“Where’re you going?” he teased Ruth, who had gotten run off the road into a dried-mud tractor tire groove in the process.) He soon fell in with Adam, and within a minute had offered to guide us on a shorter route since Cycle Route 11 goes on quite a swerve, presumably to stay on the most bike-friendly roads. We rolled with it—he seemed authoritative, and Google Maps, which I had displayed on my bike-mounted phone, agreed on the alternative. Except for one half-mile stretch on the shoulder of a fast A-road, the rural roads he took us along didn’t seem that different from the cycle network selection.

I didn’t get to talk much to Ray, as he was called, since I was usually behind, but Adam (a wonderful talker) reported later that he was a retired jockey from Belfast, now living in a small village in Cambridgeshire, and on a 50-mile cycle ride that day. I’m not sure how far out of his way he went to lead us, but it was all in a day’s work for him.

At some point after a hairpin turn into a yet more obscure road, Maps started telling me to take a U-turn, and Amelia saw some spires rising beyond the field furrows off to our right (“First to spot the cathedral wins,” Adam had said earlier) that I agreed must be the cathedral, so I started to wonder if we were taking a less direct route after all. But a few fields later I saw the real cathedral emerge ahead, noble and gray and gothic. Ray had not led us astray. He left us at a final intersection with instructions to take a right and then the track diverging out of Barway (he actually came rushing back to add that last instruction). This was Cycle Route 11, heading to the banks of the River Great Ouse just after it merges with the River Cam. 2 ½ more miles to Ely.

Once we rose onto the path atop the dike keeping the Ouse in its track, it was two miles of solid headwind that made whitecaps in the river and swept through gold-tasseled grass verges. What made it bearable was a rust-feathered kestrel who kept pace with us for a good ten minutes, hovering and looping on the current as he scoured the ditches for prey. He swerved away over the river once but reappeared downstream. I kept my eyes on him and pushed ahead.

Ruth and Adam dashed off to the train station as soon as we crossed into town. Rubber-legged, I was relieved that Amelia and I had a leisurely afternoon ahead as our reward.

We made our way along the waterfront to Peacocks Tearoom (“the quintessential English tearoom”). There was a wait to sit outside under the cascades of charm-saturated wisteria, but plenty of room inside the old brick house with the assortment of antique furniture, eclectic wall-hangings, racks of floral china teapots, etc. Dogs are welcomed by a basket of tennis balls outside; a Pomeranian sat at the neighboring table. We had nice toasted Mature cheddar sandwiches and scones with clotted cream and preserves, which didn’t seem like enough food after a 20-mile cycle but hit the spot all the same.

The rest of the afternoon was a wander through the city center with the cathedral as our anchor, as it is for the town. I bought a secondhand Bill Bryson book and some fishcakes at the Saturday market just across the road from the ancient stone walls of the cathedral. We didn’t go inside, both having been in before and not quite wanting to pay £8.50. But the grounds did not disappoint. We wandered through a doorway in the stone wall into the gardens, which had a tea room I would have visited if we hadn’t just been to one; instead we followed the emerald lawn and its colorful banks of flowers toward the imposing back of the cathedral and around its buttresses and along the flanking monastery buildings to the buttercup- and cow-graced meadows it overlooks, peeking into nooks and crannies along the way.

The cathedral was already 800 years old when the oldest antiquarian book I own, English Cathedrals Illustrated, was published in 1900. The book’s chapter on “The Cathedral Church of St. Ethelreda, Ely,” details its origin as an abbey (founded in 673 by East Anglian princess-turned-abbess and eventual saint Ethelreda), the elaborate Norman cathedral begun in 1083 and given cathedral status by the Benedictines in 1109, and the progressive additions by the well-funded and fastidious monks over the centuries, still visible (apparently) in the architecture.

What I chiefly remember from my pre-pandemic visits is the famous central octagonal tower, opened up after the previous tower collapsed in 1322, too wide to vault in stone and so roofed by a wooden “lantern” which needed twelve years to source big enough (63-ft) timbers. “Oaks like those do not grow now in England,” English Cathedrals Illustrated said in 1900. I went on the tower tour and walked between the thick, dark, rough-hewn wooden beams still bracing between the tower walls and the lantern. Here we could open the panels lining the lantern, traceried and painted on the inside with larger-than-life Victorian angels with rainbow wings and assorted instruments, where choristers can appear and lend their voices to the angels, and where we could peer down at the glass and stone below. Red paper petals were littered along the bottom ledges of the tracery, accumulated there from years of Remembrance Day services raining poppies down from the lantern.

From below, those richly painted green-gold-red geometric spangles flanked by stained glass draw your gaze upward until your neck can no longer support your head. The long, arched wooden ceiling of the nave is painted with the same palette. Off the corner of one of the transepts (the arms in the cross-shaped floor plan) is the Lady Chapel, with stone fan-vaulting that inspired King’s College Chapel, an ambience immediately recognizable even though the chapel was severely damaged by the English Reformation (scraped stone, faceless saints). When I went in, someone chorally minded demonstrated the acoustics with a long, reverberant note. Later, a choir and organ filled the whole cathedral with tides of music as a wedding party proceeded down the nave.

Upstairs is the Stained Glass Museum, glowing with exquisite samples of stained glass from across the ages.

My tower tour happened to fall on a day being celebrated with English folk dance outside the cathedral. We went on the roof amidst the gothic stonework and, in addition to rooftops and cow pastures, saw the dancers below performing a regional dialect of Morris dancing, one where they dress in decidedly punk black and yellow streamers and pheasant feathers and painted black masks and hit sticks together and whoop while they skip in time to the drums and accordion. Down the road, more traditional Morris dancers, wearing white shirts and trousers, blue-and-yellow sashes, and bells on their shins, waved handkerchiefs during their stately do-si-dos.

Also down the road is the half-timbered house of Oliver Cromwell, now inhabited by a quaint museum which I have yet to cough up the money to visit. Amelia and I stopped by to chuckle at the life-sized plaster peasants outside and look at guidebooks in the gift shop, before looping back for one last look at the cathedral tower with its superbly ornate cylindrical turrets against the blue sky.

Then on to the train station for an easy-breezy 15 minute train ride home.

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