Highways and Byways in Cambridge and ElyConybeare, John William Edward
History
Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely
Conybeare, John William Edward
Cambridgeshire (England) -- Description and travel; Isle of Ely (England) -- Description and travel
But they kept a tight grip upon him, and, when he left Childerley that
Tuesday morning, would not allow him to ride on to his state prison
at Newmarket through Cambridge (where the streets were being decked in
his honour with "whole rose-bushes and strewn with rushes and herbs"),
lest these demonstrations should kindle too ardent a flame of loyalty.
He was accordingly carried round by way of Grantchester and
Trumpington. Since that time Childerley Hall has been rebuilt, but the
room in which the King slept is still to be seen. And hard by the Hall
there still stands the unpretentious little red-brick chapel (now a
barn) in which he worshipped on that memorable Sunday.
A mile further along the road, lanes again branch off north and south.
The northern leads to the secluded hamlet of Knapwell, where a spring
of ferruginous waters, held of old to be wonder-working, still
justifies its ancient name of the Red Well. The southern brings us to
Bourn, where the Bourn brook rises. On the slope above the stream
stands the beautiful cruciform church, of late Norman and Early
English architecture; the arches which open from the tower into the
nave and the aisles being particularly noticeable. Bourn Hall is a
fine Elizabethan mansion, the seat of J. Briscoe, Esq., and is the
modern representative of a castle (the moat of which still exists)
erected here by Picot, Sheriff of Cambridgeshire under William the
Conqueror, and the scene of hard fighting in the Barons' War, when it
belonged to the Peverells.
Eleven miles from Cambridge we cross the Ermine Street, a junction
sufficiently important to have been selected by the wisdom of our
ancestors as the site of a gibbet; the object being that as many as
possible should see the gruesome spectacle of malefactors hanging in
chains, and thus, if evilly disposed, take warning, or, if well
disposed, be encouraged by this visible vindication of the Law's
majesty. The gibbet has been gone for a century and more; but till
quite lately the sign-post here directed the traveller simply TO
LONDON and TO YORK on either hand, reminding us that this was the old
North Road.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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