Grantchester - Academics, Apples and sore Ankles

As Cambridgeshire is so close to London, we decided to do our Grantchester walk as a day trip, travelling from Liverpool Street station to Cambridge early on Saturday morning, returning from Great Shelford station later in the evening.

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:

There are plenty of accessible routes around Cambridge and, if you can deal with the crowds in summer, it would be a pleasant place to have a wheelchair accessible holiday.  The path from Cambridge to Grantchester and over the M11 is completely inaccessible.  

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.  

Godmanchester - Rain, Revolution and Animal Rights

Despite the fact that there aren't so many chesters in the East of England, it was quite a coincidence that we ended up in Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire - as our last two chesters were also in the East of England - Great Chesterford in Essex and Brancaster in Norfolk.  Going to Godmanchester, really means going to Huntingdon, so were found ourselves on the Friday rush-hour commuter train to Peterborough, jumping out at Huntingdon and launching into a cold and wet autumnal evening. 

Despite last year's flooding and our adventures wading through water in places like Irchester, we haven't had a lot of rain on our chester walks.  Huntingdon made an interesting departure from this streak of luck.  We got soaked to the bone on arrival, as we walked from the station to the BnB, then from the BnB to dinner and back again.  After such a gorgeous summer, it was a sure sign that winter is on its way!

Lodgings and victuals

Braywood House

A warm welcome at the BnB certainly made up for the inclement weather and we were really happy to find ourselves at Braywood House on St Peter's Road in the north of the town.  Braywood House is a beautiful building, dating back to 1828, it was built as the home of the Governor of Huntingdon.  The building used to house the county gaol and 'house of correction' and the current owners have made an effort to retain the correctional theme in the names of the bedrooms. 

We had a rather extravagant, but very tasty, meal at The Old Bridge Hotel, an 18th century townhouse by the River Ouse.  A nice bottle of wine helped us brave the elements once more, as we walked back across town to Braywood House. 

BAM (Best Aussie Mate) seems to be somewhat of magnet for her fellow Australians and we had an interesting conversation around the breakfast table, the following morning, with a couple of Aussie Mormons from Adelaide, who were in England visiting relatives and Mormon places of interest!

Braywood House to Godmanchester (1.3 miles/2.1 kilometres)

Huntingdon High Street

Huntingdon is a funny kind of place.  We got a real sense that it has seen better days and somehow hasn't quite achieved its full potential.  It's, perhaps, most famous as the birthplace of Oliver Cromwell, who was born in a house on the High Street in 1599.  His former school now hosts The Cromwell Museum. 

Flagstone commemorating Cromwell

I've always found Cromwell fascinating - occasionally revered by the left in Britain, as a true revolutionary who overthrew the monarchy and established a British Republic - he has a really bad reputation in Ireland, having engineered the massacre of many native Irish people in towns like Drogheda and Wexford.  I've written about his attempt to ethnically cleanse Ireland in my sister blog, Learning about the World. 

It was very weird being in his birthplace and I wondered how much Huntingdon's connection with Cromwell was responsible for the eclipse of that town's prosperity in favour of places like Cambridge and Peterborough.  Historically, Huntingdonshire was its own county within England - now it's part of Cambridgeshire, which seems like a kind of punishment for producing England's only dictator!

Godmanchester to Brampton Mill (1.7 miles/2.8 kilometres)

Godmanchester

Boathouse in Godmanchester

Bridge over the River Ouse

Crossing the pedestrian bridge to Godmanchester and everything changed - suddenly we were no longer in the town, but in a rather pleasant little village with quirky buildings, a boat haven and pretty little riverside park.  For the rest of our walk, we were following the Ouse Valley Way - a 150-mile footpath that runs from the source of the River Ouse in Northamptonshire, to the Wash at King's Lynn - linking up with the Norfolk coastal path that we walked along in our Brancaster walk. 

There are several rivers in England named Ouse - probably related to the Celtic word for 'slow flowing river' and possibly related to the modern English verb 'to ooze'?  The one we walked along is called 'Great Ouse' to distinguish it from all the lesser ones, in other parts of the country.  One of the Ouse's tributaries is the River Cam - the river we saw on our last Chester walk, in Great Chesterford and the one which gives Cambridge its name.  Somehow our walking becomes an interconnecting tapestry of rivers, ancient paths and English history!


The largest meadow in England

From Godmanchester we crossed Portholme - the largest meadow in England and site of the former Roman settlement of Durovigitum a major crossroads on Ermine Street and the Via Devana route between Colchester and Chester.  It's a beautiful open space, with a slightly ancient feeling, despite being hemmed in by the modern trappings of road and rail. 

Brampton Mill to Buckden Marina (2.2 miles/3.5 kilometres)

Sign post near Brampton Mill

Due to diversions on the foot path, we somehow missed Brampton Mill - although it looks like a lovely spot for lunch or a quiet pint.  As we settled into the Ouse Valley way, our conversation turned to the relationship between humans and dogs.  This is something I blogged about recently in Learning about the World and myself and BAM found ourselves questioning the morals of the human/dog relationship and the way we treat animals in general, not to mention plants and our environment.

By coincidence, I found out later that Brampton Mill is not that far from Huntingdon Life Sciences - an animal research laboratory that has attracted a lot of attention and protests from animal rights activists, due to their alleged mistreatment of animals.  In 1997, BUAV - the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection secretly recorded a documentary in the Huntingdon Life Sciences laboratory called It's a Dog's Life, which showed cruelty against dogs and this was broadcast on the popular British TV station, Channel Four. 

Blackberries

Subsequent intimidation campaigns directed at laboratory staff and suppliers, has resulted in prison sentences for animal rights activists belonging to SHAC - the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty animal rights group.  I believe that animals should be treated with dignity and fairness but I'm not convinced that violence is the answer to the animal rights question - perhaps there a wider need for a cultural shift in terms of how we view animals and how we treat them.  Animal research laboratories are an obvious target for animal rights groups, but what about the everyday cruelty that animals, in particular dogs, experience from incompetent and neglectful owners?  Surely that merits some debate?

Buckden Marina to Little Paxton (3.9 miles/6.4 kilometres)

Wooden lodge at Buckden Marina

Buckden Marina is a very peaceful place and we were fascinated by the wooden lodges that surround the marina, making us feel as though we'd suddenly arrived in the wilds of Canada!  Whilst it seems like a really relaxing place to have a second home - the price tag of £160,000 for the most basic lodge, probably pushes it out of our 'casual spending' budgets!  Still, if we win the National Lottery . .



Path through Paxton Nature reserve

Apart from the distant buildings of Offord Cluny, there isn't much sign of civilisation in this remote corner of Huntingdonshire and the rest of our walk to Little Paxton was a dreamy, wandering path along the river and through the Paxton Pits Nature Reserve.  Originally a quarry for extracting gravel, Paxton Pits is now a wonderful area of lakes and woodland, teeming with all kinds of wildlife.  Its proximity to the village of Little Paxton meant that we soon started seeing dogwalkers and afternoon-strolling families.

Little Paxton to St Neot's railway station (2.5 miles/4.1 kilometres)

View of Paines Mill Foyer, St Neot's

From Little Paxton we crossed the River Ouse and followed a path along the Lammas meadow to the centre of St Neot's.  Named after a Cornish monk, St Neot's is the very definition of  'commuter town'. I found it hard to feel any connection to the place, although the view of the Paines Mill Foyer from the meadow was quite picturesque.

After a quick meal at The Weeping Ash on New Street, we made our way past housing developments to the railway station and our train back to London.

Access for wheelchair users:

Narrow footbridge over the River Ouse

Unfortunately, as the Ouse Valley way follows a very narrow riverside path, it wouldn't be at all suitable for wheelchair users.  I would recommend some walking around Huntingdon and Godmanchester as far as Portholme which, being a meadow, is not accessible.  I would also recommend a circular walk Paxton Pits Nature Reserve, as this is accessible and a really lovely place to spend a morning or afternoon. 

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Ancaster - Isaac Newton and the great Ocean of Truth

In my quest to do some research before the Grantham-Ancaster-Sleaford walk, I decided to learn more about Isaac Newton, who was born in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, just a few miles south of Grantham and a stone's thrown from the ancient Roman road, known as Ermine Street.  It's amazing really that this son of an illiterate farmer from Lincolnshire, could become one of the most influential thinkers in human history. 

