James Tucker in Cov

Ely used to be an island well known for its eel-fishing, and is now a slightly high point in the flat, flat Cambridgeshire fens. It's about the only decent place for miles and miles to build, and so it's where a huge monestary was founded in 673 by St Ethelreda. It's a very small town, notable mainly for the cathedral and the former home of Oliver Cromwell, which is right next to it.
The cathedral, the main reason we went, is visible from a huge distance, and quite distinctive. Built from the 1100s, it seems to have had some issues with collapsing towers- one of the flanking front ones is missing, and the great central tower fell down in 1322 (the stone, by the way, was bought from Peterborough Cathedral for 6000 eels a year). The repair of the huge hole left in the middle is probably the most famous thing about Ely, for it was redone in wood, not stone, and as an octagonal lantern. I'm pretty sure there's nothing like it anywhere else.
One of the great things about such a quiet, near backwater, town is that you get things to yourself, and so I was able to go right up the tower on a small tour of the octagon. To get there, you have to walk across the roof a hundred-odd feet up, and then clamber around the huge old timbers, which were hundreds of years old when they were cut in the 1320s, and are still holding the whole thing up. The statues and paintings here are about the only surviving ones here, as they couldn't be reached by the government forces when the monestary was dissolved, or by Cromwell's men a century later. The views, inside and out, were incredible, but the little things you see inside the roof of such a huge building were almost more rare to see. Laura sat that bit out, and had what I'm told was a very good tea and scones.
There's also a great collection of monestary buildings, once ruined and now reused for school or cathedral functions. One great hall is now, in fact, a street- the interior walls now the facades of the buildings lining it. Some were attacked in the Peasant's Revolt of 1381, which ended up marching on London.