The Cow (formerly The Red Cow)
Anglesey Abbey
Of the 12th century Augustinian priory, a medieval core (probably the Prior’s Lodging) remains as the dining room of an L-shaped house, a mansion of c.1600, altered in 1861, 1926 and finally in 1938. It is the home of the splendidly named, wealthy bachelor Urban Huttleston Rogers Broughton, Lord Fairhaven (from his birthplace in Massachusetts). He embellished the house with tapestries from Bruges and Mortlake, silver chandeliers from Hanover and paintings by Claude, Gainsborough, Constable and Etty, creating a miniature museum of the first rank, with large collections of clocks and books. Outside, the celebrated garden is famed for snowdrops (240 varieties!) and commended by Pevsner for ‘much statuary skilfully disposed’. The 18th century watermill is still in working order. There is a shop, restaurant, Plant Centre and Wildlife Discovery Area.
Audley End
A mile west of Saffron Walden, this spectacularly sited mansion is less than half the size of its double courtyard original (1603–14) but remains one of Britain’s biggest. John Evelyn called it ‘a mixt fabrick, twixt antiq and modern’ and it still is. Attractions include a majestic Jacobean Great Hall, stunningly restored rooms by Robert Adam, a ‘Gothick’ chapel, a fine picture collection, grounds by Capability Brown, an exquisite Palladian bridge, a miniature railway and a superb walled kitchen garden.
Bishop’s Stortford
Travellers by car from London along the M11 may wish to divert into this market and commuter town, its historic heart well hidden among contemporary commercialism but worth looking for. Americans may note the birthplace of imperialist adventurer Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), founder of the Rhodes Scholarships (to Oxford!), now a well-arranged museum and arts centre.
Duxford
The airfield at Duxford, since 1972 part of the Imperial War Museum, was built c.1917 and still has concrete hangars of Great War vintage, although one was sacrificed for the 1967 film Battle of Britain. Notable as the base of celebrated legless fighter ace Douglas Bader (1910–1982), Duxford became home to American bombers in 1942 and has a major display devoted to the ‘Mighty Eighth’, plus dozens of aeroplanes and armoured vehicles, an intact fighter control room, a midget submarine, the launch runway for a V-1 flying bomb, a post-war ‘prefab’ house and the prototype of Concorde. Adjacent to nearby Whittlesford station is the rambling Red Lion Inn, every tourist’s ideal of an ancient hostelry with, right beside it, a bijou medieval chapel, empty but atmospheric.
Ely
Pevsner devotes 40 pages to the Cathedral and its precinct, and just four to the town. Visitors can see the surviving motte of a 12th century castle, a few medieval buildings and rather more Georgian houses. The interior of the medieval parish church of St Mary ‘has more interest than the outside’. The remnant of the once busy medieval quay is now Waterside, ‘the prettiest street in Ely, all informal, humble C18th cottages’. The main visitor attraction is St Mary’s Vicarage, otherwise known as Cromwell House or the Steward’s House at 29 St Mary’s Street.
Visible for miles looming above the Fens, Ely Cathedral offers an outline unlike any other in England. Instead of the usual two towers at the west end and crossing-tower in the middle, it has a single tower at the west end (215 feet) and in the middle a mighty octagonal tower (170 feet), surmounted by a lantern. In the usual English manner, the cathedral is immensely long (597 feet).
First built in AD 673 by St Etheldreda, sacked by the Danes in 870, Ely was reconsecrated in 970. A major Norman rebuilding began in 1083; the oldest surviving features of the building are to be seen in the south aisle. St Etheldreda’s remains were translated to a new shrine in 1106. Three years later Ely was established as a bishopric, but the existing monastery continued to exist in parallel under its own prior. There was a further phase of building in 1234–52, which added the Retrochoir. Pevsner’s lengthy account of the building’s history includes many comparisons with features of contemporary work at Winchester and Lincoln.
In 1322 the Norman crossing-tower collapsed. By 1328 this had been most unusually rebuilt as a stone octagon, by 1342 capped by a timber lantern. The sacrist Alan of Walsingham, a goldsmith as well as a monk, is credited with the idea. In the meantime (c.1330–5) the choir was also rebuilt and an almost detached Lady Chapel begun (dedicated 1353). (The chapel’s iconography, depicting the life and miracles of the Virgin, was the subject of detailed investigation by M R James.) The misericords of the choir stalls are of exceptional interest, depicting Biblical motifs (Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, Samson, the beheading of John the Baptist) mixed up with huntsmen, wrestlers, monkeys and everyday scenes of women quarrelling and men throwing dice and picking grapes. Of the many monuments note especially those of Bishop Hugh de Northwold (died 1254) in the North Chancel Aisle, Bishop West’s Chantry (1525–33) at the East End, Canon Selwyn’s in the South Chancel Aisle and The Spiritual Railway in the Cloisters.
Ely was dissolved as a religious house in 1539 and the shrine of St Etheldreda virtually erased by local iconoclasts. Many former monastic buildings were also demolished for use as building stone. In 1757 James Essex began a desultory restoration. In 1847 (Sir) George Gilbert Scott began a thoroughgoing one, rebuilding the lantern, drastically altering the fine choir stalls and providing a new organ case, font, rood screen and reredos. Almost all the Cathedral’s stained glass is Victorian.
Numerous outbuildings survive in the Cathedral Precinct, many of them now part of King’s School. They include an infirmary, barn and imposing gatehouse, Ely Port of c.1400; but the most outstanding is Prior Crauden’s Chapel (c.1325) ‘a gem of the Decorated style’, which features ‘one of the most important tile mosaic pavements of England’.
Farmland Museum and Denny Abbey
Just beyond Waterbeach on the road to Ely, this museum of Cambridgeshire rural life is combined with a 12th century Grade I listed abbey, a Grade II 17th century barn, a reconstruction of a Fen-dweller’s hut and a 1940s farmworker’s cottage and shop. There are displays of agricultural machinery and a programme of craft workshops and children’s activity days.
Grantachester
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 blue
In Grantchester, in Grantchester…
Rupert Brooke, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
According to Scarfe, Grantchester exudes ‘an amiable self-consciousness’, perhaps befitting the inspiration for two of the most quoted topographic lines in English poetry:
Stands the church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
The name of the poet Rupert Brooke can be seen on the village war memorial. Ironically the poem was written while he was visiting Berlin in 1912. Brooke’s former home, The Orchard, once patronised by E M Forster, Bertrand Russell, Augustus John, J M Keynes and Virginia Woolf, is still, as then, a noted teashop. Brooke’s late lodging and the inspiration for his poem, ‘The Old Vicarage’ (1683), has famously become the home of blockbuster novelist Jeffrey Archer. The Royal Commission on Historical Monuments noted with circumlocutory approval that the village was ‘a place of recreation and retirement for the students and scholars of the University … some of the smaller buildings put up between 1715 and 1850 are not without academic overtones’. ‘Modern’ architecture is represented by Kenneth Capon’s 1959 house, Salt Hill on Bridle Way.
Madingley
According to Sir Simon Jenkins, Madingley Hall looks ‘as if part of a Cambridge college has been blown out into the country and come to rest on the first high ground it met’. A brick mansion built around 1543 by John Hynde (d.1550), a Serjeant-at-Law, it underwent extensive internal alterations in the 18th century. In the attic are 17th century murals of scenes of hunting, hawking and bear-baiting. The imposing gateway to the stable court was originally erected c.1470 as the eastern gateway to the Old Schools in Cambridge. Demolished in 1754, it was re-erected at Madingley in 1758 by Sir John Hynde Cotton (1717–1795), who also had the ‘Gothick’ pinnacles and gable added to it. In 1756 Cotton had the grounds landscaped by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown; much of his work has been obscured, although his serpentine lake and sham bridge still remain. The Hall is today set in seven acres with a landscaped walled garden with topiary, a rose pergola and a hazel walk. In 1948 Madingley Hall was acquired by the Extramural Department of the University for classes, courses and conferences.
