27 April 2017
Keeping the Sky the Limit
Ely and Seville.
by J.R.Thomas
Sometimes it is worth going to a lot of trouble just for a moment’s pleasure. Any reader who wants to see one of the best views in England might, if they find themselves at a loose end and have spare money for a train fare, arrange to travel from East Anglia on that strange rural railway byway which winds through Thetford Forest and eventually gets the traveller to Cambridge. But the object of the exercise is not Cambridge, but Ely; and not to even leave the train in Ely, but simply to look out of the right-hand side windows as the train passes through the long abandoned marshalling yard.
Not to look at rusting rails, but to raise your eyes to the heavens – for you will see what must be the best view (from public transport certainly) of any English cathedral. Ely is one of our least known but most original and striking cathedrals, a monstrous galleon of stone carved into soaring fantasies. If it is known at all, it is for a legendary tale that, if it happened, certainly did not happen in the present cathedral – the tale of Ely as the last redoubt of the Saxon, Hereward the Wake, in his defence against William the Conqueror. Charles Kingsley, that great Victorian writer of stirring children’s literature, guaranteed to inflame the weakest patriotic instinct, retold this already exciting story with magnificent colour illustrations. In his version Hereward retreats finally to the Isle of Ely, in the eleventh century still an island amongst ponds and reed beds linked by winding and obscure paths. When the Norman knights find their way through, Hereward makes for the top of the cathedral tower, which the knights burn – a tale which appeals to an early version of the Dunkirk spirit; a story for a nation which finds much glory in honourable defeat. Some of it is true, so far as we can determine a thousand years later, but the cathedral bit certainly isn’t. The present building was begun shortly after Hereward’s time on the site of an older much smaller church.
Ely is one of the great medieval architectural glories of England, with two towers, the central octagon and the west tower, each reaching well over two hundred feet high and in their height and shape creating a most distinctive skyline. The building is enormous – to reflect its status in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as one of the most power bishoprics in England. That was Ely’s highest point politically and economically; then gradually the town declined into a forgotten backwater, and even the draining of the fens to form very productive agricultural land could not reverse its slow decline. But that economic failure has left us with an aesthetic delight. There is not a building in the little part-medieval, part-Georgian, town that is higher than four stories, and the cathedral soars above it all. Soars, you might think, in status as well as physically. Ely is not a prosperous town, its preservation reflecting poverty rather than, as at, for instance, Seville, a conscious urge to preserve a glorious past. Ely’s ancient buildings are overlaid with alien modern tat, standard shop fascias and infillings of cheap modern machine brick. But the cathedral is serene in its ancient work, just honest antiquity, no cheap scrubby intervention or improvement. So powerful is it, so strongly does it dominate, that none of the modern inflorescence at its feet detracts at all. Even more wonderful, the flat landscape means that not only does the cathedral ignore the slightly grubby town but dominates the landscape for miles around.
It is indeed the Isle of Ely, let us not forget. The whole bundle is sitting a little higher than the former wetlands around it. So it is visible for many miles; the cathedral towers appear early from every distant approach to the town. Driving on the dead straight roads (except for their unexpected 90 degree bends trying to head you into a ditch) through black fields of vegetables, that stone silhouette slides along the horizon, always watching your approach. If Kingsley gave us some false history you can entirely understand why. The idea of the Normans creeping ever closer to the Wake’s last defence, with Hereward watching from the great tower, is much too good an image not to use.
And best of all; for those of a solitary and romantic bent, the population of Ely is small and, it seems, not especially god-fearing, but the Church of England continues to provide a full service religious experience in its Fenland flagship. So, if you are inclined, go to Ely in winter, when the dawn mists rise off those fields that are in their hearts still fens, and the streets are slippery and empty. Slip into the cathedral through the south door, and follow the few lights that are left on (for sake of greenness or economy, it does not matter, though candlelight would be better still) and sit at the back of an 8 o’clock mass in a side chapel. There was one celebrant and two worshippers on Christmas Eve morning last year, and the sense of faith and mystery beat very strongly.
So to compare and contrast, something the same and utterly different: Seville, hence our strange swerve earlier. Seville Cathedral also dominates a great and flat landscape, visible for many miles around, and is the centre of a city whose best years are centuries behind it. But the modern revival of Andalusia has created a threat – a rapid expansion of the urban zone of which Seville in the regional capital – but also an opportunity – the wealth to restore and maintain the city centre in all its tightknit baroque mystery. Like Ely, the cathedral is one of the great medieval glories of the western world, and like Ely, it arose on the footings of something much older – a mosque, one of the greatest of Moorish Spain. More survives of this than the new visitor might suspect, including the entire cathedral tower, now housing a great peal of bells but formerly the perch of the muezzin whose job it was to call the Moorish city to prayer five times a day. Not a job for the weak legged you might think, but there is a reason for the wide and shallow staircase of that great tower – so the muezzin could ride a horse to the top.
The Catholic church, now the cathedral’s occupant, continues to thrive in the faithful Catholic south; Seville is as packed for services as Ely is empty; though somehow even with an enormous congregation and an equally enormous crowd of tourists wandering about in a little corralled area by the west door like cattle newly come to market, there is a surprisingly devout atmosphere here too. Something about the singing and the organ and the incense and even the drover stewards shouting “shush” make it very firmly a place of God still. (Though mammon and lavatories are available if required in the gift shop in the south transept.)
Seville has also preserved its cityscape remarkable well, the buildings are higher and the streets narrower but City ordinances say no more than six floors, enabling the cathedral to sail confidently above them, a flat sea of roofscapes deferring to the sublime cathedral tower.
Except for one thing. To the west of the city there has recently arisen a tall circular blue office tower, not unhandsome but totally alien to this brick and stone and stucco low-rise city. The blue pole sits apparently empty, the Spanish recession having done nothing for its lettability – though one would like to hope it might also be Seville businessmen declining to endorse such a banal blot in their cityscape. The fact that it is the only building that challenges the cathedral makes its presumption worse still, but as it is the only intrusion, offers a possibility of redemption. Some caballero, please blow it up, fell it, like the alien it is. Make an example to any others with similar intent. Keep yourselves Ely-like, an example of ancient glory overpowering all.
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