Early life in Woolsthorpe and Grantham

Newton was what is known as a posthumous child, meaning his father died before he was born.  The consequences for Newton were severe, in that his mother was forced to remarry and, as part of her marriage contract, to abandon the young Isaac, leaving him in the care of his grandmother.  Newton hated his mother's new husband and I have no doubt that the experiences of his childhood would go some way to explain his antagonism towards society in later life and his desire to live in a world of numbers and equations. 

Newton had a wide variety of interests throughout his life and, although we usually associate him with the sciences of physics and optics, he was also interested in subjects like Linguistics (he wished to design a common, global language that would be based on mathematical principles) and History (towards the end of his life, he spent weeks and months calculating the reigns of Kings and Pharoahs and trying to predict the end of the world.)

Cambridge and the Lucasian professorship

Newton's mother had always intended that he would go into farming and continue the familty tradition at Woolsthorpe, but Newton was so phenomenally bad at sheep rearing that money was found to send him to Cambridge, albeit in a very lowly position as sizar, ie. a kind of servant to the richer boys.  He managed to make a name for himself and did so well at Cambridge that, aged 26, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, currently one of the most prestigious academic titles in the world, having been held recently by people like Stephen Hawking. 

Newton was only the second person to hold this post, mathematics being a new arrival on the academic scene and somewhat derided for being the science of merchants and traders.  In the historical context of the Interregnum, the Age of Exploration and the new politics of Cromwell and the Puritans, mathematics was becoming increasingly important as a subject matter.  By all accounts, Newton was a great academic, but a poor lecturer.

Light, Space and Colour

During his time at Cambridge, Newton continued his research into the nature of light, space and colours.  He's famous for inventing the reflecting telescope, which increased the ability of astromers to explore the sun, solar system and far-away planets.  Late 17th-century Europe was a bit obsessed with space and the solar-system.  Early scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo had exploded the myths about the Earth being flat and the solar system revolving around the Earth.  Much of Newton's time was devoted to understanding the relationship of the solar system to the sun.  He was amongst the first to posit magnetic fields of attraction, that held the sun and the planets in orbit and meant that the movement of planets and comets could be predicted.  The 1690's saw an unusal number of comets pass through the Earth's atmosphere, no doubt leading to a sense of panic and a feeling that the end of the world was nigh.  Newton wasn't an astronomer, but he was able to apply mathematical principles to rationalise the orbit of celestial bodies.  One of his biggest fans was a young astronomer called Edmund Halley, well-known to us in modern times because of Halley's comet.

Alchemist or Scientist

Newton's era saw a revolution in attitudes towards the older science of Alchemy and the new sciences being explored by the newly-founded Royal Society.  Because he believed in invisible fields of attraction or magnetism, Newton was accused of being an Alchemist.  Alchemistry was starting to get a bad name, as science moved into the Age of Enlightenment.  There was a real desire among the new scientists to rid science of all quasi-religious or supernatural associations.  To his credit, Newton spent all his energy rationalising that which seemed irrational, but he still allowed for an element of magic or the unknown.  Later critics of Newton, like the poet William Blake criticised Newton for taking modern science down the road of mechanisation and away from the very obvious spirituality of the Earth.  In many ways, I think it was inevitable that Newton's rationalising would consign Alchemistry to the footnotes of modern Science, although I'm not sure that this is what Newton had intended.

Rivalries and the Royal Society

My work is all about helping teachers collaborate online, across borders and with teachers in other parts of Europe and the world, so I'm really interested in the history of global collaboration.  In many ways, the Royal Society was the very beginning of this.  Not only did the Royal Society, which was founded in 1660, seek to bring science into the realm of experiment and away from the endless theorising of previous generations, but it was also the first time an international review of scientific developments was published, mostly organised by Henry Oldenburg, a German diplomat and first Secretary of the Royal Society.  For me, it was exciting to learn about this early example of international collaboration and how, by building on and developing the ideas of their counterparts on the Continent, British scientists and mathematicians were able to leap forward and add a new element to the debates that were raging across Europe at the time.