Hard by Madingley Hall is the 14th-century church of St Mary Magdalene, more attractive in its setting than in its external appearance but, according to Scarfe, ‘enter and the outside is forgotten’. Note especially the monuments to the Cotton family – Dame Jane (d. 1692), spinster Jane (d. 1707), and Admiral Sir Charles (d. 1812) by John Flaxman, and Commander Charles (d. 1828) by Sir Richard Westmacott.
Beyond Madingley Hall lies the American Military cemetery, sombre yet serene. White Italian marble headstones, 3,812 of them, fan out radially down a slope fading into a distant vista of the Cambridgeshire countryside. A memorial wall, punctuated by monumental statues of servicemen, lists the names of 5,127 men whose bodies were never recovered from their missions at sea or in the air. An austere chapel features windows honouring the then 48 states and massive carved maps of the Western European theatre of operations, and the distribution of major US bases in the United Kingdom. The site was a gift from the University of Cambridge and is maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission.
March
Densely settled and cultivated in Roman times, medieval March reverted to an outlying grange on the enormous estates of the Abbot of Ely before becoming a modest market town and then a strategic railway centre with vast marshalling yards. Pevsner gives the town only tepid approval – ‘pleasant to walk through, though it is lacking in outstanding buildings’ – with one major exception. The Town Hall of 1900 is dismissed as ‘hideous’ – not to be confused with the County Hall, which, built in three stages (1908, 1928 and 1937), is merely ‘bitty’. The parish church of St Wendreda, however, is in Scarfe’s words ‘rich and rewarding … worth a very long journey over the fens’. Basically 14th-century, enriched with Perpendicular additions in the early 16th century, it has, according to Lord Norwich, ‘the finest double hammer-beam roof in all England’, seemingly supported on the outspread wings of almost 200 carved angels. If you’ve ever wondered what a heavenly host looks like, look no further.
Newmarket
Tucked just inside Suffolk, a dozen miles east of Cambridge, Newmarket has been the home of English horse racing for four centuries, accommodating both the National Stud and the sport’s ruling body, the Jockey Club. The 1,000 Guineas and 2,000 Guineas races are run at Newmarket in the spring and the Cesarewitch and the Cambridgeshire in October. The surrounding countryside is open heathland, ideal for exercising the finest bloodstock.
Charles II brought his court to Newmarket twice a year, established the first written rules for the sport, donated prizes of silver plate and himself rode to victory in 1671. The ‘Rowley Mile’ racecourse is named for the King’s famously fertile stallion, Old Rowley, a name also attached to its owner. Most of Newmarket burnt down in 1683, so its oldest parts generally look Georgian. The National Horseracing Museum in the town centre tells the story of the sport and includes paintings by those masters of equine art, George Stubbs and Sir Alfred Munnings.
Saffron Walden
A dozen miles south of Cambridge, this ‘town of exceptional interest’ merits 15 pages from Pevsner. It takes its name from the saffron crocus, once used to dye the cloth produced here and also in cooking and medicine. The 15th-century parish church of St Mary the Virgin is one of the largest in Essex, built by the master masons of King’s College Chapel, Simon Clerk and John Wastell, its size and their involvement both evidence of the medieval town’s wealth. Later, Quaker businessmen made it a major centre for malting and brewing. There are also the remains of a modest 12th century castle, one of the earliest purpose-built museums (1834) and dozens of fine half-timbered buildings, many with pargeting, the decorative plasterwork unique to the Essex-Suffolk-Hertfordshire borders.
Thaxted
Pevsner rhapsodises – ‘The town as a whole is very perfect … truly not one house in it that would appear violently out of place.’ Seven miles south-east of Saffron Walden, Thaxted is dominated by the handsome church of St John the Baptist, made famous for music by its socialist ‘Red Dean’, Conrad Noel (1869–1942), reviver of Morris Dancing, and its most distinguished local resident, composer Gustav Holst (1874–1934). The tune of ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’ is named ‘Thaxted’. The much-photographed Guildhall of c.1460 was originally built as the headquarters of a local cutlery industry, later superseded by woollen textiles.
