Punting on the Cam

I’m not sure if I had heard of punting before Cambridge came onto my radar, but it’s become a regular part of my vocabulary since arriving. Punting—pushing a flat-bottomed boat down the shallow River Cam with a long pole—is one of the iconic Cambridge things (incidentally, Oxford does it too).

Outside of midwinter, the city-center stretch of the Cam is reliably busy with the rectangular wooden boats, which are laden with tourists and students reclining on the seats, punters standing on the boat-backs and ducking under bridges, poles dipping up and down. Riverfront colleges have their own little fleets of punts docked in side-bays for use by college members (or friends with connections). There are also multiple commercial punting companies that advertise pricey guided punting tours—the hired punters recite Cambridge factoids of sometimes questionable veracity in affected guide voices—or self-hire boats. So you’ll see experienced punters gliding smoothly around the self-hired tourists spinning slow circles, and prows bump easily, but rarely do people fall in; the boats are stable and the pace is inherently relaxed.

Besides being a novel and leisurely activity, punting the Cam is a nice way to see this part of Cambridge. From the river, you can get the lay of the oldest colleges lining the river—Queen’s, St. Catharine’s, King’s, Clare, Trinity, St. John’s, Magdalene—and drift through their luxurious gardens, known as the Backs. Going punting was thus one of the first things I did with my scholarship orientation group last September. A more experienced scholar from a river college played guide-punter and seemed to enjoy giving us our first wide-eyed glimpse of the centuries-old brick that rises straight out of the river, the elegant bridges framed by willows, the college garden booked a decade out for weddings. Swans floated alongside us with King’s College Chapel as a backdrop; the ivy on St. John’s inner court wall was turning scarlet. I was sure to take a selfie in front of the Bridge of Sighs (a covered bridge named for the one in Venice, with its own neo-Gothic flair; incidentally, there’s also one in Oxford). Talk about dazzling first impressions.

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The second time I went punting, it was after dark a few nights before Halloween. My labmates like to organize outings occasionally, and this time it was night punting (with mulled wine and brownies). It was cold, but also as atmospheric as it sounds. The moon was full, and though the sky was quilted with clouds, moonlight haloed the silhouette of King’s College Chapel and fell on the wings of courting swans. We held our punts alongside each other and snacked and enjoyed the quiet river. A few of the bolder labmates were taking turns punting, and when they said, “Anyone else want to try?” I decided that despite the cold and dark, I should take the opportunity to get a feel for it—it’s pretty much a given as a Cambridge student that you’ll be called upon to take visitors punting sometime. So I clambered nervously onto the back of the punt, wielded the fifteen-foot aluminum pole, and awkwardly began to learn the rhythm of pulling the pole forward and vertical, letting it drop through my hands to the riverbed with a swish-thunk, walking my hands up and pushing, correcting and overcorrecting the inevitable veer by dragging the pole like a rudder. Despite abundant advice I couldn’t quite get the physics of it, and within ten minutes my sleeves were soaked from the pole’s dripping and my hands were burning with cold despite borrowed gloves, so I gave it up for the time being.

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Those ten minutes were enough, however, to make punting—being the punter, that is—feel like a viable possibility when my parents came to visit last week. They were heartily put off by the commercial fees, even for a self-hire punt, and my college doesn’t have punts. But luckily for us, my labmate immediately offered to book their free college punt for me when I texted the group chat. All we had to do was pick it up from the Scudamore’s punting station by the Mill Pond.

The Mill Pond is a kink in the river near the city center where the water pours over a lock, pooling between bridge and green and pubs (one of which,
on Mill Lane, is named The Mill—hm, there must have been a mill). Here, whole rafts of punts are tied up, and from here most punting tourists are deployed. Because of the lock, you have to decide whether you want to drift downriver through the Backs, along the “Middle River” to the next lock, or launch upriver toward Grantchester Village, a more rural experience. I have yet to do the second (stay tuned this summer…), but for new visitors, the Backs are a must-see, so we chose that direction.

