Notes on East Anglia I (July 14-18, 2025)
July 14, (Monday). Aberystwyth-Oakham. Ceredigion to Rutland. 9.00 am: Grey sky, a sprinkling of rain, and a light wind have followed the last two-day’s heatwave. Welcomed with gratitude. The smell of rain (petrichor) after a period of dry heat is almost sensuous. 10.00 am: Having pulled down the shutters on work and established radio silence across all social media channels, I headed for Oakham in the County of Rutland, England (the birth place of The Rutles), for an overnight stay with friends. The morning’s cooler air accompanied me.
My introduction to an area of the country that’s new to me is often by way of its supernatural folklore. East Anglia is a happy-hunting ground for apparitions and poltergeists, as well as demons and witches. Borley Rectory, Essex (on the boundary of the counties) was reputedly the most haunted house in England. A haunting is a history that refuses to go away; and a ghost — an aspect of the past that persists as an active, if impermanent, agent in the present.
July 15 (Tuesday). Oakham-Ely. Rutland to Cambridgeshire. 6.oo am: An Oakham morning.
I awoke to sunlit projections of branches on the garden canopy, and the coo of two wood pigeons in the trees. They ‘sang’ to one another for a further hour. Then … silence. The silence experienced in one place is as subtly different to that of another as the taste of the water.
9.30 am: My host toured me around Oakham town centre, beginning at All Saints Church. This parish church is the size of a modest cathedral. Parts of its architecture are 14th century. The font is two centuries older.
On, then, to the Butter Cross or Market Cross in the town square. This dates back to at least 1611. It was used to sell diary products, and as a venue for public preaching (possibly) and punishing miscreants (definitely). It still has a stock. (Butter and battery, cheese and chastisement, milk jugs and judgement, all under the same roof.) At the top of the structure’s central column, sparrows nested. Their sound was amplified by the conical shape of the canopy’s interior — which operated like a gramophone player’s horn.
10.30 am: The journey to Wicken Fen (one of Britain’s oldest nature reserves), en route to Ely, passed miles of flat, featureless agricultural land, much of it occluded by high hedgerows. Road signed with names such as Landbeach and Waterbeach suggested titles that the Cornish artist Peter Lanyon might have applied to his paintings. (There’s another St Ives close by.)
The fen or, more properly, fens (there are a number) is now a National Trust property. Much of the area was drained during the Second World War to create farm land for crops and cattle. However, one of the fens — Sedge Fen — remains waterlogged. Sedge (Cyperaceae), which grows tall and in abundance either side of the walkways, was used to make thatch. It swooshed and swayed elegantly in a dance with the wind, like some natural phenomenon with a metaphysical import in an Andrei Tarkovsky film. The Trust commissioned a sound artist to install hydrophones beneath the water to record the fen’s sub-aquatic life.
In the fen cottage, I came across a cat whisker radio set and an old gramophone player. There were no ‘DO NOT TOUCH’ signs. So, I did. The sound of the gramophone record was amplified, via the stylus, by a diaphragm in the tone arm (rather than through a horn). The technology was remarkably effective.
July 16 (Wednesday). 10.15 am: A return visit to Wicken Fen, to take a boat trip up and down the Burwell Lode (the Roman name for a man-made waterway). The ‘Boatman’ (a title which, for me, always evokes the mythology of Charon, the ferryman of the Greek underworld), provided a continuous and illuminating commentary on the wild life and plant life either side of the boat. Reeds brushed against my arm and neck like a lover’s tender caress. I felt out of place and time. I could’ve been on a waterway in 17th century Holland, or travelling through the pages of Tales of the Riverbank. What I’ve learned to appreciate about this landscape is that its interest lies beneath the surface, in peat layers and grasses, and the hidden history of cultivation, compression, sinkage, and drainage (courtesy of Dutch know-how). I was engrossed.
2.00 pm: A visit to Ely Museum, which is situated on the opposite side of the road from my apartment. Once the city’s gaol, it’s now devoted to the period of the Roman occupation, and the pre- and post-drainage history of the fens. I tried on a replica centurion’s helmet. It was heavy. In this peaty-area of Britain, the plural for ‘turf’ is ‘turves’. Whereas in Scotland, it’s ‘turfs’. An artist was painting a mural in the museum’s Education Room. She’d graduated from Northampton School of Art, and was making an exemplary response to her brief. The painting would last only as long as the Summer, and then be painted over.
3.00 pm: An ambulation around the city, before visiting Ely Cathedral. Among its remarkable array of stained-glass windows is a particular type, the colours of which are so intense that when the sun passes through them the window is rendered visually overwhelming. It’s the optical equivalent of ecstatic utterance. Whatever story the glass illustrates is apprehended as a secondary manifestation. I always refuse audio guides. I prefer to see (to know … and not know) immediately, rather than mediately through another’s interpretive commentary.