Trumpington
Now virtually an annexe of Cambridge, Trumpington was for centuries a favourite destination for weekend walkers. The Green Man Inn probably began its long life as a medieval house. Trumpington famously provides the setting for the Reeve’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a not altogether uplifting narrative of rustic fraud requited by clerical cuckoldry. Anstey Hall of c.1700 takes its name from leisured landowner Christopher Anstey (1724–1805) whose satirical poem about Britain’s most fashionable spa, The New Bath Guide (1766), made him famous. The ‘sumptuous’ 13th-century church of St Mary and St Michael was restored by William Butterfield (1814–1900). Inside is a memorial to F P C Pemberton, killed in Belgium in 1914, a very early work of sculptor and typographer Eric Gill, who also contributed the reliefs on the village war memorial (1921–2). The greatest treasure of the church is, however, the famous brass of Sir Roger de Trumpington (d.1289), the second oldest in England, in the eastern bay of the north chapel. There is also a pleasant woodland walk to Byron’s Pool, where Rupert Brooke swam naked with Virginia Woolf one magical moonlit night. Village children once knew it as ‘Dead Man’s Hole’, after a friend of Byron’s drowned there in 1811.
Wicken Fen
Charles Darwin came here in the 1820s, a victim of beetle mania. Britain’s first nature reserve was created in 1899 when the newly-established National Trust purchased a two acre strip of Fenland, subsequently enlarged to 800 acres, rich in plant, insect and bird life.
Wisbech – ‘Capital of the Fens’
… quintessentially Cambridgeshire – with the best approach, via the Brinks, to any English town I know.
John Julius Norwich
Wisbech (pronounced ‘wizbeach’), was once only four miles from the sea (now 12) and served as a thriving port for Peterborough. It is still an important market and centre for fruit-growers specialising in strawberries, raspberries and Bramley apples.
Wisbech is praised by Pevsner as ‘one of the most attractive towns of East Anglia’, with ‘a great many varied visual pleasures’. North Brink and South Brink, flanking the River Nene, are singled out as among ‘the finest Georgian brick streets of England’. Nearby is ‘a nice planned development of c.1800 with tucked-away streets and crescents of small houses.’ There are also numerous warehouses, a former workhouse, a windmill, a theatre, Sessions House, a police station, a grammar school, a brewery, and several ancient hostelries, including the Rose and Crown Hotel, the Queen’s Hotel, the Five Bells Inn and the New Inn.
The ‘showpiece of Wisbech’ is Peckover House of c.1722. Built for a local banker, it is complemented by stables, a barn, a grotto, a summer house and an Edwardian cats’ cemetery; it looks more impressive from the rear (garden) than the front (street). The interior décor is of immense sophistication and elegance, rich in panelling, carving and stucco and outstanding plasterwork. Lord Norwich notes of the house that ‘I know few others, even in Bath, that so effortlessly recapture the atmosphere of rich, cultivated provincial life in the first half of the 18th century … good taste reigns everywhere.’
In the town’s old cemetery is a Gothic chapel designed by Willis, the architectural historian. A spectacular 70-foot memorial of 1881 commemorates Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) whose diligent data collection supplied William Wilberforce with ammunition for his parliamentary campaign against the slave trade. As an undergraduate at St John’s College, Clarkson won a prize for a Latin essay on the question ‘Is it right to make slaves of others against their will?’ This was widely read in an English translation. Designed by the prolific Sir George Gilbert Scott, the monument features the badge of the abolitionist movement, a Wedgwood medallion of a slave in chains.
Author, atheist and anarchist, William Godwin (1756–1836), was born in Wisbech; his daughter, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein. The birthplace of Octavia Hill (1838–1912), housing reformer and founder of the National Trust, is marked by a modest plaque at No 7 South Brink. Wisbech was also the discreet chosen place of retirement of John Thurloe (1616–1668), Oliver Cromwell’s spymaster, although his house has long gone, like the Norman castle which once stood on the same site.
