Ely

I wanted to write about Ely because it was so weird. I knew people whose last name was Ely and I'd never thought about it before but Ely is really named after eels.

East Anglia was very swampy until they drained the water, but even then there were marshes and people lived on eels. You would stick a giant spear into the mud and hope you pulled up an eel. Oliver Cromwell's wife, (we visited his house) had a very famous eel recipe that they have put on a bench. Evidently they still eat jellied eels in East London.

The cathedral was beautiful. We happened to be there on Easter Sunday and it was a great service. There is this huge painted ceiling that is gorgeous. It also has an octagonal tower which is unusual. An artist was commissioned, for some Ely anniversary, to do a series of artworks around the town and one of them was this big tall group of 8 eel spears that echoed the 8-sided tower of the cathedral.

The cathedral had a labyrinth at the entry and then a big wall sculpture of a cross. The bottom is wavy and it is supposed to symbolize the path to Christ, but dad thought it also looked like an eel. I'm not sure if that is what the artist intended, but who knows.

St. Etheldreda is (600's) is associated with the area because she started the abbey where the cathedral now stands. She died of a tumor in her throat, but when they exhumed her years later her body had not decayed and the tumor was gone so she became a St. and everyone made pilgrimages to Ely like they did to Canterbury. You wanted somebody cool buried in your cathedral or you tried to acquire somebody's bones or organs or something so that people would come to your town to see the cathedral that housed them. It brought it lots of money to the town and church.

I also included a picture of Dad looking in a bakery. A very common sight.