Destination Shippea Hill

This was the view I had, not far from the summit of Shippea Hill in Cambridgeshire, early on the 13th March, 2014:

Shippea Hill station, 13th March, 2014, with convenient red arm-chair outside the signal-box

The perceptive reader, contemplating this tableau, might make several observations and deductions.  For instance, the engineer’s mind might wonder how the builders of the railway negotiated the hill of the station’s name.  A sceptical, troublesome reader (we all know the sort), developing a strong suspicion that the author arrived by train, might keep eyes peeled for any hint of a claim to have made the ascent under his own steam.  A more sympathetic reader, noting the heavy fog, might regret that the view has been so comprehensively obscured, and imagine that the 13th March 2014 must have been the occasion of a wasted trip.

I wonder now what these same readers will make of the picture below, taken from the same point a few months later on the 20th June, 2014:

Shippea Hill station, 20th June, 2014

Several observations might again be made — for instance, that the weather has cleared up admirably, or that, at some point since March, the signal-box appears to have been relieved both of its sign and of the red arm-chair perched outside.  Or perhaps something else is more immediately amiss?  For in this place, Shippea Hill, there seems to be no visible sign of any actual hill, as the sceptical reader would doubtless point out without hesitation.  Indeed, we would appear to be in the Fens, a part of the world not renowned for its craggy splendour.  Warming quickly to his tune, the indignant reader might add indignantly that there is not a ship or a pea in sight either (though one cannot quite rule the latter out in this agricultural region of England).

I suppose it is no use denying that the elevation of the summit of Shippea Hill above sea level is, well, negligible.  Yet it qualifies as a hill because all of the peat fenland around it (Burnt Fen) lies at an altitude at or below 0.  The clue is in the Anglo-Saxon suffix ‘ea’, which in the old days referred to an island of firm, raised ground above the prevailing wateriness of the undrained fens.

This means that I can now attest without shame to having arrived by train, since I can hardly be accused of gaining any altitudinous advantage by doing so.  In fact, my riposte to the sceptical reader is that my achievement in making the journey by train is possibly greater than if I had arrived on foot.  Shippea Hill station is served by a single train a day — not a single train in each direction, but one train, a Norwich-bound service at 7.28 a.m., and that is it.  There is no return train (except on Saturdays), and no Sunday service at all.  All other traffic along this stretch of railway, the well-used Breckland line between Ely and Norwich, hammers straight through.

One might expect the good people of Shippea Hill to be up in arms about this state of affairs.  But it is far from certain how many ‘people of Shippea Hill’, good or bad, it is possible to speak of.  There is no village, no pub, no church for miles.  The only signs of habitation in the empty breadths of peatland are the austere, solitary farms with their strange, unhomely names (Lark Engine Farm, Bulldog Bridge Farm, Letter F Farm).  As any map makes plain, the only apparent reason for the existence of this station, which has stood here on its lonely fen since 1845, is the road that meets the railway at this point.  In fact, the station was originally called ‘Mildenhall Road’ — small matter that Mildenhall itself lies eight miles away.  It is hard to say which is the more tenuous: the claim to serve Mildenhall or the toponym ‘Hill’.

Thus the reader will understand why, on the two occasions that I have managed to drag my friends out into the middle of the Fens to this apparently unremarkable but resolutely contrary place, almost an almost military standard of precision and planning has been required.  Coming from the direction of Cambridge, we would make ourselves known to the guard, ask for the train to stop, find ourselves duly deposited on the platform, congratulate ourselves on our initiative and daring, and then, at half seven in the morning, apprehend the reality of our predicament:  there was now nothing for it but to spend most of the rest of the day making for civilisation on foot.  For a bus service is something else that there is not at Shippea Hill.

Considerable alertness was required, too, not to be taken in by the tantalising presence, five miles further down the line, of another station, Lakenheath.  It would not be unreasonable to assume that this might be a good place to a catch a return train.  Alas, it is no help at all.  Perhaps the reader will not now be surprised to learn that the service provided here is almost the direct inverse of Shippea Hill’s.  It has no trains at all on weekdays, there is one train in each direction on Saturdays, and on Sundays it enjoys a service that might almost be called lavish.  For all that these are two adjacent stations on the same line, it is generally impossible, and always totally impractical, to travel between Shippea Hill and Lakenheath by train.  No single train serves both consecutively in either direction.  The only itinerary that does not actually involve breaking the journey overnight is on Saturdays, when it is possible to go from Shippea Hill to Lakenheath by catching the 0728 Norwich train, hurtling straight through Lakenheath, getting off at Brandon and catching a train back west.  This journey takes three hours, and the same in reverse takes four.  It is just as well that nobody much lives near Lakenheath station either.

