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The Great North Road and, rather more accurately, the old Great Northern Railway, cut little Huntingdonshire in halves along its longest axis, which is only thirty miles. What hosts of people have hurried through it without any notion of its character or the names and nature of its villages! Nevertheless, these birds of the passage exert a definite influence on the social life that they hardly touch. The claim that transportation is civilization, a favourite thesis of Kipling's, is curiously illustrated by the annals, new and old, of several villages. One quaint example may be recorded. Soon after the Great North road enters the county from the south, it passes through Buckden. Though this historic village never became a town, as was expected at several periods of its history, it was a very well-known place in the coaching days when it was a famous stage in the journey between London and York. When the railways robbed the roads of their eminence, and the Great Northern Railway outpaced the Great North Road, Buckden fell back, and its famous inns lost much of their old prosperity and also something of their sense of rivalry. Happily, the whirligig of time does not cease to revolve. When the motorcar came to restore their busy life to the roads, it was found that Buckden about sixty miles north of London, was a convenient rest for those who could escape from London after business hours on Friday; and so get a flying start for a longer expedition on Saturday. The two chief inns each kept a man by their entrances to catch the arriving motorists, as was made manifest to the world by the report of a stand-up fight in the street by the two propagandists. These very excellent inns, like many others, are now, we may hope, permanently restored to prosperity. The village itself is large and prosperous, but the long red wall and tower of the old palace of the bishops of Lincoln indicate that once upon a time Buckden was no less prosperous than it is at the present time and certainly much more important.
When the motorists leave Buckden on Saturday morning for their extended journey, they see at the first crossroads, one of which leads to Huntingdon, a signpost with the pleasingly condensed legend "To the North." A little farther on, after passing through Alconbury, they are offered a telling illustration of the general structure of the shire, if they have eyes to see it. On their right, to the east, stretches a singularly spacious view over the fens, so-called flattest and now the most fertile land in England. The surface - hence the fertility - is sometimes of peat, sometimes of silt, under-laid by marl, which has proved ideal for fertilizing the alluvial or black soil overlaying it. The road itself is well kept up, and the land on its west side is agreeably undulating, moulded out of some of the toughest clay in England. It has not always has a good name among farmers, but it provides admirable bean and wheat land when well worked and drained.
This proviso indicates a serious social change in the shire. When the price of wheat fell to the neighbourhood of a guinea a quarter, acre after acre of corn land was allowed to fall back rough, often very rough, grass. I, personally, am very familiar with fields (giving excellent cover for partridges, hares, rabbits, moles and ants) which followed the course of the Garden of Eden after the fall. They were choked by thorn and briar. The ditches were not cleaned, and so the water held up by the clay could not escape and the hedges spread into bits of woodland. Not a penny of profit came to the landlords, and the farmers had much ado to live. Farm buildings and fences fee into ruin. The clergy began to fear that their tithes would cease to be paid. Indeed, much of this part of the shire was well on the way to become prairie.
It is on authentic record that an M.F.H (Ed: Master of Foxhounds), standing as candidate for parliament, was heckled by an opponent, who finally called out, "And what is the chief industry where you come from?" He replied instantly "Fox ‘untin'" - and was cheered to the echo. The impression which the heckler had tried to create was defeated by its own success. The hunt was indeed the only prosperous industry and was popular with all classes.
Now, for a part of the year the Fitzwilliam hunt made its headquarters at Great Gidding. Perhaps its most famous meet (Catworth guidepost, excepted) was Gidding Windmill. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the mill, once very prosperous, fell into disuse and the village of Great Gidding ceased to deserve its attribute. It became little bigger than the more famous Little Gidding and Steeple Gidding. When I first knew Great Gidding and rode my pony to the meet, the population was about eight hundred. When I visited the place some forty years later it was about three hundred. The place reminded me of Galway on the west coast of Ireland and of Constantinople, both of which the outskirts consist of houses that had been allowed to tumble into shapeless ruins. But the unsightly outskirts of Great Gidding have, I understand, been tidied up since last I visited the village.
