We’ve dearly loved staying in this apartment for the last four nights and are sorry to be leaving it. It’s been a real luxury to have a fridge, space to spread out, and a separate bedroom with a closable door so one of us can be up and rustling around without disturbing the other. And we’ve liked the town too, of course. It’s been a great stay for us.
We’re sitting around enjoying coffee after breakfast this morning when I remember I haven’t taken a photo to help us remember this place, so I grab one. The lighting’s not the best but we’ll keep it anyway as a memory hook.
We have plenty of time and a very easy ride to Ely, so we don’t check out until nearly eleven. It’s only 28 miles to Ely and we can’t check in there until 2 anyway so there’s no rush.
Our ride begins with the same route out of town as it did yesterday, with a gradual climb up the low ridge west of town. There’s a chance of showers in the day’s forecast but nothing that sounds serious.
This is our third time past this road construction project that closed the road for a couple of miles, since we crossed it going and coming yesterday also. We want to remember how considerate and friendly the work crew was every time we squeezed past their equipment.
The final climb before we drop out of these chalk hills and into the fens. Not much of a climb at all, but it’s likely the largest hill we’ll be seeing in a week.
I’ve heard of fens before of course, but not of The Fens as an actual geographical region. This is something I’m really enjoying about this tour, starting to granularize my knowledge of England. If you’re not familiar with it already, The Fens (also known as Fenland, According to Wikipedia at least) are a large region of formerly marshy land that has been mostly drained and converted to agricultural use. It’s all very low elevation - once we reached them today, our average elevation for the last half of the ride fluctuated between 15 feet above sea level and five feet below.
There are many interesting things to learn about The Fens and how greatly they’ve been transformed since drainage opened them up to extensive agricultural use so that now they encompass half of the highest grade agricultural land in England. The thing that most startled me to learn though was that 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age England and continental Europe were connected by a land bridge, and some of the rivers in eastern England drained across what is now the English Channel into the Rhine.
At the lazy place we’re traveling at now we’ll be in Fenland for the next week: three nights in Ely, two in King’s Lynn, two in Boston before we finally climb out of them at the north end on our way to Louth. Pretty easy living in the days ahead, we think; at least until we come to an undisclosed four miles of unsealed bone shaker near the end of the ride. Before that we’d been thinking we’d get to town around two and go out for a walk along the Great Ouse - but by the time we arrive I’m content to sit around our pub and continue with the research project while Rachael explores the town checking out restaurants and coffee shops.
In The Fens. I anticipate a lot of views like this in the coming week.
I’ve been looking at walls like this and those of the medieval churches we’ve seen over the past two weeks without knowing what I was looking at. It’s flint. Walls like this built with fractured stones are chipped or knapped flint.
Keith AdamsWhere there's flint in the walls it's likely also in the roadway. Keep an eye on the state of your tires and brakes, especially when the road surface is damp: it makes sharp, highly abrasive dust and tiny chips that eat the contact points on bikes for breakfast. We had several flint-induced flats, and probably ground ten percent off the life of the rims, during our tandem tour in England in 2002. You've got disc brakes, so it may be less of an issue, but still... Reply to this comment 2 years ago
Scott AndersonTo Keith AdamsThanks for the alert. I hadn’t heard this and will start keeping an eye out. In particular we’ll do our best to avoid damp roads. Reply to this comment 2 years ago
Rachael got ahead of me while I was stopping to ogle the pigs. In the meantime it started to sprinkle and threatened worse, so she texted me that she was waiting for me down the road. She found a fine place to wait it out, and the air had cleared by the time I caught up again.
After three miles of this I noticed that I was biking beneath a dike or berm and wondered if there was any chance there was a smoother path on top. I’d have felt really silly to discover later that I was biking beneath a pave cycle path, so when I came to an access path I went up to look. No path, but biking across the grass was no worse and at least gave a better view.
Looking across the Lark, the same small river that flows through the Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds. It’s on its slow journey to join the Great Ouse and eventually come to the North Sea at King’s Lynn. And I suppose ten thousand years ago it would just keep going until it reached the Rhine?
Kathleen JonesPretty much that, Steve. It looks a lot like the equipment we would hire to clean weeds out of a lake. This one’s pretty new it looks like. Reply to this comment 2 years ago
Scott AndersonTo Kathleen JonesEel-y, accent on the first. I’ll have more to say later, but before the fens were drained four hundred years ago Ely was an island accessible only by boat, the highest ground in a swampy waterland brimming with eels. There are different opinions but many say that the name came from an old English word for the Isle of Eels. There’s an annual Eel Day celebration held in May, complete with an eel throwing competition (though they no longer use live eels). Reply to this comment 2 years ago
