In 1978 when I was 12 years old and my sister 14, my parents decided that we should leave South Africa, a troubled country, to start a new life in England.  They picked a place called Ely which is just north of Cambridge and in an area of England known as the Fens.

The Fens are a vast flat landscape, about 1 million acres in total,  with an interesting history.  This part of Britain was originally joined to Europe and the rivers here were tributaries of the Rhine. About 10 000 years ago, when the last ice age ended, the forests that were growing in this region became flooded.  The trees died and fell to form the rich peaty soil which is characteristic of the Fens today.  For many hundreds of years the Fens were mostly flooded, with the occasional island.  When the Romans invaded Britain they built banks to keep out the water and they settled these islands. They cultivated the available land as well as surviving from fish, wildfowl and eels.  

In the 17th century there were further attempts at draining the Fens but as the land dried out it shrunk causing the rivers to be higher than the fields.  It wasn't until the 1820s and the availability of steam power that serious drainage could take place.  Today there are about 400 miles of artificially created waterways and drains which are controlled by hundreds of automatic and manned pumps, now diesel and electric.  All these pumps help to protect against the very real threat of serious flooding.

If you drive around the Fens you will notice that the soil is almost black in places.  It is some of the most fertile soil in the Britain.  I always want to get out of the car and feel it!  Interestingly the Fens are responsible for 37 % of all the vegetables grown in the open in the U.K as well as 24 % of the U.K's potatoes.

Ely, which is pronounced eely and takes its name from the eels that would have swam around it, was one of the larger islands in the Fens.  It is dominated by a huge medieval cathedral which can be seen for miles.  This great building appears to float above the flat surrounding landscape and  is known as "the ship of the Fens".  Ely cathedral deserves a hub of its own so I won't go into too much detail here but the building of it was started in 1083 and finished in 1189 although various additions came later.  The amazing thing is that all the stone was brought from Northamptonshire by boat.  The size of Ely cathedral was out of all proportion to the size of the town of Ely which had a population of about 10 000 people when I lived there.  Ely was actually classified as a city on account of its cathedral.

At the time we left South Africa the history taught in schools was limited to the history of the country since European settlement.  We knew that Cape Town was first established in 1652 when Jan Van Riebeeck was sent by the Dutch East India Company to start a vegetable garden and to provide ships with fresh meat, vegetables and fresh water on their way to Asia.  1652 seemed like a long time ago to us.  And a building that was more than a hundred years old was something interesting.

Our new school in Ely was housed in a collection of buildings around the Cathedral.  Several of these were medieval monastic buildings.  The school dining hall was (and still is) a monastic barn which dates back to 1375 - beautifully restored of course.  One of the boarding houses dates back to 1180.  It was strange to suddenly be in a place with such history.  We had been so proud of our old buildings back in South Africa but here everything was old and no one seemed to take that much notice.

We adjusted to our new lives, we spent the rest of our school years in Ely.  My parents moved to Asia and both my sister and I moved on and away.  Some years later I moved back to Cape Town.  Now of course I live in another sunny country which has a very young European history.  I haven't been back to Ely for years but that sense of history really changes the feel of a place and I find that I am very conscious of its absence.