East Anglia with Cambridge

East Anglia with Cambridge Travel Guide

One of those beautiful English inconsistencies, East Anglia has no spectacular mountains or rivers to disturb the storied, quiet land, full of rural delights such as tulip fields, flint churches, and thatched-roof cottages. Occupying an area of southeastern England that bulges out into the North Sea, its counties of Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, and Cambridgeshire are a bit cut off from the central routes and pulse of the country.

This area has been home to some of Britain's greatest thinkers, artists, and poets. John Milton, Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Byron, William Thackeray, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson were educated at Cambridge University, one of the world's most important centers of learning and arguably the world's most attractive university town. Here, Oliver Cromwell groomed his Roundhead troops, and Tom Paine, the man who wrote "These are the times that try men's souls," developed his revolutionary ideas. Here, John Constable painted The Hay Wain, and Thomas Gainsborough achieved eminence as England's most elegant portraitist. If East Anglia has remained rural to a large extent, its harvest of legendary minds has been just as impressive as its agricultural crops.

Despite its easy access from London, East Anglia remains relatively unfamiliar to visitors, with the notable exception of Cambridge and, to a lesser degree, North Norfolk, where the unspoiled villages have become fashionable. It was a region of major importance in ancient times, as evidenced by the Roman settlements at Colchester and Lincoln; and during the medieval era, when trade in wool with the Netherlands made East Anglian towns strong and independent. But with the lack of main thoroughfares and canals, the Industrial Revolution mercifully passed East Anglia by.

As a result of being a historical backwater, the region is enormously rich in quiet villages, presided over by ancient churches, tiny settlements in the midst of otherwise deserted fenland (lowlands), and manor houses surrounded by moats. Few parts of Britain can claim so many stately churches and half-timber houses. The towns are more like large villages; even the largest city, Norwich, has a population of only about 125,000.

If you find the region's mostly quiet, flat spaces dull, you need travel only a few miles to reach the bright lights: four splendid stately houses -- Holkham Hall, Blickling Hall, Houghton Hall, and Her Majesty's own Sandringham. There are incomparable cathedrals, at Ely and Lincoln particularly, and the "finest flower of Gothic in Europe," King's College Chapel in Cambridge. These are the superlatives of East Anglia. But half the attraction of the region lies in its subtle landscapes, where the beauties of rural England appear at their enduring best.