Wimpole Hall
Approached from the south by a two mile drive, Wimpole Hall is commended by Norman Scarfe as ‘the stateliest home in Cambridgeshire … one of the great showpieces of the region, as exciting as any secular building in Cambridge itself.’
The Hall’s historic core dates from 1641 when it was built for Sir Thomas Chicheley. Writing in the 1720s, however, Daniel Defoe regarded the Earl of Radnor, owner from 1689 until 1710, as the builder of the house as it existed by then, in a style characterised by Pevsner as ‘a subtle mixture of seventeenth century Dutch with Palladian English’. Wimpole, when Defoe saw it, had passed, by descent and marriage, to the manic bibliophile and alcoholic Edward Harley (1689–1741), second Earl of Oxford. His house guests included such literary luminaries as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and the poet Matthew Prior, who actually died at Wimpole. Harley employed James Gibbs to add the east and west wings, the library and a chapel with a trompe l’oeil coffered ceiling, reckoned by some to be the masterpiece of Sir James Thornhill, painter of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Lord Norwich commends the library, a double cube, as ‘worthy of the greatest book collector this country has ever known.’ After Harley’s death his books and manuscripts became one of the three founding collections of the British Museum.
Harley also brought in the royal gardener, Charles Bridgeman, to landscape the grounds. In 1740, having run through most of his wife’s £500,000 fortune, Harley sold Wimpole to the then Lord Chancellor, Philip Yorke, first Earl of Hardwicke. Hardwicke set Henry Flitcroft, architect of St Giles-in-the-Fields in London, to make further alterations, and the celebrated Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was commissioned to give the grounds his special touch. In the 1790s the future Sir John Soane obliged the third Earl by creating such typically idiosyncratic features as the Book Room, the massive Plunge Bath and the flamboyant Yellow Drawing Room, with its characteristic dome and profusion of apses, arches and spandrels. For Lord Norwich the Book Room is ‘marvellous … light, well-proportioned and utterly individual: no one but Soane could have achieved it.’ The Yellow Drawing Room – ‘Soane’s ultimate show-stopper’ – was created by knocking together a number of small rooms on two floors and demolishing a staircase to create a T-shaped space, large enough for balls, concerts and even amateur dramatics – rising through the whole height of the house. Brown’s successor as doyen of landscape gardeners, Humphrey Repton, gave the grounds yet another make-over.
Wimpole remained in Hardwicke hands until 1894, when bankruptcy obliged the spendthrift fifth Earl, ‘Champagne Charlie’, to sell up. After decades of neglect, in 1938 Wimpole was bought by Captain George Bambridge and his wife, Elsie, ‘Bird’, daughter of recently-deceased Nobel Laureate, Rudyard Kipling. Mrs. Bambridge restored the house with well-heeled enthusiasm and enlightened good taste. Look out for the trompe l’oeil table by Builly which features what appear to be abandoned cards, coins and sheet music. Lord Norwich especially approves of her ‘quirkish and delightful taste in pictures’. Following Mrs Bambridge’s death in 1976 Wimpole Hall passed to the National Trust. Her bedroom and study are preserved as when she occupied them, complete with two paintings by Tissot.
Five hundred yards north-west of the house is a mound which was probably the motte of a twelfth-century castle. Elsewhere in the grounds, on Johnson’s Hill, is a ‘Gothick’ tower folly. Designed in 1747 by Sanderson Miller, who specialised in this quirky architectural conceit, it was not built until c.1772. At one point it was used as living accommodation for a gamekeeper.
Wimpole now promotes itself as a family-friendly destination, ‘unique working estate with an impressive mansion at its heart’. Courses are offered in Livestock Husbandry, Hedgelaying, Blacksmithing, Ferreting, Scything, Spoon Carving, Rake Making and Heavy Horse Driving. The walled kitchen garden provides seasonal produce for the restaurant.