We woke up yesterday not really knowing what we were going to do with our day. I phoned mum to see if she’d be around for a cup of tea and to tell us all about Iceland. She wouldn’t be. So H said “How about a couple of county tops?”

We’ve been eyeing up Rutland and Peterborough for a while. They’re not too far apart, and separated by Rutland Water. It promised to be a nice little trip out.

The highest point of Rutland is actually on private land, belonging to a hunt pony club, but there are public footpaths very nearby. We parked the car in a convenient location at the side of the track and walked along the footpath, regarding Rutland Water far off to our left and looking for a trig point to our right. There was a pony meeting of some sort on, with cars coming and going across the adjacent field. When we spotted the trig point, it was in the adjacent field.

Hmm… what to do? It was clearly just a field of grass - no crop to destroy. There were clearly cars coming and going, so despite being private land, it had access to the main event. We made our decision upon finding a gate that was held shut with nothing more than a loop thrown over the post - classic accessible gate closing. We crossed the field towards the trig point, and it’s then that we spotted the fences around us…

Oh no! The horses will surely come thundering through any moment and we could nearly die.

Luckily they didn’t, and the top was bagged without unneccesary drama.

Peterborough’s top was on Racecourse Road, a moderately impossible-to-find place not helped by one end of it being closed. A great 2km section of dead straight, level road though…

Despite setting out late, there was still plenty of time to enjoy ourselves, so it was then on to somewhere I’d only read about a week or so ago, and just happened to be pretty close (ie. within 50 miles) of where we were… the Lowest Point of Britain.

Holme Fen, Cambridgeshire lies around nine metres below sea level. The surrounding land is around one metre above, but the ground in the Fen consists of peat which has been shrinking as the area was drained. In fact, in 1852 the shrinkage was already apparant and a post was sunk into the peat into the clay below until its top was flush with the ground. The post is still standing…

The ground has shrunk A LOT. But it’s still strangely spongey underfoot. In fact, it’s an altogether very funny bit of the world. Well worth a visit. On the way out, we had to drive over what felt like a small mountain just to cross the ‘level’ crossing of the mainline railway.

A quick potter to Ely for a look at the magnificent cathedral, and then into Norfolk for the old Bedford River - where the Bedford Level Experiment was carried out in 1838 thereby proving beyond all doubt that the earth is, indeed, flat.

On the way back, as darkness fell, we passed within a couple of miles of the highpoint of Leicester City, and it would certainly have been rude not to visit.

And that is how we visited three tops, a bottom and a flat earth.

Statistics

Total: 137
Done: 36
Todo: 101
Completed: 26%

First date: 09/05/2007
Last date: 05/10/2008
Days elapsed: 515
Days per visit: 14
Projected finish: 15/02/2014