Approach to Ely.--The Park.--Walpole Gate.--Crauden Chapel.--Western Tower, Galilee.--Nave.--Baptistery.--Roof.--Prior's Door.--Cloisters.--Owen's Cross--Octagon.--Alan's Grave.--Transepts.--St. Edmund's Chapel.--Choir Stalls.--Presbytery.--Norman Piers.--Reredos.--Candlesticks. The foregoing pages have taught us something of the history of Ely Cathedral, of the men and women who have loved it and worked for it; of those who have defaced and pillaged it; of the wars and revolutions that have surged around it. Now we propose to visit it, and to see for ourselves the very stones which, though silent, can speak to us; hoping to be favoured with a fine day, that we may be able to study the Minster advantageously from without as well as from within. And let us come provided with a glass, for much of the best carved work is high above our heads. It may be unenterprising to come to Ely by rail; but yet there is no approach that can give us a finer impression of the Minster than we gain by our first view of it from the train, whether we arrive from the north or from the south. In either case we have been travelling over flat dull country, when suddenly there stands up before our eyes the "stately fane" of which we have heard so much, and our first impulse is to show her some token of reverence. We take a good look at the pile of building before us, and we resolve not to forget our first sight of this our new friend. Well did the quaint historian, Thomas Fuller, write of Ely Minster in 1660, "This presenteth itself afar off to the eye of the traveller, and on all sides, at great distance, not only maketh a promise, but giveth earnest of the beauty thereof." Leaving Ely station, our best course will be to walk toward the Cathedral, taking the second turn to the right. This brings us into a commonplace street; where, however, we should notice on our right a row of thatched cottages, with their overhanging upper storeys, that have survived from olden days. Just opposite these cottages is an iron gateway which invites us into the Cathedral "Park," an undulating piece of ground some sixteen acres in extent grazed by cattle and sheep, its highest point being an artificial mound, now densely clothed with trees, called Cherry Hill. An award of the seventeenth century speaks of it as Mill Hill, an early print shows it topped by a windmill; so here, doubtless, stood the windmill of the Monastery, mentioned in the epitaph on Alan of Walsingham as one of the four wonders of Ely due to his genius (the others being the Lantern, the Lady Chapel, and the Abbey vineyard). The place of the mill (which itself superseded the Norman keep built on this eminence by William the Conqueror) is now occupied by a monument in memory of Bentham, the historian of the Abbey of Ely, who wrote in the eighteenth century.