No county in England suffered so dramatically as did Huntingdonshire from rural depopulation and loss of land value. The decline had probably been in progress for several hundred years, as indicated by the foundations of great houses, the avenues leading from nowhere to nowhere, the fishponds and moats, and the memorials in the huge churches, now standing over tiny hamlets often consisting of no more than a few ill-thatched cottages.
The fall in the value of properties is hard to believe. A good example is the fortune of the farm just below the parish church in Little Gidding. The farm in question, owned at one time by a squarson of an almost forgotten type, was bought in 1777 for £22 an acre. The purchase spent at least as much as the price of land on cottages and farmhouses and homesteads, which have proved solid enough to defy the attacks of time. In 1915, the farm with all these excellent buildings was sold for £12 and acre, a sum that would not pay for the houses alone. The end was not yet. A few years later, the farm with its buildings was again sold at the rate of £4 10s an acre. And this was good land, in a beautiful scene, very well treed with a running brook at the boundary, and little more than sixty miles from London. What had we done to England that such a place should be worth only about half as much as a houseless farm of indifferent quality land in thinly populated Australia?
The squarson, who owned a good deal of property in Huntingdonshire, was a glorious character. He came once to take duty at the next village to Steeple Gidding, dressed in a coat of unknown pattern, and thus explained its origin. "You see," he said, "I had to have a coat in which I could hunt on Saturday, do duty in Hamerton Church on Sunday and attend Peterborough market on Monday!" With the rector he established on the glebe a sort of communal cow-pasture, which greatly assisted the more energetic members of the village. Common grazing, associated with private patches for haying, and the provision of funds for the purchase and inuring of milch cows have brought back some of the spirit of pre-enclosure days.
"La tere qui meurt" might have stood as title for a tale of this bit of England; but the land did not quite die and never will. It was near the point of extinction at the opening of the First World War; it was on the way to revival in and after the Second, though the old value has not yet returned. This fall in land values is most clearly reflected in the diminution of tithes. Today, in consequence, one parson does duty in three parishes, each of which once owned its vicar or rector. At one period when this clay land was going out of cultivation and losing population, the fenland east of the Great North Road was growing both more populous and more productive.
The shire is not famous for its landscape beauty, but those who have their home there see in its spinneys and farms and hamlets and hedges an epitome of rural England. The hunting man who followed the hounds over a favourite line of country from, say, Buckworth Wood to Salome Wood and thence to Hamerton Grove through Gidding Gorse to the big wood of Aversley, will ask for nothing better. There is nothing within the shire that suggest the urban. Even its capital, Huntingdon, is less like a town in many regards than a village, and its neighbour, Godmanchester, though not very much smaller, is village pure and simple. However, both towns, in spite of the village atmosphere, are the proud possessors of mayor and corporations, thanks to the antiquity of their histories.
Incidentally, these two little townships are joined by a causeway across the marshy ground and a fourteenth century bridge of exceptional beauty across the Ouse. Passage today, of course, is free, but the bridge was at one time financed by special tolls; and it is recorded under date 1279, that these included "on every Jew and Jewess crossing the bridge on horseback one penny, on foot one halfpenny." The first bridge was almost wholly destroyed and the greater part of the present bridge was built in 1332.
One of the sins of our time is a disregard of our river. The Ouse (a word which like Usk, or Wye, means water) is not poisoned like the Lea, the chief river of Hertfordshire, but its general management as a navigable water-way, which once extended from Bedford to the sea, has been grievously mismanaged in recent times, chiefly by neglect of the locks in the neighbourhood of Godmanchester. It has at times flooded seriously, with the result that the whole of that glorious plain known as Port Holme, has been under water. Those who have suffered from floods along the lower reaches where the slow stream has difficulty in reaching the sea at the Wash, have been in constant conflict with those responsible for the upper reaches. An admirable scheme (by which all neighbours of the river from Bedfordshire to Cambridge through Huntingdon would have benefited) was worked out and put forward by the famous engineer Rennis, but no whole-scale reformation was then put into effect. Happily, the Ouse Drainage Board has since carried out extensive alterations and the floods are now properly controlled.
