I'd been in Cambridge quite a few times before, always work-related and it's a place I struggle to understand - a completely different world from the one I live in. A world of academia and bicycles, college dons and big ideas.
I guess it's only the privileged few who get to study in Cambridge, it was never really an option that presented itself to me when I was a young buck, growing up in a working-class community in Donegal.
The allure of this other world has certainly worked its magic, judging by the hoards of tourists that were clogging up the city on the Saturday morning in August (last month) when we did this walk. I found it quite overwhelming actually, as myself and BAM (Best Aussie mate) used our walking poles as weapons, to carve our path through the crowded streets.
Cambridge station to Scudamore's Mill (2.6 miles/4.3 kilometres)
We set off along Station Road, then turned right along Hills Road, our initial destination being a diamond-shaped park called Parker's Piece. It's a curious name for a park and the land that the park is on once belonged to Trinity College, Cambridge but was sold to a man called Parker, which is where the name comes from. It's the place where the rules for Association football (the Cambridge rules) were formulated in the late 19th century.
From Parker's Piece, we made our way past Christ's College and along Market Street to Market Hill, where the Guildhall is, as well as Great St Mary's Church. We then made our way to King's Parade, past the impressive buildings of King's College and we ducked into King's Lane, which was a lot quieter than the main streets and followed Queen's Lane until we came to Scudamore's Mill and the punting station, where we were met again by crowds of people.
Scudamore's Mill to Grantchester (1.6 miles/2.7 kilometres)
I must admit, there is something very romantic about punting and I can see the attraction, although I'm not as fond of the water as BAM is, and I feel more comfortable walking along the river bank than punting down the river. We were following a really well-trodden route at this point and it's been a bit of a fashion, since the days of Rupert Brooke, to hire a punt at Cambridge and make your way down the river for a lazy picnic at Grantchester.
I became a bit obsessed with Rupert Brooke when I first discovered his poetry at university - he was such a handsome man - and I once knew his poem The Soldier pretty much by heart. An unusual thing for an Irishman, admittedly, but I think my obsession with English literature, the poems of Rupert Brooke and the novels of Thomas Hardy, with their magnificent descriptions of the English countryside, were a kind of rebellion to my Irish nationalist upbringing!
My older self reads The Soldier with a great deal of scepticism - I find it hard to enjoy the patriotism in the poem, the colonial heartbeat of the theme and the glorification of dying for your country. I don't believe any of that, although I do still find Rupert Brooke interesting and I'd love to learn more about his life.
His grave, that piece of foreign land that is forever England, is on the Greek island of Skyros, not far from Evia, where I once spent a holiday. As we walked along the River Cam, on our way to Grantchester, I thought that Rupert Brooke must be turning in his grave to know that the elegant tradition of punting has been taken over by raucous groups of privileged youth, destroying the tranquillity of the countryside by shouting and screaming with laughter, getting rat-arsed in the afternoon sun!
Like Puritans from a bygone era, myself and BAM had lunch on the river bank near Grantchester, tutting and shaking our heads in disbelief, as groups of lager louts punted by, in increasingly dangerous zig-zags, as they tried to navigate the narrow bends in the river.
Grantchester to Haslingfield (2.7 miles/4 kilometres)
We had another stop at the Orchard tea room in Grantchester, a wonderful place to sit and enjoy a mid-afternoon cup of tea or a snack. Rupert Brooke once lived at Orchard House and started a trend that was followed by notable writers like Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, as well as philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Not to mention the familiar hoards of tourists, who somehow managed to transport themselves from Cambridge in the morning to Grantchester in the afternoon.
This was the first Chester walk where we abandoned my paper map and did the whole thing solely through the Ordnance Survey app. BAM bought me a year's subscription to Ordnance Survey a few years ago, but the technology was difficult to use back then and not very accessible on a mobile platform. Since then, they've really upped their game. I have used the app on many walks recently, including trickier ones in the New Forest and it's been very reliable.
Not that it was difficult to find our way out of Grantchester and it was a very straight forward couple of miles along a walking path crossing the M11 and then following the curiously named 'Cantelupe Road' leading to the village of Haslingfield.
The M11 is quite a short motorway, just 56 miles from London to an obscure point near St Neot's, a place we've also visited on our Chester series. We don't believe that Cantelupe Road was named after the melon, but it's possibly named after the Viscounts Cantelupe (later Earls of De La Warr), Vita Sackville-West's ancestors, who seem to have an historic link to Cambridge.
There is also an English saint called Thomas de Cantilupe, so perhaps the road is named after him? Interestingly, St Thomas de Cantilupe died in the Papal States in Italy, not far from the village of Cantalupo in Sabina, which is where the melon takes its name from, although this melon species originates in Armenia. Cantaloupe means 'song of the wolf', but we didn't hear any wolves singing in Cambridgeshire, a long way from the hills of Lazio or Armenia!
Haslingfield to Great Shelford (4.2 miles/6.8 kilometres)
It was also quite a straight forward walk from Halsingfield to St Edmund's Church in Hauxton, however, as well as switching to new digital technologies, I've also been breaking in a new pair of walking boots and, by the time we stopped for a break at St Edmund's Church, my poor ankles were throbbing and I was in a bit of pain!
I always hate changing walking boots and my new pair are the third pair that I've had. My first ever pair of walking boots literally fell of my feet on the coastal path in Cornwall and my second pair seemed to be going to the same way, until BAM and other concerned friends staged an 'intervention' and convinced me to give them up finally.
From Hauxton we walked past a rather eerie abandoned mill, which used to be a traditional water mill, but lost its wheel a few years back. It would be a beautiful building, if it was refurbished and it definitely presents a good opportunity for creating a living or office space. It's a shame to see such a lovely building fall to wrack and ruin and I hope that someone does something with it before it falls down altogether.
After Hauxton Mill, we entered private land, which used to require written permission from the landowner, to cross his fields towards Great Shelford. He must have got fed up with responding to letters from walkers, as he's now set up a permissive path through his land and I hobbled onwards, each step more painful than the last until we reached St Mary's Church in Great Shelford.
Great Shelford is more like St Neot's than Cambridge and our eating options were pretty limited, but we had decent enough fare at The Plough, amusing ourselves by watching a rather overweight cat dodge the traffic, as he crossed the High Street. It was a short hobble from The Plough to the train station, where we caught our train back to London.
Access for Wheelchair users:
Cantelupe Road is a pleasant and accessible lane way, but it's very short. Unfortunately the rest of the walk, from Haslingfield to Great Shelford is also completely inaccessible for wheelchair users.
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