Imagine a fenland morning. Granted, this was September, so there were leaves on the trees, but if you wake up on a boat on a fen river (this is the Great Ouse, near a place called Over), it looks a lot like this.
If you read with assiduity yesterday, you'll know that on the spur of the moment I decided to make a Lenten walking pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk. All of this is basically imaginary, but once the imagination is fired, there you are. I decided to make Cambridge's Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and the English Martyrs my starting point, with the idea that I'd walk, over 30 days, a distance equivalent first to a walk from Cambridge to Ely, then from Ely to Walsingham.
If I'd really been walking the towpath along the Cam yesterday, I'd have passed through the village of Milton, just outside Cambridge, and probably wound up in the middle of nowhere, about a mile beyond Milton. So I imagined that I had a support narrowboat following me --- trust me, you can walk about as fast as a narrowboat goes --- and that while I'm on this leg of the pilgrimage, I'm spending the night on the narrowboat.
Which means that although it's the wrong time of year for the trees to be leaved out, still on waking I might see something like that photo above. I took that first thing in the morning on a boat, in which my husband and I and the three of our four children who had been born before or in 2002 were messing about, puttering from Ely to a place called Hemingford Grey, a few miles down the Ouse, and back up again to Ely. This remains the best family vacation we've ever taken (and too bad for the little arty daughter, who wasn't born until December 2003). The Viking Son remembers nothing of this magical boat trip, having been seven weeks old at the time.
The Infant Viking, for your delectation:
Our trip took us on a route that didn't tend toward Walsingham, I don't think, but if you want to know what that general part of England looks like:
This will be near the end of my imaginary Cambridge-to-Ely walk. That's Ely Cathedral in the distance. This shot was taken on the Ouse, just upstream from where it and the Cam meet and diverge:
This is sort of an islandy place, with a pub. I think it's called Duck, but I'm not sure anymore. This is looking down the Ouse, though this little stretch might be called something else (the Old Something River). To the left, outside this shot, the Cam flows away on its own course.
Again, you can see how flat the land is here. This was all truly fenland, mostly underwater, with hummocks and islands where people lived, until the 17th century, when Dutch drainage technology came in. You can still see 19th-century steam-powered pumping stations along the rivers.
So, in imagination at least, this is where I'm walking for a while, four miles a day, with Dora. In reality I'm walking far less level ground, with some hills, which I guess makes it more penitential.
Meanwhile, in reality, the day is not that unlike an English day in some essential respects:
By the time we reached this starting point, we'd already walked .68 of a mile.
The weather overall could plausibly be East Anglia in August. At any rate, I was comfortable, neither too cold nor too warm. My shoes felt light and not unsupportive, the right thing for weather that was damp but not actively pouring with rain.
