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.
Edinburgh is like the cool cousin of London. I wouldn’t be surprised if its popularity as a quick holiday destination has only increased during the pandemic, domestic travel being a hot commodity. I’d only ever heard good things about it but hadn’t managed to get there, despite it being only a 5-hr train ride the length of England from Cambridge. I was determined to squeeze it in before the term got into full swing or any unforeseen disruptions *cough* Covid *cough* got in the way, so my friend Marie and I made a long weekend of the Edinburgh bucket list. Hills, castles, kilts, neogothic grandeur, bagpipes, haggis, hipster art—we fit all of it in.
The day before the August Bank Holiday, my friend was restless to go somewhere and he threw out an invitation to a couple of us to go to the Peak District the next day. Having wheels to the Peak District, an England bucket-list item for me, was more than enough to outbalance any ideas I had about working on the holiday, and soon I was looking up walking routes.
It was supposed to be a three-hour drive, which we felt was reasonable for a day trip if we left early enough. As it turned out, a miscommunication with Apple Maps led us on a 1.5 hour detour (ending up, instead of in the heart of the Peak District, in the middle of a nothing town near Newark-on-Trent, which we should have been suspicious of before checking the map on arrival because there were no real hills to speak of). We grinned and bore it, took a detour back through Sheffield (an interesting glimpse of the industrial North) and got to the Peak District just before lunchtime.
botanize (or botanise): v., to study plants in their natural habitat (akin to birdwatching)
When I heard that Ed Tanner, retired plant ecology professor from my department who still sits in on ecology group meetings, was taking a few other students out on Saturdays to nature reserves around Cambridge to botanize, I didn’t waste time in inviting myself along. I was delighted by the chance to explore new places and absorb some of the decades of plant and place knowledge that Ed has to offer (not to mention being one of the most Cambridge-y ways I could possibly spend an afternoon). The next trip planned was to Devil’s Dyke. All I really knew about Devil’s Dyke was that it was a very old landmark somewhere out in the countryside—near Newmarket, of horse racing fame—and, Ed told us via email, is habitat to rare orchids.
The focus of this blog is Cambridge, but Cambridge is of course embedded in a larger landscape. We’re in the county of Cambridgeshire, which is part of East Anglia, which is an area within the East of England, an official region of England, which is part of Great Britain, which is part of the United Kingdom (which is no longer part of the European Union). Learning these nested names reminds me of being a kid in the United States before I had a solid sense of what was higher in the geographical hierarchy, a state or a country. East Anglia is more of a historical geography than an administrative one. It’s the easternmost knob of England sticking out into the North Sea, including the counties of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk, and is known for its flatness. Let me take you across the flat fenland to the big open spaces of Suffolk, all the way to the seaside.
In the flatlands, hills draw history to them. Where the layers of chalk bulge up south of Cambridge, giving a green roll to the fields and beech groves and feeding flowers in chalk meadows, history crowns the 75-meter hilltops at Wandlebury and Magog Down. Legends call the Gog Magog hills a sleeping giant (see my post on Beechwoods), but there are plenty of other stories still observable on the chalk here: Iron Age ring hillfort, Roman road, 17th-century thoroughbred stables, country estate, and rescue from bulldozing as nature reserve. Portals, paths, layers.
Think about where I haven’t been recently (or ever)
Click around for general cycling directions
Get on my bike
Deviate from that route as much as I like.
On Easter Sunday, a month ago now, my afternoon was wide open after Easter observances and the weather was perfect. So I opened Google Maps and consulted my map feelers—where I felt like being and where I could extend my exploration coverage—and decided on the direction of Jesus Green and Fen Ditton. No endpoint in mind, just a place to be and see where I ended up.
Well, I ended up seven miles down along the River Cam. The pull of the path was irresistible, and only a sense of daylight waning turned me back.
So much of Britain is countryside. It still boggles my mind that after millennia of habitation, such a relatively small place could be mostly rural, with a few major urban centers and the rest a network of tiny villages in a sea of fields. Cambridge is balanced rather precariously on the boundary between these worlds. You don’t have to go far in any direction to plunge straight into rural green. It’s also growing fast, destabilizing the long history of tight containment within that green matrix, and unsurprisingly stirring up anxiety among countryside lovers and dwellers. I’m only an observer—but I do number myself among the countryside lovers.
When the English poet and Cambridge alumnus Rupert Brooke was homesick and depressed in Germany in 1912, he wrote a nostalgic, light-hearted poem about one of Cambridge’s gems:
. . . would I were In Grantchester, in Grantchester! — Some, it may be, can get in touch With Nature there, or Earth, or such. …I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
God! I will pack, and take a train, And get me to England once again! For England’s the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; And Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand; And of THAT district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
(from “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”)
Brooke proceeds to comically badmouth every other village in the vicinity of Cambridge based entirely on what insults rhyme with their names.[1] It makes an interesting timepiece, to recognize the names of villages that have now been subsumed as neighborhoods of the City of Cambridge (Madingley, Cherry Hinton, Ditton…). Grantchester, however, is one village that has kept its geographical identity, still tiny and discrete on the banks of the River Cam amidst fields and college sports greens. Nevertheless, it is very closely linked with Cambridge, not least by the steady flow of joggers and dog-walkers along the two-mile footpath that runs beside the River Cam from Cambridge to Grantchester. Much more could be said about Grantchester, the village— its medieval church, its pubs, its tearoom, its namesake detective show I got my family hooked on after witnessing its fourth season being filmed in town—but it’s the path to Grantchester I want to write about for now. The path ambles through the idyllic chain of green where Brooke wanted to lie “flower-lulled in sleepy grass”: Grantchester Meadows.
Waterways have an inherent sense of story—they bring elsewhere to you, following a path with a volition beyond your own, and tacitly invite you to find out where from and where to. Here’s one: Hobson’s Conduit, a stream dug in 1610 from chalk springs out in the fields to the heart of Cambridge, still flowing and steeped in city lore. When a retired Cambridge professor told me about the walk along the Conduit’s length from city center to source at Nine Wells Nature Reserve, I tucked the captivating idea away in my to-walk list. Although I inadvertently walked partway on the inviting public footpath once, it took me a while to pick up the trail again.
Boxing Day 2020: gray and brisk but not raining or freezing; paths still muddy and fields flooded after the storm two days before Christmas. Looking for a way to pass an afternoon with a friend on the first day of renewed Covid lockdown, I suggested the walk to Nine Wells.
