But a yet more striking approach to the Island of Ely may be made by taking at Earith the road through the toll-gate which leads northward immediately alongside the great embankment of the New River, and lies some few feet below the level of its waters. For three miles this association continues; then road and river part company, and the former drives straight across the fen to climb the western shore of the island. The change of scenery when you reach that shore is striking in its suddenness. You have been travelling for miles through the bare, treeless, dead level of the fen, with its immense width of view; then, almost in a moment, you find yourself ascending a steepish hill through a tree-shaded hedge-bordered cutting which might be in Kent or even Devonshire.
At the top of this brow you look down on the fen behind you and on either hand, your southern horizon being bounded by the near uplands of Haddenham, with the flat bay of North Fen between. And very shortly you come to the undulating village street of Sutton, with its highest point crowned by the truly glorious church. This church is all in one style, Decorated, on the verge of developing into Perpendicular, having been built by Barnet, Bishop of Ely 1366 to 1373. The splendid tower is crowned by an octagonal steeple, and that again by a second, richly pinnacled, and is a landmark for many miles along the valleys of the Ouse and Cam.
From Sutton we reach Ely by way of Wentworth and Witchford. The former name is supposed to be a corruption of Owensworth, and to commemorate that the place was of old the property of St. Owen. The little church has a Saxon porch, with twisted pillars, and contains a remarkable carving of the same date, representing an ecclesiastic wearing the pall of a Primate. His left hand supports an open book, while in his right he holds, not a cross or pastoral staff, but something more suggestive of an aspersory for holy water. The corbel in Ely Cathedral depicting the burial of St. Etheldreda shows us a figure similarly equipped.
In looking southward from Sutton Church, three steeples are specially conspicuous in the Ouse valley. They are those of Over, Swavesey, and Willingham. All are churches of the first class, and all are best reached from Cambridge by way of the Via Devana, which, after crossing the "Great Bridge" and climbing the ascent past the Castle, continues its straight course to the north-west under the designation of the Huntingdon Road. Just as it leaves the town a branch-road on the right leads to the village of Histon, which the jam factories of Messrs. Chivers have made one of the most flourishing in the county. The church here has some good Early English work, and a remarkable "Rood" (much defaced) on the gable of the S. transept. This is an almost unique example of the early "Majestas" type of crucifix (p. [339]). Christ, with outspread arms, wears, not the Crown of Thorns, but the Old English "king-helm," and is fully robed. About 1200 this ideal type gave place to the later "realistic" crucifix.
Sutton Church.
A mile beyond the last houses of Cambridge the Via Devana comes to the huge red-brick mass of Girton College, which has been already spoken of.[193] Its spacious grounds and never-ending corridors impress the mind with admiration for the enthusiasm and energy which has thus materialised Tennyson's vision of University education for women. At this point another northward turn takes us to Girton Church, where there are good brasses to two successive fifteenth century parsons. In their day the living belonged to Ramsey Abbey, by the gift of Eric, Bishop of Dorchester (1016). We next come to Oakington, the Mecca of Cambridgeshire Free Churchmen. For here, in the quiet little Nonconformist Cemetery, rest, side by side, the three men to whom the chief sects of the county trace their spiritual ancestry—Francis Holcroft, Joseph Oddy, and Henry Oasland.
The first named was a Fellow of Clare College where he had for his "chum" (i.e. chamber-mate, as we find the word used in "Pickwick") Tillotson, the future Archbishop of Canterbury. He began his ministerial career by taking on himself to supply the place of a brother collegian, the Puritan minister in charge of Littlington, near Royston, who, most un-Puritanically, was often incapacitated by drink from performing his duties. Later, in 1655, when still only twenty-two, he himself became pastor of the adjoining parish of Bassingbourn. When the "Black Bartholomew" of 1662 deprived him of this charge under the Act of Uniformity, he preached, at the risk of fine and imprisonment, throughout the neighbourhood, binding together his adherents in a loosely-knit organisation, whose members were admitted on subscribing the following Profession of Faith: