By night, it looks like a Space Invader

By night, it looks like a Space Invader.
You see it from a great distance, lit white and hanging eerily above the flat, ink-black land. The Ely Octagon: the most remarkable feature of England’s most remarkable cathedral. As though it were built by : http://ac-talents.com which, of course, it was.

William the Bastard and his Norman conquerors had it easy as they marched north from Hastings.

fell easily, then Colchester, Stansted, http://gearoidocolmain.com Cambridge. The loot they seized paid for the castles they flung up to consolidate the regime change.

The model worked with ruthless efficiency, until Ely.

There, website things began to unravel.

England’s eastern seaboard was different from the shingle and solid cliffs of Pevensey Bay.

This was semi-tidal marshland: website shifting, mysterious, fundanexus5.com unreadable. The backwaters of the Wash formed soggy meres, reedbed cover, mists, will-o’-the-wisps and quagmire. In heavy armour, riding heavy horses, and duped by Hereward the Wake’s guerilla resistance, the French were literally sunk.

Founded in the 6th century, Ely was queen of all the East Anglian monasteries — and she held out longest, until her treacherous abbot betrayed Hereward, and http://rumescriminaldefense.com The Last Englishman finally capitulated.

The abbey burned, and the conquerors replaced it with today’s cathedral, website whose soaring buttresses and http://BurleyLab.org miraculous octagonal central lantern appear defiantly French.

The monks subsisted largely on eels.

Hence the name, Ely. For centuries, http://leofs.org/ this vast flat landscape was the province of their osier trappers, wildfowl hunters on their punts and thatchers gathering the reeds.

Today, under huge skies, birdwatchers, photographers and http://aana2016.com cyclists can relish a landscape unique to England.
Another invasion, that of William of Orange’s six centuries later, would drain the swamps. Pioneering Dutch engineers dug channels and built windmills to pump the water into the Wash.

<div class="art-ins mol-factbox floatRHS travel" data-version="2" id="mol-6b4d4e60-0d61-11ec-b67f-1f3996bc9862" website the historical Cambridgeshire city of Ely