Tuesday 17 October - Ely


Last day of travelling, off to Norwich and then homewards, back to London and trying to avoid fog and then rain.

posted at 08:56 in /where (permanent link)

Monday 16 October - Ely


Began the day with a stroll around Boston, still signs of its Georgian glory in the buildings. And lots of foreign workers out in the fields picking vegetables. A strange combination. All through the fens the fields are filled with tractors and strange contraptions harvesting sugar beet. Wagons filled with beet struggle along the slightest incline and traffic builds up behind them.
This is vegetable growing land, acres of cabbage and it looks like a good year for cabbage, or at least in the fields I saw. Many fields have been harvested of their crop and have been ploughed, ready for the next. At Surfleet there are Highland cattle, which seems rather odd in these lowest of lands. There are seed companies and bulb companies, farm vegetable shops every mile or so. The land looks completely flat, but the landscape is in reverse. There are ditches and drains to keep the water out of the fields. The rivers are banked high to stop them overflowing onto the land. It looks as if you could walk for miles, but unless you could walk on water, or leap over the ditches you wouldn't get very far.

Then went on to King's Lynn and another stroll. My great grandfather was a brewer in King's Lynn, a hundred or so years ago and that is a part of family history still to be tracked down, but not today. The town is thronging with school children, there must be a special event, the Tuesday market place is filled with school buses and minibuses. There is lots of laughter and they flock like starlings, suddenly fluttering en masse to another location.

Go north along the Norfolk coast, would be nice to spend all day here but no time. Wander along the beach at Old Hunstanton - the dog walkers are out in force. Dogs are bounding happy to be free. Some plunge into the sea following balls and sticks. Others stay on the sand. All shapes and sizes, the dogs leap about while the people stroll at a more leisurely pace. The tide is out and there is a vast expanse of sand before the waterline. This is the edge of the Wash and the sea deepens at a leisurely pace. The gap between land and sea more blurred here than on the craggier west coast.

Head back south as the sun dips to a very autumnal misty light. The landscape has changed in the few weeks I have been travelling - the days have got much shorter, the sun much less strong and it drops south, the leaves are beginning to change colour but the mild weather and lack of frost means that they have not reached their full colour. But the greens are darkening, ready to drop away for winter.

Am staying with my sister in Ely and the cathedral looms out of the evening mist on the fens living up to its name as the Ship of the Fens.

posted at 08:54 in /travel (permanent link)