In a gust of tradition worthy of Gormenghast, every year St John’s College Cambridge sends original poetry in Latin and Greek written by a scholar of the college to Burghley (pron BUR-lee) House, ancestral home of the Cecil (pron See-SELL) family. It’s not clear what the Cecils do with the poetry, but judging from the chimneys, they have a lot of fireplaces. The first Lord Burghley (the gh is silent as in Conghway), William Cecil, was a minister of Elizabeth…
Let’s start with the high point of the day. Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men (and Weed, did you notice Weed?) were fixtures on BBC children’s television when I was a little kid. There were only ever 26 episodes made in 1952 and 1953, but they were repeated for the next twenty years. Of course, this was before the days of plastic flowerpots, so it’s pretty unlikely that they were those colors. Still, they might have been. There’s no way…
We know quite a bit more about what happened to Saint Wendreda’s remains after she died than we do about her life. She may have lived in the 7th century, she may have been a herbalist and healer, she may even have been the sister of Saint Etheldreda of the Kippered Hand. In any event there is one solitary church dedicated to her in the town of March. After her death, her remains were enshrined in Ely cathedral. In the…
Denver Sluice lock has a resident seal. He’s currently on the river side, but sometimes locks through with the boats to the tidal side. He came to see us off today. That was clearly a good omen. I had not been looking forward to the tidal passage from Denver to Salters Lode. The entry to the lock is at a difficult angle. You have to make a 120 degree turn across the center of the stream with the tidal current…
Today we bid farewell to Bob and Kay who joined us in Cambridge, and headed down the Ouse to Denver Sluice. There has been a sluice to control the flow of the Great Ouse into the sea since the 17th century. It has turned the marsh and water of the fens into England’s most productive farmland, much to the disgust of the eel fishers and duck hunters who used to make a living in the wetlands. The sluice is opened…
As you may have noticed, we turned around in Cambridge and are now going back the way we came. There is no other way to get back to the canals. There is talk of a canal from Milton Keynes to Bedford which would be a dramatic shortcut, but unless the canal enthusiasts can raise two hundred million pounds it’s not going to happen. On the other hand, canal enthusiasts are a patient and persistent lot who are playing a long…
The star exhibit of the Ely Museum is a huge gold torc, weighing one and a half pounds and large enough for a cow to wear. At today’s prices the gold alone would be worth $30,000. Nobody is quite sure what it was for. It dates back to the bronze age (about 1200 BCE) and literacy did not reach Britain until the Romans turned up twelve hundred years later. I’m going to go with the cow theory, though. There’s more…
Five miles from anywhere on the River Cam there is a duck infested pub called Five Miles From Anywhere, No Hurry. We cruised there this morning, with Paula doing loads of laundry between locks. Though the building is modern, there has been an inn here since the 18th century, and it has had this name since 1850. Technically the pub is in the village of Upware, but Upware seems to consist entirely of the pub. In 1851 a group of…
Divorced – Executed – Died – Divorced – Executed – Lived. You probably recognize this as the final state of the six wives of Henry VIII. King’s College Chapel has the initials of two of those wives, added when they were alive. The H and A carved into the screen and choir stalls are for Henry and Ann Boleyn. She was wife number two, so she was executed. In one of the stained glass windows there’s an HR and a…
Kettle’s Yard was formerly the home of art collectors Jim and Helen Ede (pron EED). It was filled with art and found objects, and left to the university as a gallery. In keeping with it being a home, none of the art has labels, and you are welcome to sit on any of the seats. It’s a lovely collection. There are lots of boats and sailboats… …and they even have a skull. The rest of the day was meeting up…