However, at all time the Ouse at Huntingdon has remained a waterway of singular beauty. Some of the reed beds are as dense as forests. They are much enjoyed as roosting places by thousands of swallows and starlings; and nowhere perhaps are the deep swinging nests of the reed-warblers found in such numbers. The waters abound with coarse fish, such as perch, bream, tench and pike; and there is no good reason why salmon should not run up from the sea. It is put on record in the registers of the church at the beautiful village of Hamerton, lying on a brook which has a nine-mile course before it reached the Ouse, that after a famous flood "a salmon a yard and an inch long was found stranded in Farmer Newton's meadow." I have seen the same little brook flood the village street and invade a number of the thatched cottages; and it is recorded that "low fevers" were at one time frequent and sever. Happily, a thorough cleaning of the bed not so long ago put an end both to the flooding and the fevers, and the brook is more conspicuous for its absence in any dry summer than for its excesses in winter.
It is written in a standard and popular life of Cromwell that Hinchingbrooke, the lovely and historic house just west of Huntingdon, is situate on the Ouse. It is not, but the rich gardens run down to this brook, which at that point has almost the dimensions of a river. The house, which is of great charm, was founded on the site of a nunnery. It was brought from Sir Oliver Cromwell by Sir Sydney Montagu, whose descendants, the Earls of Sandwich, have adorned it not only within by famous pictures, largely on naval subjects, and without by as beautiful gardens as you could wish to see, but have enlarged and added to the structure with great architectural taste. It was famous in both the world wars as a hospital. After the last ware it was made over by George Charles Montagu, the ninth earl of Sandwich, to his eldest son, Viscount Hinchingbrooke.
Its one rival in architectural charm is a Norman doorway of the old grammar school at Huntingdon, where Pepys and Oliver Cromwell were educated. The discovery of this relic and its subsequent restoration are in pleasing contrast with many acts of iconoclasm in the neighbourhood. Of late one of the loveliest old mills in England, in Godmanchester on a branch of the Ouse where it approaches the old Ermine Street, was of necessity pulled down by local authorities. The mill, with the junction of the two divisions of the river, the island (joined to a beautiful house by a willow pattern bridge) and the little, almost Venice-like boathouses set a flourish on as charming a corner of river scenery as could be found in any county.
This little county is dominated by the Ouse, which enters it at St Neots, called after a monk whose relics where stolen from Cornwall and placed in a priory in the little town. From the picturesque old water-mill, converted into a paper-making factory about 1807, the river, once the third biggest in England, flows in a broad, slow stream through twenty-five miles of the county and touches some of the loveliest villages in England, first by the mill and lock at Offord, then Brampton, past Pepys' farm. After ten miles it reached first Godmanchester and then Huntingdon. The scene from the Huntingdon Bridge drew almost ecstatic admiration from William Cobbett; and his tribute is still well deserved.
"The valleys terminate at the foot of rising ground, well set with trees, from which church spire raise their heads here and there. I think it would be very difficult to find a more delightful spot than this in the world. To my fancy (and everyone has his taste) the prospect from this bridge far surpasses that from Richmond Hill. The famous mill at Houghton, some three miles farther down-steam (once a youth hostel) is perhaps the best-known mill in England, and the village itself is one of the prettiest in the whole county. Two miles farther on past a lock and mill are twin villages, a mile and a half apart, which county patriots, not without good argument, claim to be among the loveliest in England. Certainly both Hemingford Grey and Hemingford Abbots, with the river, the churches and Elizabethan cottages and houses, may contemplate even with Finchingfield or Ewelme. The Norman manor house at Hemingford Grey stakes a claim to be the oldest inhabited house in England.
At the seventeenth mile from St Neots the river flows under a bridge that is very nearly unique, by reason of the old chapel still standing on its middle. The views, though lovely, are not to all tastes. It is written in a life of Laurence Sterne, who had first curacy in St Ives: "Thanks to the torpid influence of that Midland landscape, where church bell answers church bell across miles of fen, and the damp plain stretches unbroken as far as the towers of Ely humped against a glimmering sky . . . the atmosphere of Sterne's charge was doubtless, doubly soporific."
There is less interest in the next few miles, till the boundary of the shire is reached at Bluntisham and Earith, which have inspired both a remarkable book on local folk-lore (Bluntisham-cum-Earith; Records of a Fen Parish) and an account of birds in a rectory garden by E. A. Peake, once a well-known Oxford cricketer. Until the railway era, the two villages were important as a junction of the two branches of the river, where was the first high ground, so described, reached by vessels in their passage up-stream. Today their wealth comes not from barge traffic but from their orchards. After it leaves its favourite county, the Ouse becomes a medley of canals that have altered its character and abbreviated its length.
Many Huntingdonshire names are of particular interest. Thus it is written of the county: "It is remarkable that so small an area in the Midlands should include four such ancient names as Gidding, Yelling, Lymage and Wintringham suggesting that the original settlers were Angles." As to Earith: "We must have here and in Erith (Kent) a compound of the Old English ‘ear' and ‘hyth' meaning perhaps ‘muddy landing place'."
One other river, though smaller, less lovely and much less important, has great historic interest. The Nene flows reluctantly along the northern boundary of the county to much the same bourne as the Ouse and meets similar difficulties. It was famous for the monasteries on its banks, and these were the chief nurseries of the form of English that has survived and conquered in the making of our modern tongue.
The river Nene has become a household word among naturalists, partly because of the genius of Lord Lilford, who rivalled the Dukes of Bedford in his zeal for natural history and naturalization, and, more especially, for aviculture. Lilford, just over the county border, was one of the places where the little owl was naturalized and the species still flourishes excessively throughout the shire, as the grey squirrel does in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.
Huntingdon is a shire of little towns and little villages. To this generalization the only exception is its slender northern tip, where three counties join and where also a west-to-east Midland line crosses the Great Northern. Just south of this peak are to be found the best doorways into the fen country, especially in times of a bearing frost. (Now a bearing frost is a commoner experience in the fen region than anywhere in England, till the far north is reached.) One of these doorways is a Conington Castle, so-called, a castellated country house, successor of a medieval manor which stood about half a mile to the south. The house has been in possession of the family of Heathcote for two hundred years and more. One of them wrote and illustrated for private circulation a book on the fens in 1876 and reported a particular trip on the ice. He and his companions put on skates a quarter of a mile from the house and skated on and on till they reached the neighbourhood of Ely Cathedral, delighting in the exercise and the scene;
"The scenery of the Fen rivers at all times beautiful, in the eyes of those who appreciate Dutch art, is peculiarly so in the winter. The mills, of various form and colour, are conspicuously placed on the river banks . . .Boats, eel-trunks frozen up in the ice, slackers all closed up and useless, little gunning boats with their sprits lying on the bank, stacks of reed beside the river, groups of figures skating, some drawing sledges loaded with sedge - all these objects of beauty and interest."I myself have made a similar expedition, which may still be undertaken by anyone with the requisite stamina and skill. We put on our skates a hundred yards from Holme station on the Great Northern Railway by the side of a dyke, and the freedom of the fens was open to us. Our roadways were two dykes known as "Forty-foot" or the "Sixteen-foot" and the old Nene, and we covered some thirty miles before returning to our starting point.
A certain official of the Bedford Level Corporation gave a fascinating account of a fifty-mile journey in 1799. Ramsey offers another starting point and much archaeological interest. The demesnes of the Abbey ("where every monk lived like a gentleman") were granted to Sir Thomas Cromwell, and Sir Oliver lived there after leaving Hinchingbrooke.