Since the Reformation, the cathedral’s Lady chapel as been empty, austere, scrubbed-down, spacious, and furnished with plain-glass windows. The Protestant Thomas Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, had ordered the ‘demolition’ and ‘obliteration’ of all images, relics, memorials, and shrines set-up under Roman Catholicism. As a consequence, the chapel’s sculptures were either beheaded or defaced. (That’s to say, their faces were hacked-off.) The brightly covered paintwork that formerly graced the interior is still covered in lime wash. (I recalled the impending fate of the mural at the museum.) The ‘ghosts’ of erased saints, prophets, and martyrs now haunt the interior as shadowy stains on the bare-stone walls. (Again, they represent a history that refuses to go away.) This iconoclasm was a violent and thorough act of artistic and religious genocide.
The Chapel’s interior has a reverberative decay of 7 seconds.
5.30 pm: I returned to the Cathedral for Sung Evensong in the late afternoon. There was a girls choir from northern Holland visiting. I’d not before experienced other than a boys’ choir singing in a cathedral service. Hearing the Magnificat (a song composed by the Virgin Mary) sung by other women — some of whom would have been the same age a her when she conceived the Christ child — yielded an interpretive tenderness and insight that was startling.
July 17 (Thursday). 9.00 am: Thursday is Market Day in Ely. Much swishing of hands and arms to ward-off wasps was in evidence. The fresh fruit and vegetables were excellent and ‘The Cheeseman’, as he’s known locally (a title which has no mythological resonance), offered an impressive range of produce from Britain and Europe, including a rare mushroom brie from Germany.
12.30 pm: I attended a piano recital by Julian Hellaby in the Cathedral’s choir. The space has a relatively flat acoustic. He opened with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in F-sharp Major and Prelude and Fugue in F-sharp Minor. Nothing else that followed seemed to matter. Bach’s music is sonic architecture — pure, complex (yet unadorned), abstract, and rational (yet full of spirit).
July 18 (Friday). Ely-Cambridge. 9.00 am: An amble along the river bank to the railway station to take the train to Cambridge. 9.30 am: It passed through Waterland — which appeared to be an undistinguished tract of land … with no visible water. I’d not visited Cambridge since 2008, when I delivered a paper on spirit photography at the University. That was on November 21, on the day the annual Carols from King’s broadcast was recorded in the College Chapel. At that time of year, the university district already looked Christmassy, if not a little magical — like Edinburgh in Winter. Today, the city was heading towards 28°C, ablaze with sunshine and blue sky, and teaming with overseas school parties and tourists.
En route to the city centre, I visited The Polar Museum — Scott Polar Research Institute. For some years it has operated an impressive artist-in-residence scheme. By ‘residence’, the organisers mean in either the Arctic or the Antarctic. In 2022, the elected artist was Polly Townsend, one of the School of Art’s illustrious alumni, whom I’d taught painting during the 2nd and 3rd year of her undergraduate degree. Small world. She was, even then, a hardworking, gifted, and an ambitious student, who was destined to go far. (Her Instagram profile is well-worth following.)
The Museum Hall sports a pair of magnificent ceiling murals depicting the two Poles, conceived and painted by Macdonald Gill and his female assistant.
From there, I headed for the Fitzwilliam Museum, and reacquainted myself with Henri Fantin-Latour’s still life, White Cup and Saucer (1864). I’ve known artists who’ve wept before this piece. No matter how many times I’ve seen the painting in reproduction, I’m always taken aback by its real presence. The subject’s simplicity belies a profundity. This is a proto-minimalist painting; and I do appreciate how daft this assertion may sound. But I know of no other work that’s so starkly and abstractly conceived, prior to Late Modernism. The painting is small (life-size), but could hold its own against one twenty-times larger. I had goose-pimples and weak knees.
Close by, sat Gwen John’s The Convalescent (1924). (Gwen was a far better painter than her brother Augustus, in my opinion.) In a more distant room hung Adriaen Coorte’s A Bundle of Asparagus (1703). Both Fantin-Latour’s and Coorte’s still lifes embody a peculiar quality of absolute silence. In Dutch etymology, the word ‘still’ [‘stil’] means both ‘motionless’ and ‘silent’. 12.00 pm: Afterwards, I sat in a deckchair in the shade on the Museum lawn for half-an-hour. ‘Bliss: the eternal now.’
Onwards to King’s College Chapel, via cafes, ice-cream parlours, and any shop (regardless of what it sold) that had formidably fierce air-conditioning. 4.00 pm: I took an early dinner before boarding the train back to Ely for my final night in the city and the beginning of my adventure’s second part, tomorrow.
Summa: diary (Notes on East Anglia II (July 19-25, 2025)
Summa: diary: Notes on East Anglia III (July 26-30, 2025)
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Studium; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Bluesky; Instagram; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice