Thursday, January 07, 2016

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 hillas 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...!

8 comments :

  1. I LOVED this post! This is the kind of eccentric undertaking I would happily go along with myself. However, since most people are not so sporting, and since you managed to drag your friends along, I must conclude you have either 1) great personal charm, 2) very sporting friends or 3) great personal charm AND very sporting friends.

    God bless Shippea Hill forever and amen! When I was travelling in England I enjoyed making as many connections as I could. One day I got on the wrong train and hastily got off a few stations in. The stationmaster was very sympathetic and got me on the right train for free, but while I was waiting I enjoyed walking up and down on the platform of a deserted and obscure station, on a hot summer's afternoon. I forget its name. I would like to think it was Shippea Hill, but I was in fact in the North of England!

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  2. I'm glad you enjoyed it! It's certainly true that I have very sporting friends. The first walk took longer than we had bargained for, and one of them had to ring to postpone a meeting... and to try to explain why!

    It also occurred to me that it was no mean feat for the driver to stop in that thick fog along such a featureless stretch of line. (By the way, neither the guard nor the clerk at the ticket office batted their eyelids when I asked for Shippea Hill! I had been slightly worried they would never have heard of it).

    I think Betjeman's line 'I can think of few pleasanter places to hang about in on a sunny afternoon like this than Snettisham Station' could be applied to many others...

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  3. What delight to see these fine photos! Once upon a time (mid 90s being unemployed) this area was even for me, far away from England, contemplated as a possible place for a visit. No not this certain unknown Shippea Hill of course, but the landscape... Well, and right at this moment it has given me the impulse to pick up a cd for listening to RVW "In the Fen Country". So thank you for the article.

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    1. Thank you very much for the kind comment! I sometimes think the Fens are the only part of England's landscape that might be called extreme: their flatness is as absolute as the Alps' loftiness or the Sahara's dryness. Ely Cathedral, the 'Ship of the Fens', is also a remarkable place.

      And they are generally shunned by tourists, except for the 156 people who visited Shippea Hill this year: a 1,200% increase in passengers!

      You can't go wrong with RVW, in my opinion.

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    2. To see the 'Ship of the Fens' would be a blessing.

      I agree on the all-is-good-view and also like some of his lesser known works as much as the symphonies, like this one.

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    3. I think of myself as an RVW nut, but regularly come across something new to discover! A great composer, and arguably a great man also.

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  4. Nice to hear. LOTS of works there indeed. I have about 15-20 cds but sadly seldom listen to them nowadays.

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    1. This year is the 60th anniversary of his death, and 2022 will bring the 150th of his birth. Hopefully there will be all sorts of concerts and records issued to celebrate - and not just in GB, either.

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