Country Park Trails - Ely Cathedral (Bullrush)

Ely Cathedral is known as ‘The Ship of the Fens’, as Ely was once an island surrounded by marsh and swamp. After the Norman Conquest, where Ely saw some of last Saxon resistance lead by Hereward the Wake, Abbot Simeon began the building of a new cathedral. It took centuries for the cathedral to develop as we see it now. All the stone had to be brought by water, most of it from the quarries at Barnack, near Peterborough.

The river at Ely is manmade, diverting the original course, which ran at the bottom of Stuntney’s Hill. In 1321 the central Norman tower collapsed and out of the disaster Alan of Walsingham, the cathedral Sacrist, created the magnificent and unique octagonal lantern tower, which is one of the glories of world architecture.