It was to Brandon, in fact, that my long-suffering friends and I made our way on foot on the first (foggy) occasion, along the Hereward Way.  And very spooky the journey was too:

Lakenheath station

East of Lakenheath, things cleared up slightly:

View over the Little Ouse east of Lakenheath

Near Brandon

My friends forbore this escapade with superhuman patience.  All the same, since these foggy photographs would hardly have satisfied the Shippea Hill Tourist Board, and I still had scarcely any idea what the view from the summit actually looked like, I decided to make a second excursion, with another unsuspecting friend, this time setting off back towards Ely from the train.  The weather was much clearer, and this time there was no obstruction to those strange fenland views, which go on and on and on for miles across the level, and are in their own way almost as disconcerting as the fog had been.

At Shippea Hill again, looking eastwards towards Brandon

Westwards towards Ely

This was not a public bus — it was taking farm labourers to work.

The typically enormous Fenland skies and foreground 

Level crossing at Mile End, Prickwillow

Towards Ely Cathedral

One might have thought it impossible that anything else should remain to be said about this station that is scarcely a station and its hill that is hardly a hill.  Imagine my surprise in early December 2015, then, to read this article about the latest estimated passenger numbers at stations in Great Britain.  Lo and behold, there is Shippea Hill station in pride of place as the quietest in Britain.  Your humble scribe hereby boasts of finding himself among a rather select club of people who actually used the station in 2014/15: a grand total of twenty-two.

It is true of course, as the O.R.R. admits, that there are some limitations to this data.  For instance, since on the first trip my friends and I had bought returns to Brandon, I doubt that our perfectly valid visit to Shippea Hill will have been registered in the statistics.  We are presumably not alone in having done this, so the actual number of passengers is probably higher than the figures show.  But that only raises another question: for what conceivable reason could Shippea Hill station have been visited by even as many as 22 people?

And might any of them have anything to say about a missing station sign and a red arm-chair?

The author is also a member of a somewhat less exclusive club of 99, 201, 604 people who  last year used London Waterloo, the most alighted-/boarded-at station in Britain, and through which the equivalent of Shippea Hill’s entire annual footfall passes every seven seconds…!

Three Carols from Old England

Along with their ten favourite pieces of music and a luxury, castaways on the B.B.C.’s programme Desert Island Discs are given three books: the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and a volume of their choice.  Unlikely though it is that I will suffer that fate (either to be cast away on a desert island or to be interviewed on Radio 4), I have been thinking that my choice might be Sloane manuscript 2593, a collection of fifteenth-century English carols and poems held in the British Library.  A (smallish) digitised image can be seen here.

These manuscripts have preserved something quite precious of medieval England’s character.  Sacred lyrics are mixed with profane in the manuscript, which alone tells us something about faith and life in those days, but it is the carols that I find the most spine-tingling.  I think the best-known are Lullay, myn lyking, Adam lay ybounden and I sing of a maiden, which have each been set to music by various composers.  Not only the meaning of these three texts have survived, and their noteworthy Marian spirituality, but also (as I hear it) their mood, something altogether more fragile.  The lyricist sets off with a catechetical aim but succeeds in amazing himself with his own catechesis.  This amazement is expressed in a restrained, a mild — and dare I say even an English — way.  For instance, I find very moving this depiction of the Adam’s ‘happy fault’ in Adam lay ybounden:

Ne had the apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Ne had never our ladie
Abeen heav’ne queen.

Or, in I sing of a mayden, there is the quiet awe of the line 

Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.

which leaves nothing else to be said.  With closing lines like this, the middle three verses can afford to be duplicates (but beautiful duplicates!) of each other.

Or there is the detail of the line ‘as clerkes finden written in their book’, an image which for the original listeners linked the everyday and familiar seamlessly to the song’s spiritual subject-matter, and which for us transmits a flicker of the flavour of their life and worship. (We marvel that clerics had to read Sacred Scripture on behalf of laypeople; these words were written by someone for whom this was normal).  As an Englishman, certainly as an English speaker, I cannot read them as a neutral observer or objective student: I feel I have inherited these carols in a certain way.  This only magnifies the flash of elation that comes with reading any good poem.  Centuries separate the England I know from the England that produced these words, but the feeling that that I know what they meant, or that I think exactly what they thought — which is also an assurance of the unchanging nature of the Christian faith — is, in my view, very precious indeed.

Here are some musical settings which to my mind have captured the words’ mood: Lullay, myn lyking — Richard Runciman Terry:

Adam lay ybounden — Philip Ledger:

or https://play.spotify.com/track/1hDflwTiGeSXvD2hHqLRii

I sing of a maiden —Patrick Hadley: