Time Out Country Walks near London Volume 1
Walk 26 : Shelford to Cambridge
Grantchester - the Rupert Brooke walk
| Length | 21.1km (13.2 miles), 6 hours 30 minutes. For the whole outing, including trains, sights and meals, allow at least 12 hours, especially if you want to visit one or two of the Cambridge colleges. |
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| OS Landranger Map | No.154. Shelford, map reference TL 465 523, is in Cambridgeshire, 6km south of Cambridge. |
| Toughness | 5 out of 10 (not 3 as in book. The walk is flat but long, with pavements hard on feet in Cambridge at end of walk). |
| Features | (There now are trains to Shelford on Sundays.) This walk is long and flat but full of interest, and it's a lovely way into Cambridge. Near the start, you may be able to walk along the River Cam from Shelford and its church, but you need to write two weeks in advance to ask the farm for permission (see the book's walk directions); otherwise there is a 2.5km stretch of road. On leaving the farm, the route passes the old mill at Hauxton, to the pub and church in Haslingfield (allow over two hours to get to the lunchtime pub here, which is 7.3km - 4.6 miles - from the start); and from there up near the travelling telescope (on rails) to Grantchester and The Orchard tearooms; then along the meadows and the Backs, to meander down the narrowest Cambridge lanes, past many of the colleges. |
| Shortening the Walk | There are regular buses from Haslingfield, the lunchtime stop, to Cambridge. Or you could do a shorter version of this walk by taking the bus 146 or X46 from Cambridge - from near the railway station, in Lensfield Road, by the Catholic Church on Hills Road, an hourly service (not on Sundays) - to auxton Gap, the lay-by mentioned in the book's walk directions, 335 metres beyond the Church of St Edmunds, Hauxton. For bus information phone Cambus on 01223 423 554. On entry into Cambridge city, you could avoid the visits to the colleges if you're tired and ask directions to the station, or catch a bus or taxi there; or at least when you reach the front of King's College after touring the colleges and city (The station is a very long way outside the centre, allow half an hour from the centre if walking.) |
| History |
Perhaps Friends of the Earth should employ poets. Writing a famous poem must be as effective a way as any of ensuring that a place is preserved forever. Rupert Brooke's poem The Old Vicarage he had rooms as a student at the Orchard, and later, at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester - was written in a mood of nostalgia in a Berlin cafe, in May 1912. The poem celebrates not only Grantchester and the river ('Laughs the immortal river still/Under the mill, under the mill?'), but the surrounding countryside ('And sunset still a golden sea/From Haslingfield to Madingley'). Augustus John camped in Grantchester meadows with, as Keynes put it, his 'two wives and ten naked children'; Brooke and Virginia Woolf (who dubbed his friends the 'Neo-Pagans') swam naked by moonlight; EM Forster visited to stay with Brooke at the Orchard; Wittgenstein would come there by canoe; AN Whitehead and Bertrand Russell worked on their Principia Mathematica at the Mill House, next to the Old Vicarage. As for the church clock ('oh! yet/Stands the Church clock at ten to three?/And is there honey still for tea?'), in Brooke's first draft it stood at half past three (the actual time it was stuck at for most of 1911). The Church of St Mary the Virgin, Great Shelford, was rebuilt at the expense of its rector, Thomas Patesley, in the early fifteenth century. It contains a mural of the last judgement which was painted about then, showing the devils, on the left of Christ, dragging away the damned in a chain. St Edmunds Church, Hauxton, is renowned as one of the oldest and most interesting small churches in Cambridgeshire, with Norman windows, doors and chancel arch; a thirteenth-century font bowl; a fifteenth-century pulpit and nave roof. It also contains a rare thirteenth-century fresco of St Thomas à Becket, which survived Henry VIII's depredations; and, having been previously walled up, this fresco also survived the vandalism of the notorious puritan William Dowsing (who, in 1643, destroyed 'three popish pictures' in this church). St Edmud became King of East Anglia in 856 at the age of 15, and was killed 13 years later by the Danes for refusing to renounce his Christian faith. The oldest surviving building in Cambridge is St Bene't's Church, which has a Saxon tower. Cambridge University was founded in the early thirteenth century by students and academics fleeing riots in Oxford, where the townsfolk felt imposed on by the academics. Within a couple of centuries, the university dominated the Cambridge townsfolk too: in 1440 Henry VI had a large part of medieval Cambridge demolished to make way for King's College, intended for students from his new Eton school; in 1496 a twelfth-century nunnery became Jesus College; in 1542 a Benedictine hostel was transformed into Magdalene College; and in 1596 Trinity College was endowed by Henry VIII, with funds from the monasteries he had vandalised. (A few colleges charge for admission, and some charge only from mid-March to September - although often with free admission to evensong. Evensong is the time to visit King's College Chapel, if you get the opportunity. Colleges may well be closed to the public during exams, from late April to mid-June.) |
| Lunch | The suggested lunchtime pub is the Little Rose (tel 01223 870 618), 7 Orchard Road, Haslingfield. The pub serves cheap and simple food from midday to 3pm weekdays and all day at weekends; groups of more than 15 people should phone to book. |
| Warning | This text was taken from an older edition of the book, and is a little out of date. Please check the updates for this walk. |
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Walking Instructions
For a map and detailed walking instruction, please see Time Out Country Walks near London Volume 1
