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.
Coton 
Coton Countryside Reserve
Besides Grantchester, the closest villages to Newnham are Coton and Madingley. The villages first came onto my radar during my first year in Cambridge when my flatmate invited me on an afternoon cycle ride out past the nearby western edge of Cambridge. It was only the work of 15 minutes, first along the commuter bike path past the West Cambridge site, then into the fields and over the M11 on the pedestrian bridge to reach the quaint, quiet High Street of Coton and its thatched-roof cottages and pub. Our main destination was a few fields away: the Cambridge American Cemetery, a wedge of manicured lawn and white crosses looking out over the countryside. It’s cheek to cheek with Madingley Wood, a patch of wild halfway between Coton and Madingley and about the size of either village. The cemetery, established to bury and memorialize American World War II dead, is stately and dignified and worth visiting, but for me, the main appeal was the setting. The interred have a peaceful view of rural England and its wild corners, and for the living the journey there is as charming as the view. We walked to the end of the path between the cemetery and the fenced-off Wood, where a sign pointed to Madingley, but that was as far as we got.
After that taste of Coton’s environs, I eagerly signed up to the mailing list circulated by David Coomes, a professor in the Ecology group in my department who also happens to be in charge of the Coton Countryside Reserve volunteer force. Coton Countryside Reserve had the ring of exactly where I wanted to be. And yet, with every announcement of work party or walk, something always intervened to keep me from cycling out—until, finally, last month.
Despite national lockdown (the months blurring into each other at this point), volunteer work was one of the many loopholes allowing gathering. Today was a litter pick. The pedestrian bridge over the M11 was closed for construction so I had to take a longer, less scenic route to Coton via the busy Madingley Road. When I arrived at the meeting place across from the Plough (the upper crust village pub), people were already scattering with their litter grabbers and bags. I caught David just in time for him to suggest accompanying him to Madingley Wood, since the litter pick had turned out to be so popular that the Coton Countryside Reserve would be well-picked by the others. Little did I know I would be getting a three-hour’s ramble with a professor whose own graduate students have to vie for his time!
David expected there to be lots of rubbish in the bank of jumbled plants between the Madingley Wood fence and Madingley Road, but when we got there he said, “Ah, looks like someone’s already been through!” We went searching anyway for the bits of human leavings we could find, our conversation mostly obliterated by the whiz of cars (though thankfully we were not) until we made our way to the path between the Wood and the Cemetery that would deliver us to quieter pastures. By then, we had found the keel bone of a wild bird, food wrappers from McDonald’s (which David called “Macky’s”), a long, striped pheasant feather, half a glass bottle, a discarded woven strap sheltering a cluster of red ants, leaf buds on a horse chestnut tree, and disintegrating shreds of plastic bag caught on a branch that David speculated drily had been there for several years already.
The path between the Cemetery and the Wood—the one where my flatmate and I took a last look and turned around—is pleasingly sheltered and narrow, graced by the gray scramble of woodland visible (though inaccessible) through the fence. At the end, the view opens out over the fields, a view apparently promised in perpetuity to the Americans with the bequeathing of the land for the Cemetery. Screened by the trees edging the far reaches of the fields, however, a motorway hustles by, leading past the newest and shiniest Cambridge development, Eddington. I also noticed some incongruous hills in the flat landscape between Eddington and the trees, which David said was the earth displaced by Eddington’s foundations. Following the seemingly inevitable trend, there is currently a battle over a proposed busway which would cut right through these fields and skirt closely around Coton. Coton is plastered with banners opposing the route.
Path between Madingley Wood and Cemetery 
800 Wood 
View from Cemetery, Eddington in the distance
It would also cut through the 800 Wood, a parcel of 15,000 small trees planted in rows alongside Madingley Wood for the 800th anniversary of the University of Cambridge in 2008. We soon reached this plantation-like park, which was looking a bit scraggly in its post-winter state, plastic sapling guards yellowed and unraveling at the base of trees. The open grassy avenues were interrupted periodically by orange construction netting around holes, which we speculated had to do with the potential busway. But there were buds on the trees, people strolling, and birdsong pouring out of Madingley Wood—tits whistling up and down, woodpeckers shrieking, and flocks of crows scattering and calling. David told me the wood is a center for blue tit research.
Then David asked if I had ever seen Madingley Hall. Only at night, I said—I had been driven there in a taxi and spent an evening at a pre-Covid party inside the Tudor-estate-turned-conference-center. I didn’t have much of a sense for the place. If I was interested in walking a bit, David suggested leaving off litter picking and going to see it.
So we stashed our rubbish bag and walked down through 800 Wood, over the canyon of the A428, and onto a handsome country lane leading into the village of Madingley. Daffodils planted in clumps along the road, big thriving hedges, and cottages with dark trim belied the woodsy feel of the lane, though David named wildflowers as we went. And then there was a grand gate. This was the entrance to the sprawling grounds of Madingley Hall, which were long ago closed off from the village to preserve, I imagine, the wealthy owner’s tranquility. The now University-owned grounds were still closed to the public (other than those attending events there) until quite recently, when they decided to take a leaf out of the National Trust’s book and open a café.