My dad actually had been punting on the Cam once before, with his parents on a Europe tour in 1984. His dad was the punter then, even less experienced than me, and his mom spent the whole ride gripping the sides of boat. There’s a faded picture of her smiling nervously, pressed down into her seat, with her husband leaning into the pole behind her. The view beyond looks exactly the same as it does today.

I don’t think my parents were too worried about entrusting themselves to my punting, but I told them not to expect much, and as we walked around the river colleges beforehand, we noted hapless tourists struggling with their punts and joked about how that would be us soon. I must admit I was gulping a bit when I took the pole and climbed out onto the punt, not for fear of losing my balance but in anticipation of navigating bridges and other punts—getting into embarrassing scrapes.  “Just keep right,” was all the employee said (British ways don’t extend to waterways, apparently).

Backing out from the punt dock and (not quite) straightening up in time to crouch under the low Silver Street Bridge ended up being the most precarious part. I remembered how to rudder, but even mimicking the other punters, I still couldn’t figure out how to push straight. I felt like I spent most of my time as the fulcrum of a large lever, twisting around my core, redirecting the nose of the punt this way and that. So it was slow going and we ultimately had to turn around before reaching the next lock. I avoided all but the mildest grazes with other boats, however, and I pushed us (with some paddling boosts) successfully under the wooden struts of the Mathematical Bridge, the graceful arch of the King’s College Bridge, the Garrett Hostel Bridge that stretches toward the airy windows of a modern library, and others. We made it past the Bridge of Sighs before turning back.

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The day had lifted from earlier coolness into a hazy and pleasant warmth, so the pole didn’t freeze my hands. When I wasn’t concentrating on hefting the pole or aiming the punt (I sometimes had to break off midsentence, that’s how distracted I was), I enjoyed the show the Cam was putting on for my parents. Softly dimpling water, golden hour light on the new willow leaves, birdsong and cheerful murmurs of human conversation, the thunk of punt poles, the stately walls and bridges so intimately layered along this narrow conduit. We got snippets of Scudamore’s Cambridge trivia from passing punts (“It’s called the Bridge of Sighs because St. John’s students would sigh as they walked across it to their exams on the other side.” “If you had been here seventy years ago, you would have seen David Attenborough walking around Clare College.”). My dad asked me to pause by King’s and Clare College so he could try to recreate the picture of his mom, with my mom sitting in for her, and the college buildings obligingly unchanged (plus or minus some scaffolding).

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The Cam struck me as a strange river when I first arrived. In this city stretch, at least, it’s been canalized in concrete and held between locks for so long, much longer than any American river has been touched by development. One building adorned with “1624” in stone has its foundations directly in the water. The river is heavily polluted—the main reason to avoid falling in—with agricultural runoff and, I assume, cow dung. Cows roam freely in Cambridge green spaces, the commons with their centuries-old grazing laws intact, which are often along the Cam. According to Wikipedia, barge-horses even used to wade through the river on a submerged gravel towpath to avoid treading on the sacred (prohibited) college lawns. The water is murky, slow, tame. There are high-water tick marks on some of the bridges commemorating floods, but it’s hard to imagine the water threatening institutions as venerable and long-standing as these colleges. They, along with the punting establishment and rowing teams, seem to have complete dominance over the river. (The human-adapted waterfowl perhaps have some claim as well.)

But outside of the geological accruement of Cambridge brick, the river does widen and wander. It flows from multitudes of streams rising out of chalk hills. It gathers tributaries through drained remnants of fens. Towards Grantchester, it retains (maybe informally) its ancient name, the Granta. People—farmers, swimmers, boaters—and livestock still exercise their whims over it, but at least it runs through soil, and gives place to grebes, moorhens, herons, coots. There’s so much more of it I would like to know.

For now, though, the layered human aesthetics of the Middle River Cam, the center of the Cambridge-centric world, explorable by punt, are wonder enough.

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Above: map with pinned starting point for our recent punting trip, which proceeded downriver toward Mathematical Bridge. Feel free to explore!