Byron’s Pool

Of all the romantically named Cambridge haunts, Byron’s Pool may be near the top of the list. I don’t particularly enjoy what I’ve read of Lord Byron’s high-flown poetry (except for the satire), and I don’t find the Romantic hero-personality of extremes and debauchery and drama particularly appealing—but I was as beguiled as anyone by the idea of a grove along the River Cam where the famous poet was supposed to have swum while an undergraduate at Trinity (this is what all the guidebooks and interpretive signs say, and not much more). It’s so very Cambridge. Most significantly for my interests, it’s farther up the River Cam than I’ve ever visited.

I didn’t actually set out to visit Byron’s Pool. I was following the sun while fighting jet lag on a surprisingly mild morning, and it led me to Grantchester Meadows. I was in a poetical state of mind: there were few other people out yet, just the low morning sun glaring across the grass, cirrus clouds gauzing the sky, robins and tits and wrens in the bare trees, and the muted green, gray and mud-and-bramble brown palette of England in winter. I kept walking until I got to Grantchester. I’ve said before that I will write a proper post about the village, and this is not that post, but I did loiter around the corner of Grantchester where the Meadows path spits you out. That is, past the Orchard Tea Garden and across to the medieval Church of St. Andrew and St. Mary (the outside of which features in the vicar-turned-detective show Grantchester) with light spilling through its windows, its rambling churchyard overlooking open fields, the plain vicarage next door with some stray plastic wisteria caught in the bushes from the latest Grantchester shoot, and the other neighbors: alpacas grazing serenely behind an ancient stone-and-brick pasture wall.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

While wandering around the churchyard and wondering what to do next, I remembered that my friend had mentioned Byron’s Pool being nearby. It had been on a cycle ride between Great Shelford and Grantchester, the only other time I carved out that little section of countryside beyond Grantchester, down the High Street away from Grantchester instead of in. My friend hadn’t given Byron’s Pool a particularly glowing review, but of course I had to visit it at some point. So I turned right on my way out.

The mile-long walk to the Byron’s Pool Local Nature Reserve has its own charms. Just beyond the Orchard Tea Garden is Orchard House, a boxy white cottage boasting a Blue Plaque for being Rupert Brooke’s onetime residence. Rupert Brooke has a much stronger presence as a poet in Grantchester than Lord Byron—he also swam in the pool, and in fact, it’s apparently (?) his poem, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (which I’ve quoted in a past post), that gives Byron’s Pool its legendary status:

Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.

• 

• 

• 

The Old Vicarage itself, Brooke’s second residence in Grantchester, is just around the corner. It’s a stately brick house enclosed by a brick wall and imposing gates, through which the beginnings of a sculpture garden are visible (a statue of Rupert Brooke being the centerpiece). This apparently all belongs to Lord Jeffery and Mary Archer, who are famous but whom I don’t know much about. Around another garden-walled corner by way of a sheep paddock, a bridge crosses a picturesque mill pond with willows and swans and a fisherman casting his line (and more sculptures—the Archers’ garden contributing to the public greenery). The gray brick house abutting the bridge was once Grantchester Mill, but it hasn’t been functional since the 1920s after a fire decommissioned it.[1] The mill stream runs here in a straight channel from the River Cam at the weir that forms Byron’s Pool—though I couldn’t see this from there. After the mill pond, it runs under the trees of the Old Vicarage and back into the Cam right where Grantchester Meadows (actually a sports field at this point, plus a corner of accessible Old Vicarage woods with an unexplained telephone booth in it) ends to public thoroughfare.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Past a horse paddock and a bridge over the actual Cam, the trees begin again and the turnoff to Byron’s Pool LNR and Trumpington Meadows is indicated. From here, the scenery began to feel somewhat eerily similar to the green space running parallel to it, Hobson’s Park to Nine Wells Wood, on the other flank of the booming suburban peninsula of Trumpington, which I visited a year ago. Today I only stepped out onto Trumpington Meadows a few times as it ran alongside the slice of woods that is Byron’s Pool LNR, but what I saw echoed Hobson’s Park with its expansive, close-cropped geometrical sections of scrubby grass hemmed by modern apartments and punctuated by saplings.

• 

• 

• 

• 

The woods, in turn, reminded me of Nine Wells Wood, though bigger, with the River Cam instead of an incipient stream. Same palette: mud, ivy, gray-green water, birdsong. To save the Pool itself for last, I walked the higher side of the riverside loop first, taking in the woods. There were browned oak leaves underfoot and long-tailed tits flocking vociferously in the ivy and scraggly branches.

• 

• 

• 

Just before the path was blocked off due to mud, I found a raised metal grate, apparently a walkway, snaking around a small clearing, in one corner of which there was a low brick retaining wall inlaid with a mosaic. It was clearly modern, though a little worse for wear, but with no clues as to its origin. The internet later explained: it’s a discovery point on a Trumpington Meadows trail commemorating a rare Saxon burial of a high-born girl with a gold-and-garnet cross pendant found during the 2012 excavation of Trumpington Meadows. Wonders of all sorts!

Down around to the riverside, and over a wooden bridge to Byron’s Pool itself: Any idyll left in the pooling water is sliced through by the modern semi-industrial concrete and metal trappings of the weir and its fencing. Swimming (to the consternation of all romantics) is prohibited in bright red. I certainly didn’t sense the ghosts of Byron or Brooke, or Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales set “The Reeve’s Tale” at a long-gone mill possibly once found at this spot. There were birds, though—swans, ducks, a little grebe diving, and one of the Cambridge herons painted on the watermarked wall. Along the river are little platforms for fishing; a few were in use. The water held dull metallic reflections of ivy and branches, and the muddy paths were well-walked by people and their dogs. The birds in the trees never stopped singing their exuberant poetry.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

---

An addendum: while looking through my books that afternoon, I came across a small locally published book I bought at the Orchard Tea Room awhile back called The River Cam: A Sketchbook by E. N. Willmer. I hadn’t been patient enough to work through the prose when I bought it, but it turned out to be a treasure trove of topographical and historical information laid thoroughly and lovingly along the course of the Cam from source—or rather sources—to sink. Among other things, I learned that Byron’s Pool is situated not far below where two rivers—both called River Cam on Google Maps, but called the River Rhee and River Granta by Willmer—join to form the Upper Cam. And where the mill stream leaves the Cam at the weir, Bourn Brook feeds in. By this time, all these waterways have already seen an assortment of villages and hamlets, fields and bridges, Roman roads and railways, and cement works and historic mills on their way from over the county’s edges. As with Hobson’s Conduit (which also features in the book), I’m deliciously drawn by the stories the waterways tell, and while I itch to explore all the twists and turns into the countryside myself, it may be that this book and Google Maps satellite imagery provide a somewhat worthy substitute. If I do make it farther upstream, you will hear about it!

Another good overview of the whole Upper Cam

An overview of this walk by a journalist

---

[1] Willmer, The River Cam.