11th November, 2023

Yesterday I took a little trip to Grantchester to follow in the footsteps of Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brooke…….

It’s a charming village but Molly and I spent much of our time walking through Grantchester Meadows to Skaters’ Meadow in Cambridge. It’s now a wildlife reserve but from 1920 to 1940 it used to be flooded in the winter so it would freeze. It cost 6d for an evening’s ice-skating. After a bit of imagining what fun that would’ve been, and what I might’ve worn in 1920 for an evening on the ice, Molly and I set off back to Grantchester. We retraced our steps, taking the soggy path that hugs the river which isn’t a path at all, just a ribbon of mud snaking through the emerald grass. It was slippery and slow going, giving time to breathe in the cool air and watch the clouds in the cotton-blue sky turn from white brush strokes to low, grey slicks. We watched cows move from one meadow to another in that slow, rolling way they have. We watched ducks, a heron and a couple of cormorants. And I felt as if I were in a Thomas Hardy novel (not in hiking trousers and boots, obviously, but wearing a gown with some old-fashioned skates slung over my shoulder).

A paved path runs the course at the top of the meadows and I saw joggers and cyclists, mums with prams and couples holding hands. Its a popular walk and I’ve heard that in the summer the meadows are busy. But I liked the near solitude and the chill in the air.

There were things I didn’t get to do…. visit Byron’s Pool where it’s claimed he and Virginia Woolf skinny dipped, and the house where Virginia Woolf’s aunt lived (the aunt who left her enough money to have the freedom to become a writer). I didn’t visit the Orchard tearooms where there is a Rupert Brooke display and I believe you can see the Old Vicarage where he lodged for a time. It is this place he remembers in his poem: The Old Vicarage, Grantchester in 1912 when he was in Berlin. The Old Vicarage is now owned by Jeffrey Archer and his wife, Mary, a prominent scientist.

It is claimed that Grantchester is home to the highest concentration of Nobel Prize winners. There has been a popular television series starring James Norton set in the village, a song by Pink Floyd called Grantchester Meadows. And I wonder why this little village is so celebrated. Why Rupert Brooke wrote so gushingly about it. But when I walked across the meadows and glimpsed a spire above the trees I felt I was truly somewhere special.

I’d finished my tour by about two o’clock but I couldn’t leave just yet. I had a look around the graveyard and the Church of St Andrew and St Mary, and then I lurked. Another couple arrived, and they lurked, too. And then at a quarter to three we came together and watched the clock hand slowly move to ten to three.

And I asked:

‘And is there honey?’

and they replied:

‘Still for tea?’

And my heart soared.