Ely Cathedral

On the night of 12–13 February 1322 the Norman tower over the crossing came down without warning, taking part of the choir with it. Rather than rebuild what had fallen, the monks of Ely dared something nobody had built before: an eight-sided lantern of oak and lead, engineered to look as though it floats above a 74-foot hole. Stand underneath it today and you are looking straight up into carpentry that has held for seven hundred years.

An island, a princess, and a very large hole

The story starts nearly six and a half centuries before the collapse, on what was then a genuine island. In 673, Æthelthryth — Etheldreda — a princess of East Anglia twice married and, by her own insistence, still a virgin, founded a double monastery of monks and nuns on a low rise of dry land surrounded by flooded fen, reachable only by boat or causeway. She died in 679, reportedly of a tumour on the neck that she took as a judgement on a youthful fondness for necklaces, and was venerated almost immediately. Her shrine made Ely rich. The Danes destroyed the house in 870; it was refounded as a Benedictine abbey in 970, and by 1066 it was one of the wealthiest monasteries in England.

The Normans arrived, met resistance here longer than almost anywhere else — Hereward the Wake held out in the fen — and then did what the Normans did. Abbot Simeon began the present church in 1083. It became a cathedral in 1109. The nave, the transepts and the great west tower are his church and his successors', and they are Romanesque of the highest quality: twelve bays of it, running 248 feet, one of the longest Norman naves anywhere.

Then, in the small hours of 13 February 1322 — a Saturday, with the monks having just left the choir after matins — the central tower fell. The sacrist, Alan of Walsingham, recorded in the abbey's own account that he found the choir buried under stone in the morning. Nobody was killed. It is worth pausing on how narrow that was: an hour earlier, the entire community would have been sitting directly underneath.

The hole was 74 feet across. Vaulting that in stone was not possible with the technology of the day. What Ely did instead is why people still come.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The approach and the Galilee porch

Come in on foot from the station through Cherry Hill Park, because Ely is only properly impressive from a distance. The cathedral stands on the highest ground for miles in a landscape that is, quite literally, below sea level in places, and the ship-of-the-fens comparison is not a tourist-board invention — from the A10 it genuinely looks like something under sail.

At the west end, note what is missing. There was once a matching transept on the north side of the west tower; it fell in the fifteenth century and was never rebuilt, so the west front is lopsided and has been for five hundred years. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. You enter through the Galilee, the deep thirteenth-century porch stuck on the front, which is a piece of Early English work good enough to be a small church on its own.

The nave, and the ceiling an amateur painted

The nave is the long Norman haul: twelve bays, three storeys, arcade and gallery and clerestory, almost unaltered since about 1189. It is severe and it is meant to be. What is not Norman is the ceiling, and the ceiling is one of the best stories in the building.

By the 1850s the nave had a flat boarded roof and nothing on it. Henry Styleman Le Strange, a Norfolk squire and gentleman-artist with no professional training whatsoever, offered to paint it. He began in 1858, working from scaffolding, in a scheme running the full 250 feet: a Tree of Jesse, the ancestry of Christ, from Jesse at the west end through the kings of Judah to the Virgin and Child at the east. He got about two-thirds of the way and died in 1862. His friend Thomas Gambier Parry — father of the composer Hubert Parry — finished the rest, at his own expense, in Le Strange's manner.

Take the trouble to walk the whole length looking up, or borrow one of the mirror trolleys they leave out. It is Victorian, it is unfashionable, and it is one of the great painted ceilings in the country.

The Prior's Door

On the south side of the nave, a doorway leads out to what was the cloister. Above it is a carved tympanum of about 1135: Christ in Majesty in a mandorla held up by two angels, with the jambs covered in dense foliage inhabited by little figures and beasts. It is the finest piece of Romanesque sculpture in the building, it is easy to walk straight past, and it is at eye level, which is rare.

The Octagon

Then you reach the crossing, and the building changes gear entirely.

Alan of Walsingham's solution was to clear away the ruins and the four Norman crossing piers and open the space right out, cutting into the first bay of the nave, choir and both transepts to make an irregular octagon 74 feet across — wider than the church itself. Eight massive stone piers carry a stone vault that leans inward and then stops, leaving a smaller octagonal opening about 30 feet across at the top.

Over that opening sits the lantern, and the lantern is timber. Eight oak posts, each roughly 63 feet long and over three feet square, were found — the story is that the search for trees that size took years — and raised into position to carry a structure weighing somewhere around 400 tonnes. Crucially, the posts do not stand on the stone rim of the hole. They stand on hammer-beams reaching back over the vault, so the load is carried outward to the eight masonry piers rather than pressing on the opening itself. The king's carpenter, William Hurley, is generally credited with the engineering; the work ran from 1322 to about 1340 for the stone stage and to 1346 for the lantern.

The effect from the floor is that light falls into the middle of a dark Norman church out of an octagon of glass that appears to be resting on nothing. Painted panels of angels holding musical instruments open outwards in the lantern vault. Pevsner called it one of the greatest achievements of medieval architecture, and engineering schools still set it as a case study.

Do the Octagon Tower Tour if you possibly can. It costs about £12 on top of admission, takes around 170 steps, has a minimum age of ten, and it takes you up into the void between the stone vault and the lantern, where you can see the actual timbers, the hammer-beams and the medieval joints doing their work. You also come out on an external walkway with the fens laid out to the horizon. It sells out; book it.

The choir, the presbytery and the empty shrine

East of the Octagon, the first three bays of the choir are Walsingham's too — rebuilt after the collapse in the Decorated style, with nodding ogee canopies and carving of a fussiness the Normans would have found appalling. Beyond them the presbytery is thirteenth century, built in the 1230s and 40s to house Etheldreda's shrine, and the change of temperature between the two is instructive: the older work is calmer and better.