Whittlesea Mere, which is near by, was the scene of the most dramatic and historically interesting event in English reclamation. I have spoken with those who saw the last drop of water flow away, when muddy acres were left entirely covered with fish, pike up to 20lb and perch to 6lb with hosts of other coarse fish. The making of the dyke and lodes there and thereabouts opened up pages of prehistoric history. The remnants of vast trees, oak and others, prove that the land was once a dry forest; but the bog oak was less interesting that the bones. Among these were identified the hippopotamus, rhinoceros, elephant, aboriginal cattle, deer of several species, wolf, beaver and, finally under Whittlesea Mere itself, a grampus. A long primeval boat scooped out of the trunk of an oak, was one of the treasures of Whittlesea. These draining operations have interest for the layman as well as for the archaeologist. Ramsey Abbey was enriched by the game and the fantastic number of eels (in which commodity rents were often paid). Now the whole district is rich in grain and sugar-beet; and many a labouring fenman has achieved independence and a certain degree of wealth. It should be put down to the enhancement of their fame, that fenmen on their pattens played bandy or shinny generations before the world learnt that ice hockey is one of the best games.
The welfare of both farmers and labourers in the fertile eastern plain, stands, I fear, in sharp contrast to that of the men who live on the undulating clay-lands on the western side. Most of the farms there, too, are fertile, but they need hard continuous labour and mechanical aids. This necessity handicaps the small holder, and in many parishes, the cottages, though most picturesquely thatched, are very humble. However, labourers here and there rise to be small farmers, even on the toughest soil, as in the neighbourhood of Leighton (a living once given to George Herbert, who restored the fine church). Not too long ago to be remembered, you could see women sitting outside the cottage doors, with stout pillows on their knees, working hard at lace-making. Money earned din this excellent village industry, as straw-plaiting in Hertfordshire, formed the foundations of the labourer's capital. In few districts has the population consisted so exclusively of farmer, labourer and parson as in this one, for country houses are widely separated and industries hardly to be found. Even the little towns are few: Huntingdon, with Godmanchester, St Neots, St Ives, Ramsey and Kimbolton virtually complete the list, and their total population does not approach forty thousand.
While the fens have revealed vast treasures of very ancient history, the signs of more recent history about the county are, if the fine churches are excepted, curiously few. Even the rule of the monks from Ramsey and Sawtry and Hinchingbrooke has left few architectural relics. Even Castle Hill by the bridge between Huntingdon and Godmanchester carries no evidence of the fact that the castle was destroyed in Norman times, and neither Dane nor Roman has left much evidence of their occupation of this key point in both attack and defence.
One libel upon the county that has appeared in several books of reference should be refuted. It is described as comparatively treeless. There is small excuse for this charge. The woods are peculiarly beautiful from Barnwell Wold to Monks Wood (a great haunt of entomologists as well as hunting folk); and trees are well distributed in hosts of spinneys and hedgerows. Nowhere perhaps does Milton's famous line:
Bosomed high in tufted trees.more insistently come to the mind's eye, as you look down from the tops of the pleasant undulations, on to the great towers and spires of the village churches.
The churches and the surrounding trees, chiefly elms, are scarcely to be separated; and the churches are supreme. It has been written in a standard book on churches:" It is not too much to say that Huntingdonshire and Rutland, the two smallest counties in England, have the highest proportion of fine churches." The number of so-called broach spires is great. Spaldwick, Conington, Alconbury, Warboys and St Neots and Buckden have special features. From the prominence of the churches it has perhaps resulted that the clergy have done much for local annals. Cuthbert Bede, the pen name of a curate of Glatton, is known wherever students of folklore foregather, and he recorded local customs, superstitions, ceremonies and words at a crucial date. Most are disappearing or have disappeared, but you would still fail to persuade a surprisingly large number of farmers that pork and bacon would not suffer if the pig was killed at the waning moon.
The county in general advances in prosperity and is remarkably free from defacement; but its landscape will take a long time to recover from the war. Owing to the flatness of the land, the smallness of the population, and in some degree to its central situation, it was selected as ideal for the airman. No fewer than ten large aerodromes were built, and of all forms of building, concrete roads and foundations are the most tiresome to destroy and least useful in peace time; and the Americans used it lavishly. Some of these wartime additions are likely to last only less long than the ridge and furrow so deeply patterned on hundreds of grass fields. Grass-covered earth may yet prove more enduring than stone.