Ely

Goodbye to Patrick and Margaret again and we hopefully will see them in Australia next year. We had a nice walk around Ramsey. The town grew up around Ramsey Abbey, a Benedictine monastery. The town manor is built on the site of (and using materials from) the ancient Abbey and is the seat of the Lords de Ramsey, major landowners in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. The remains of the Abbey are now home to part of the town's secondary school. There were lots of old houses in the old town.

The town still has a church green.

The building of the parish church of St Thomas a Becket of c.1180-90 began as a hospital, infirmary or guesthouse of the abbey. It was originally an aisled hall with a chapel at the east end with a vestry on the north side and the warden's lodgings on the south, but both these have been demolished. The building became the parish church c. 1222.

Abbey remains.

The almshouses in Ramsey.
Leaving Ramsey we saw the Forty Foot which is a huge drain running alongside of the road. It is actually above the level of the surrounding fields and works by a series of pumps the water uphill into the drain. This protects the surrounding land from the sea. This type of land is called a Fen. A fen is the local name for an individual area of marshland or former marshland and also designates the type of marsh typical of the area, which has neutral or alkaline water chemistry and relatively large quantities of dissolved minerals, but few other plant nutrients.
The Fenland primarily lies around the coast of the Wash. (The Wash is the square-mouthed bay and estuary on the northwest margin of East Anglia on the east coast of England, where Norfolk meets Lincolnshire. It is among the largest estuaries in the United Kingdom. It is fed by the Rivers Witham, Welland, Nene and Great Ouse.). The Fens is situated in 4 counties -Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and a small area of Suffolk).
Most of the Fenland lies within a few metres of sea level. As with similar areas in the Netherlands, much of the Fenland originally consisted of fresh- or salt-water wetlands, which have been artificially drained and continue to be protected from floods by drainage banks and pumps. With the support of this drainage system, the Fenland has become a major arable agricultural region in Britain for grains and vegetables. The Fens are particularly fertile, containing around half of the grade 1 agricultural land in England. (Wikipedia)
Next stop was Ely, a medieval town on the way to Cambridge. It is built on a 60 sq km Kimmeridge Clay island which, at 26 m is the highest land in the fens. Major rivers including the Witham, Welland, Nene and Great Ouse, feed into the fens and, until draining commenced in the seventeenth century, formed freshwater marshes and it was no longer an island. The name originates from Island of the Eels.

Ely Cathedral, a very impressive looking cathedral.

An abbey was founded here by Etheldreda in AD 673; the abbey was destroyed in 870 by Danish invaders and was rebuilt by Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, in 970. Construction of the cathedral was started in 1083 by the first Norman bishop, Simeon. Building continued until the dissolution of the abbey in 1539 during the Reformation. The cathedral was sympathetically restored between 1845 and 1870.

Oliver Cromwell lived here for several years. The house is now a museum and it gave us good information about the civil war.

We ran out of puff before seeing all there was to see so we made our way to Cambridge where we were staying the night.