November 17, 2023

Ely and a Plethora of Freight Trains

I have said for a while I have not done enough photography for a while.

The other day needed to travel down to Norfolk for some business needing doing, and being up and awake early had the options of killing time waiting to leave, or killing time at the other end, in Thetford as it would be.

For all the extensive and not unattractive forests, Thetford itself is a dump. Seriously, when I did get there and needed to use the toilet in the pub (as the station toilet seems to close at 1pm) I really felt I should have tooled-up first, and on the way back I endured three changes to get off the station quicker and avoid what seemed to be turning into an hour of drunk people shouting in Polish.

But anyway. I hit upon the brainwave that as I did not have advance tickets, the intermediate stops were my mollusc of choice, so to speak, and decided to spend some time in Ely.

Ely is less of a dump. I am sure there are bits of it which are, but in general it is very pretty and when I went in the pub a large proportion of the clientele appeared to be Gentlemen Builders having problems with oak beams.

I guess really there are two obvious attractions in Ely (other than shopping, curse you Tindalls, I did not mean to spend money) which are the Cathedral and the Waterside.

I would have liked to have gone in, but like too many similar places the fee to enter is high. I have spoken of this before.

To get the whole building in shot I resorted to my phone as I did not have my 10-20mm with me.

I will say, that while Ely does have some nice shops, I expected a littlre more obvious gift and craft type affairs. But I bought a few things in Tindalls. Though I am increasingly dissapointed at the lack of watercolous in pans many shops seem to carry.

I wandered down through Jubilee park to the river.

One thing I have been doing recently is taking pictures of trees to learn the shapes and form for painting, and there were a couple of quite impressive ones in the park.

I wandered about and then sat and had a pint in the Cutter in and did some sketching – the light was pretty amazing and I think some watercolours will be on the cards soon. I took some with my 60D, but I have to say that my phone increasingly amazes me for the wuality of the shots, and at times I do wonder why I lug the DSLR about! The gallery will tell which I used for specific shots.

Then I walked to the station. One thing I noticed, that of course I rather liked was that Ely seems to be traversed by a lot of freight services. I also loved the way the light was playing on the fenland over the river.