Sitting on The Fens
Affectionately referred to as “The Ship of The Fens”, because it looks like a galleon rising above the wheat fields, Ely Cathedral grabs your attention unlike any other British church. One’s first impression comes at a distance – whether that’s arriving in the Cambridgeshire town by car, train, or even by boat down the River Ouse – across The Fens, the pancake-flat marshland that covers much of the East of England and seems to defy normal topographical rules.
Rivers rise higher than roads here, due to the immense drainage engineering works undertaken by the 17th-century Dutch masters – of dykes, rather than diptychs. Genius surveyors like Cornelius Vermuyden and his later colleagues arrived from the Netherlands to help drain away all the water that once
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