I would love to say that Newton embraced this collaboration whole-heartedly but, in fact, the opposite was true.  Having been stung early on by the criticism of his arch-rival Robert Hooke, Newton became obsessively secretive about his work, refusing to share his research with others and refusing to listen to any criticism or questioning of his theories.  In many ways he was right!  It seems as though Newton was ahead of his time, which would explain why he found the endless questioning and doubt of his contemporaries frustrating.  Time has proved Newton correct on many points, most notably the existence of magnetic forces and also atoms, which he struggled to conceptualise or define.  His rivalry with Hooke and later with Leibniz reminds me of children squabbling over a favourite toy.  It certainly wasn't the best example of scientists collaborating.

Principia - Newton in a nutshell

What Newton is most remembered for is his publication Principia, reputedly one of the most boring books ever written.  I have an abhorrence of maths and physics, so a lot of Newton's discoveries have gone right over my head, as no doubt is the case with many of us.  Nevertheless, I'll try to summarise Newton's Laws of Motion, so apologies to the real scientists out there!

Law 1 - Everything will stay in its original place, unless compelled to move by force (especially important to know this one if you have to get a teenager to school in the morning)

Law 2 - There is a relationship between the rate of change and the force applied and this can be calculated mathematically (although I wouldn't even know where to begin)

Law 3 - probably the most famous one:  every action has an opposite and equal reaction, eg. when a horse pulls a cart, the cart (although seemingly inanimate) also pulls against the horse. 

Whew!  Back to Newton's biography.

Working-class boy makes good

I don't know whether or not it was to do with his poor upbringing, but when Newton was offered the chance to become warden of the Royal Mint, under the patronage of Charles Montagu, the first Earl of Halifax (who was boning Newton's niece), he jumped at it!  It might seem like a strange profession for one of Britain's most eminent scientists to pursue (by all accounts he was ruthless in his pursuit of counterfeiters), but it kind of makes sense, given his background in alchemistry (manipulating metals) and mathematics.  Also it made him fabulously wealthy, which he celebrated in true rags-to-riches style by decorating his new London home in a gaudy crimson and by dying intestate. 

Newton and the apple

His resounding legacy for those of us who are not scientists is, of course, the apple.  I remember as a child, reading about Newton discovering gravity by sitting under an apple tree and having an apple fall on his head.  I tried the same experiment a few times, but you have to wait an awful long time for an apple to fall - better to give it a bit of encouragement with a stick (see the First Law of Motion). 

Of course, the story of the apple didn't really happen.  Newton had a fair idea about gravity already and didn't need an apple to prove it.  However, he did have apple trees in his garden at Woolsthorpe and he did speculate about the amount of gravity it takes to bring an apple crashing to the Earth, as opposed to the Moon, which has never been drawn in by the Earth's gravity in this way.  I guess this was the birth of the Second Law of Motion and the relationship between force and rate of change.  Newton realised that the Earth's gravitational pull on the apple must be a lot stronger than its pull on the Moon and was able to calculate the difference in a way that made absolute sense to him and his mathematical buddies (I guess the rest of us just need to trust them!). 

It's no surprise really that the story of Newton and the apple caught the imagination of 18th-century Europe, when Voltaire started retelling the story, as though it had actually happened.  Of course, in Christian mythology, the apple is associated with Eve and the Garden of Eden.  It's about sharing divine knowledge and breaking the last taboos of man's dependence on God.  I guess, like Adam, Newton also tasted the apple of Eden and moved science in a direction it would never again return from. 

I want to leave you with one of Newton's most famous quotes, which sums up his assessment of his life's work.

I don't know what I may seem to the world but, as to myself, I seem

to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting

myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell

than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered

before me.

Credits:

The image of the sign at Grantham station was taken by me.

The portrait of Newton is one he commissioned in 1689 and was painted by one of London's most fashionable portrait artists, Godfrey Kneller.  This image is in the public domain and copyright-free.

The drawing of Newton with the graph is by the poet William Blake and it's an image I absolutely love.  It depicts Newton as a semi-Godlike being, rippling with muscles and animal energy.  This is also in the public domain.

The image of the statue of Newton is one I took on Grantham High Street last weekend.

Most of the information in this blog is from a book I've just read called Isaac Newton by James Gleick, the third edition published by Harper Perennial in 2004.