Just inside the gate, strangely, is the medieval Madingley Parish church, harking back to a time before the land was bequeathed by an Act of Parliament to John Hynde, a prominent lawyer-judge in the good graces of Henry VIII, in 1539.[1] Beside the church and its churchyard, sheep— big woolly mamas with deep baas and rollicking lambs of various piebalds with flat, eerily human cries—still earn their keep cropping the lawns. And daffodils were earning theirs by rolling a golden carpet along the road to the Hall and its gardens.
The Hall was anti-climactically covered in scaffolding, other than a few of the octagonal brick-and-sandstone towers built by Hynde and a stone archway David said was originally part of the University. The café queue was hopping under the scaffolding, but as David bemoaned several times, we hadn’t brought any money. So we admired the gardens instead. A tastefully designed, walled botanical garden gave us plenty of material to nerd out over (example: after I pointed out yet another delicate blue flower, David quipped, “I notice you gravitate toward the Boraginaceae.”). Beyond the Hall was the domain of Capability Brown, the famous 18th century landscaper who designed the rambling, semi-wild landscape scattered with huge mature cedars and beeches and avenues of flowering cherries, and a pond embedded in acres of rolling green. Yew topiaries, lily ponds, and other touches have been added since. Café or no café, scaffolding or no scaffolding, the Madingley Hall grounds are worth the trip.
Then we went back the way we came (over the highway and through the woods…)—until we got to the edge of Madingley Wood. David asked if I minded breaking a rule, and we hopped the fence that said “No public access.” Madingley Wood, like Madingley Hall, is owned by the University, so I figured a prominent Plant Sciences Department professor has some right to break this particular rule. We were only passing through along the fringe, in any case, admiring the light between the still-bare trees and the birdsong. David was just pointing out some grassy ridges between the trees that Oliver Rackham (a famous Cambridge forest ecologist) had told him were Iron Age hill fort remains, or something, when my attention was arrested by the sudden appearance of an exquisite bird: a pheasant I had never seen before with golden plumage and striking black and white stripes across its face. It gave a soft little boop with every step, winding its way through the trees and back out into the fields.
Later I looked up the bird and found out it was a Reeves’s pheasant—an exotic species introduced from Asia in the 1800s. This was a bit disappointing, thinking of it as a human contrivance, whether for ornamentation or sport, though it’s possible this pheasant was part of a naturalized, free-living population. But that didn’t change the stunning beauty of the creature and its place in the landscape I encountered that day. I often have dreams about fantastical birds appearing in everyday settings—which says a lot about how much I think about birds—but this pheasant was nearly indistinguishable from one of those dreams, unforeseen and unbidden and astounding. This is, incredibly, often the case in the natural world, even in its intersections with humans. It’s a beautiful way to live.
Back in Coton, I helped David gather up the bags left by the enthusiastic volunteers. Then I had one more leg of my journey: Coton Countryside Reserve. It was what I had come for, so even after the unexpected adventure, I couldn’t leave without passing through the place I had put off for so long. David tried to lower my expectations, saying the reserve wasn’t too exciting, mostly arable land leased for agriculture with the goal of preventing development, and a smattering of meadows. But I already knew I like English fields and their grading into wild edges. When I followed my nose past the pub and the playing fields onto the muddy paths at the edge of the reserve, I found the quiet beauty of a subdued country palette. I was perfectly satisfied.
The palette: grass as green as moist England winter plus a touch of spring; dark empty branches interspersed with frothy angels; bristly earthy brown of dry thistle and burdock standing over the pale hay of dead grass haloing the living green; hearty sucking mud; subtle maroon and silvery senescent green in the brambles curving down over Bin Brook; dark metally water; dense thickets of lichen-yellowed, long-scraggled branches; clouds pearly with diffuse light, yet saturated like an unwrung sponge; bright surprise of one clump of daffodils amid the tall wiry thistles; gates leading through fences and windbreaks and to and from roads and fields[2]; long subtle curves of field furrows modern and medieval; raspy pheasant calls like Model T horns hidden in the fields. My legs stiff and my feet aching in my wellies. My cup full with countryside.
[1] (This was only part of the package; among other lands he was also given another Cambridgeshire estate, Anglesey Abbey—a future blog post—during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In fact, John Hynde has echoes of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall, and could have very easily been a minor character in the book—which I highly recommend, by the way, if you want to know all the grit, satin, money changing, brick, and blood of Henry VIII’s England.)
[2] One narrow kissing gate refused my bike, so two passing women helped me lift it over just before a long-approaching man with a dog reached us, saying pleasantly he was on his way to come offer to do that, but no need for chivalry after all!
Lovely rambling.!