The shrine itself is gone. It stood behind the high altar, was one of the richest in England, and was destroyed at the Dissolution in 1541. A slate marker in the floor is all there is, and it is worth standing on the spot for a moment: everything around you — the Norman nave, the Octagon, the whole establishment — was paid for by pilgrims coming to a box that no longer exists.

The choir stalls are fourteenth century, moved about more than once, and the misericords under the seats are the usual medieval carnival: a man being swallowed by a fish, a woman beating her husband, a fox in a bishop's mitre. Lift a seat if the vergers are not looking, or ask; they are used to it.

Bishop West's chantry chapel

In the south-east corner, a small chapel built for Nicholas West, bishop of Ely, between 1525 and 1533. It is worth going into for two reasons.

The first is that it is a hinge in English art history: the stone screen and canopies are late Perpendicular Gothic, and the panelled roof inside is Italian Renaissance, carved by people who had seen the new fashion. The two styles are in the same room, a few feet apart, done at the same time.

The second is the damage. Every niche held a statue. Every statue has had its head removed. West died in 1533, and within a decade the iconoclasts had been through his chapel — the chantry he built to secure prayers for his soul was hollowed out almost as soon as he was in it. It is the tidiest illustration of the English Reformation you will find in one small room.

The Lady Chapel

Leave the best until last, and go out of the north transept to reach it, because the Lady Chapel at Ely is a separate building — a free-standing hall attached to the north-east corner, which is unusual in itself. It was begun in 1321, a year before the tower fell, which promptly diverted all the money and labour; it was not finished until about 1349, and the Black Death arrived in the middle of the work.

It is the largest Lady Chapel attached to any British cathedral, roughly 100 feet by 46, and the vault over it is the widest medieval stone vault in England. And it is startlingly, uncomfortably bright: the walls are almost entirely window, the tracery is at the very limit of what the Decorated style could do, and the glass is mostly clear.

That brightness is a wound, not a design. Every surface in here was once painted, gilded and filled with coloured glass, and the arcading around the walls held something in the order of 150 carved figures telling the life and miracles of the Virgin. In the 1530s and 40s the heads were struck off, the colour was scoured, and the glass went. What survives is a running frieze of decapitated statuary under exquisite nodding canopies, in a room flooded with white light. It is one of the most beautiful spaces in England and one of the most thoroughly vandalised, and it is the same fact.

The modern statue of the Virgin by David Wynne, installed in 2000, is deliberately unlike anything else here and divides opinion sharply. Form your own view.

The Stained Glass Museum

Up in the south triforium, above the nave, and charged for separately. It is the only museum of its kind in the country: about 125 panels from the twelfth century to the present, taken from buildings that were demolished or reordered, lit from behind at eye level. Most cathedral glass is thirty feet up and in shadow. Here you can stand a foot away from a fourteenth-century head and see how it was made. If you have any interest at all in glass, this is worth as much as the rest of the visit.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The Octagon, from directly underneath Stand in the exact centre of the crossing and look straight up. Everything above the stone rim is oak, and it is carrying about 400 tonnes on hammer-beams that reach back over the vault.
• The Octagon Tower Tour About £12, 170 steps, minimum age ten, and it puts you inside the timber structure itself. The single best thing you can add to a visit here. Book ahead.
• The nave ceiling 250 feet of Tree of Jesse, begun in 1858 by an untrained Norfolk squire who died before he finished it, and completed by a friend at his own expense.
• The Prior's Door South side of the nave, about 1135. Christ in Majesty held by two angels, at eye level, and almost everybody walks past it.
• The Lady Chapel's broken statues Around 150 figures once filled the wall arcade. Look along the canopies at head height and count what is left of the heads.
• Bishop West's chantry Gothic screen, Renaissance ceiling, 1525–33, and every face smashed within ten years of his death.
• The Stained Glass Museum In the triforium, separately ticketed. Medieval glass at arm's length instead of thirty feet overhead.

Insider tips

The admission ticket converts to an annual pass at no extra charge if you ask at the desk. Nobody volunteers this. If there is any chance you will come back within the year, or if you are staying locally for a few days, take it.

Evensong is free, sung by the cathedral choir in term time, and it puts you in the choir stalls rather than behind a rope. It is also the only way most visitors will hear the acoustic of the Octagon used properly.

The train from Cambridge takes about fifteen minutes and runs frequently, and Ely station is a ten-minute walk away. Doing this as a half-day from Cambridge is easy and is what most people should do; driving in and parking is the harder option.

Oliver Cromwell's house is five minutes away and is now the tourist information centre and a small museum. He lived in Ely for ten years as a tithe collector, and in 1644 he ordered the cathedral closed — it stayed shut for most of the next sixteen years. The two buildings make more sense visited together than apart.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Ely is small, and everything worth walking to is within ten minutes of the west front. The streets immediately around the cathedral — The Gallery, High Street, Forehill — have the pubs and cafes; the Almonry, in the cathedral's own thirteenth-century undercroft with a garden against the south wall, is the obvious lunch and is better than it needs to be.

Most visitors come for a day from Cambridge and go back. If you do stay, the riverside at Ely Quay is the pleasant end of town, and prices are a fraction of Cambridge's.

More English cathedrals

• Lincoln Cathedral — the other great fenland skyline, an hour and a half north, and it lost a tower too
• Durham Cathedral — the Norman nave Ely's is usually compared with, and free to enter
• Canterbury Cathedral — the shrine Ely's was in competition with
• Salisbury Cathedral — built once, in one style, and the opposite kind of building

See all the cathedrals and churches worth visiting in England →