Grantchester Meadows

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.

One of the first things established Cambridge students recommend that newcomers do sometime is walk to Grantchester through the Meadows, preferably all the way to the Orchard Tea Room for afternoon tea. It may even be a Welcome Week activity. As it happens, Newnham is adjacent to Paradise Fen, a jumping off point for the full path, but it’s just far enough away that I only took it a handful of times in my first year. It’s a lovely wooded walk along the river, winding through brush full of robin and blackbird song, giving picture-window rural views through arching trees every few turns. This is almost a separate experience, however, as the river enters private land and the path deposits you back in residential streets for a while before the meadows start.

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It took the pandemic and a renewed interest in jogging for me to realize that if I skipped the initial river walk (lovely as it is) and cut through residential streets and alleyways, I could be standing in the meadows within ten minutes. Now I wander over there every few days or weeks.

Grantchester Meadows are a very linear experience, like the river is. Its green flanks are like an oblong patchwork quilt too narrow to sleep under. First patch: Skater’s Meadow, with its mysterious lamppost at the center and its lore: when it used to flood and freeze, the fenlanders would ice skate around the lit lamp. Now it’s a place for wildlife—lately there always seems to be a pheasant, perhaps an egret grazing.

The street feeds past Skater’s Meadow onto the paved footpath—narrow and busy with joggers, chatting friends and couples, cyclists dinging their bells; hemmed in by old trees with long stretching arms, tangled brush along the fences where birds sing, fields beyond this where crows congregate; periodically interrupted by kissing gates and cattle grates. On this route you can avoid the mud, admire the river from a distance and go straight to Grantchester along the top of the meadows.

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Or, you can veer off down the grassy slope, careful not to slip, and follow the path mowed and worn into the grass along the riverbank. Here you can watch the gray-green water flow and dimple, match the reflections of tall, leafless riparian trees to the wild branches in the sky; watch coots and mallards and maybe even grebes scurry through the weeds on the opposite bank and swans glide imperiously through the open; spot herons with their long legs trailing behind them as they flap over the marshes on the other side of the river. In the summer some punters come from city center for the country route. Kayakers zip by. People swim here sometimes, and fish; dogs leap in after balls. The bank is eating away into the grass in places.

The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.

(Another gem: Pink Floyd quoted this line from Brooke’s poem in their soundtrack for this place, Grantchester Meadows. The whole track is underlaid by a looping skylark song.)

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The curving swath of meadows is broken up by shallow channels cut from the river to a ditch alongside the fields. Each one has a picturesque little bridge to cross, some made even more perfect by their proximity to sweeping willows. Late spring to early fall, there are cows corralled between the channels and the gates that punctuate the walk. Is this what keeps the grass short? Songbirds in the brush, kestrels and sparrowhawks on the wing—more than once I’ve seen kestrels hovering, eyes sharp on their prey. On one walk with birders from the university Nature Society, we saw a flurry that turned out to be a sparrowhawk dispatching a chaffinch. We saw and heard, too, a vast flock of crows and jackdaws cascading overhead with their metallic calls.

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It’s difficult for me to remember Grantchester Meadows in full summer, or even spring. I missed the truly green months last year. There was a beautiful Indian summer day in October—golden sun lying over the path and the grass and the water. More recently, the Grantchester Meadows on my mind are still green, as England always is, but subdued under pearly winter skies or glazed with frost. A few weeks ago the mud crunched and the grass clicked under my feet, which pressed brown into the frost. The shallow stream across the first meadow, wide and full from recent rain, looked perfectly still, half-submerged grass resting on the surface without stirring—when I poked my foot in, there was a delicate layer of ice holding it all in place. The river itself hasn’t frozen over in decades; it was flowing fast and swirling. Sky pastel; sun white and glaring; branches dark and wild.

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Before today, I discovered, I hadn’t seen real flooding. This morning I found the meadows all water, glassy under the clear sky, too-bright sun doubled and dancing on the surface. Two swans had paddled across the meadow to the edge nearest the path and were dabbling deep in the soggy grass, radiating their whiteness. Seagulls rafted in the middle of the meadow, calling hoarsely, and moorhens poked around the edges. The river was level with the floodplain, in some places only distinguishable from the floodwater by the surging lines of the current.

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None of this deterred the walkers and runners and dogs. Most stuck to the paved path, high and dry, but some people in wellies walked the riverside path as if there were still open grass, while dogs delightedly turned their legs and bellies a new shade of brown. I listened to the wind lift in the ivy and the brambles, the blackbirds whinny and the jackdaws call, and the people stream by in all their colors, feeding their pandemic-starved social cravings, soaking up the rare sun.

The path crests a hill close to Grantchester, where the wind was colder but came with a view: stripe on stripe of grass, flood, river, field. A flock of gulls turned and turned in the sky, following bankless currents, sparkling like the floodwaters.

I’ll be back—this year will be one for the seasons.

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

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[1] e.g.

Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there…

(He obviously didn’t know about all the murders being investigated by the vicar…)