In looking southward from Sutton Church, three steeples are specially conspicuous in the Ouse valley. They are those of Over, Swavesey, and Willingham. All are churches of the first class, and all are best reached from Cambridge by way of the Via Devana, which, after crossing the "Great Bridge" and climbing the ascent past the Castle, continues its straight course to the north-west under the designation of the Huntingdon Road. Just as it leaves the town a branch-road on the right leads to the village of Histon, which the jam factories of Messrs. Chivers have made one of the most flourishing in the county. The church here has some good Early English work, and a remarkable "Rood" (much defaced) on the gable of the S. transept. This is an almost unique example of the early "Majestas" type of crucifix (p. 339). Christ, with outspread arms, wears, not the Crown of Thorns, but the Old English "king-helm," and is fully robed. About 1200 this ideal type gave place to the later "realistic" crucifix. [Illustration: _Sutton Church._] A mile beyond the last houses of Cambridge the Via Devana comes to the huge red-brick mass of Girton College, which has been already spoken of.[193] Its spacious grounds and never-ending corridors impress the mind with admiration for the enthusiasm and energy which has thus materialised Tennyson's vision of University education for women. At this point another northward turn takes us to Girton Church, where there are good brasses to two successive fifteenth century parsons. In their day the living belonged to Ramsey Abbey, by the gift of Eric, Bishop of Dorchester (1016). We next come to Oakington, the Mecca of Cambridgeshire Free Churchmen. For here, in the quiet little Nonconformist Cemetery, rest, side by side, the three men to whom the chief sects of the county trace their spiritual ancestry--Francis Holcroft, Joseph Oddy, and Henry Oasland. [Footnote 193: See p. 144.] The first named was a Fellow of Clare College where he had for his "chum" (_i.e._ chamber-mate, as we find the word used in "Pickwick") Tillotson, the future Archbishop of Canterbury. He began his ministerial career by taking on himself to supply the place of a brother collegian, the Puritan minister in charge of Littlington, near Royston, who, most un-Puritanically, was often incapacitated by drink from performing his duties. Later, in 1655, when still only twenty-two, he himself became pastor of the adjoining parish of Bassingbourn. When the "Black Bartholomew" of 1662 deprived him of this charge under the Act of Uniformity, he preached, at the risk of fine and imprisonment, throughout the neighbourhood, binding together his adherents in a loosely-knit organisation, whose members were admitted on subscribing the following Profession of Faith: