Ely 6

More monsters from the Lady Chapel, at least three of them. Monsters which I believe to be forbidden to carvers in mosques, who find alternative means of florid expression in similarly elaborate carvings of words. I find it odd that such suggestive carving of words should be deemed to be OK - but then perhaps they are not to the strict.

All this in the course of no less than three visits to the cathedral in three days. The first for evensong, reported at reference 1. The second for the building and the third for contemplation.

The second visit was a morning visit and the trusty on the door was sufficiently impressed by our concern for her missing electric fire (see reference 2), apparently crushed in some mishap or other, that she renewed our membership tickets for a further year without charge.

Interior as impressive as ever. Particularly struck on this occasion by the shape & size of the capitals to the slender columns of the triforium and clerestory; a fine bit of detailing. The blind arcading at the bottom of the snap at Ely 4 gives something of the idea, but with the important difference that the columns in question were free, rather than part of the wall.

Inter alia, we took in the chapel with its memorial boards to the dead of the first war, arranged by village. Unusual hinged boards, folding out from the wall, the only other place I have come across such things in this country being Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Also the very elaborately decorated chantry chapels at the east end. All the small statues which started off in all the niches had been removed, presumably by the people who knocked the faces off the saints in the Lady Chapel, but the elaborate carving escaped. Once again, odd.

The third visit was a late afternoon visit which took the form of sitting in the nave and taking the atmosphere. Start at the back, the west end, and move forward ten rows every ten minutes or so. As one moved forward the light in the east window gradually changed from blue to black, with compensation offered by the view up into the lantern. Where redecoration and illumination gave effects which would not have been available when the place was new. Candles not the same at all. A stirring visit.

Altogether a good thing, despite its being, in so far as I am concerned, a monument to the past rather than to the present.

Coming away, I continue to ponder on how such a large building came to be put up on an island in the middle of a large marsh. Where did all the money come from? The stone was no doubt shipped in on barges, but surely there was not that much money in the products of the marshes? Eels, fish and reeds? Was it a statement of power in the aftermath of the troubles in the area in the aftermath to the conquest? Or was it and the monastery attached a statement of piety in a pious age?

But we were grateful that Ely had remained a relatively small town, with the buildings clustered around the northern side of the cathedral of a decent age and size. Perhaps also, contrariwise, the shopkeepers of the town are not that pleased to be in the grip of the church. I recall being told forty years ago that Winchester was in the grip of the church to the point where the young had no McDonald's to go to. Perhaps the church commissioners are just glad to take their rents now.

PS: the nearest public house to the cathedral, the Minster Tavern was not, despite outside appearances, very olde worlde at all, being a rather scruffy copy of a Wetherspoon's. Where they sold me a freshly microwaved pastry which was very flaky and full of some kind of sugary goo. Known to cognoscenti as an apricot danish.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/evensong.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/ely-cathedral.html.