From Huntingdon our road, keeping close in touch with the river, takes us through the pretty villages of Hartford, Wyton, and Houghton, to St. Ives. A yet prettier way is to recross the stream at Houghton Lock and take a field-road across the meadows to the two Hemingfords, Hemingford Abbots and Hemingford Grey. The latter is famous as the birthplace of the Misses Gunning, who were the leading beauties of the Court in the early days of the reign of George the Third, and married into the highest families of the Peerage. Both churches stand on the very brink of the Ouse, about a mile apart, their graceful steeples, with that of Houghton to the north-east and that of St. Ives to the north-west, watching as guardian sentinels over the rich Ouse meadows between. All have spires, but that of Hemingford Grey lost its upper part by an equinoctial gale in the middle of the eighteenth century, and only the base now remains. St. Ives is yet another of Edward the Elder's fortresses, and is probably named from the Cornish town similarly designated. It is possible that it may be even a colony from that far-off strand, which had never swerved in its allegiance, planted here to leaven the turbulent Danish elements around. Certain it is that here Ednoth, Abbot of Ely, erected a church dedicated to St. Ivo. Who this saint may have been originally is not known; probably he (or she) was one of the many obscure Celtic saints whose names dot the map of Cornwall. But there grew up in the eleventh century a wild legend that Ivo, a Persian (!) bishop, had settled down in the neighbourhood. In the fifteenth century a stone sarcophagus, found by a peasant when ploughing, was declared to contain the body of this holy Oriental, and was translated with due pomp to the neighbouring Abbey of Ramsey. St. Ives was specially connected with this House, and it was an Abbot of Ramsey who built the beautiful bridge, the ditto of that at Huntingdon, by which we here recross to the left bank of the Ouse.