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Jul. 19th, 2007 06:06 pmA nice, relaxing day out.
Hemingford Grey, where I started, is a very picture-perfect village, with a particularly beautiful stretch of the Great Ouse running through it. Sitting by the church, looking out over the osier-fringed waters was supremely restful - more so than a footpath which petered out into a field which I ended up exiting somewhat gingerly across a barbed-wire-topped fence...). It also provided me with a very nice lunch at the Cock, which is the sister restaurant to the Boathouse at Ely, and does a perfectly reasonable and very pleasing set lunch menu (£10 for two small but perfectly-formed courses being good value, though nothing compared to the £10 for three courses at Gedney Dyke).
St Ives likewise proved well worth the visit - amazingly, in pre-Black-Death days it held one of the four Great Fairs in the country, and was a hugely important place. It's now a small, prosperous and pleasant market town, with a wide High Street, a couple of well-proportioned churches, and a 15th-century stone bridge over the river with a surviving contemporary chapel (probably the only one of its kind left in the country). I didn't stay long - long enough to do a bit of shopping and visit the town museum - but I am sure I will be back. To be fair, one iof the main reasons I will be back is that my nominal reason for going in the first place - to visit Wadsworth's (a whisky specialist, who do crop up in the least likely places) - was frustrated by the shop having a half-day. Well, at least I know it's there now.
St Ives is no Stamford, but then it's no Harlow either, and more importantly, it has none of the crushing vacancy of purpose that blights smaller East Anglian market towns (I'm thinking especially of Chatteris and Wisbech, though there are many in Norfolk and Suffolk too). Not for a minute did I feel uncomfortable, and that is a pleasure in itself.
Then back home, to wallow in more of the nostalgia of Betjeman's 1962 wanderings round the West Country, which may drive me to expand a putative visit that way later this year into a proper Explore...
Right - second night beckons. No rain. Yet.
Hemingford Grey, where I started, is a very picture-perfect village, with a particularly beautiful stretch of the Great Ouse running through it. Sitting by the church, looking out over the osier-fringed waters was supremely restful - more so than a footpath which petered out into a field which I ended up exiting somewhat gingerly across a barbed-wire-topped fence...). It also provided me with a very nice lunch at the Cock, which is the sister restaurant to the Boathouse at Ely, and does a perfectly reasonable and very pleasing set lunch menu (£10 for two small but perfectly-formed courses being good value, though nothing compared to the £10 for three courses at Gedney Dyke).
St Ives likewise proved well worth the visit - amazingly, in pre-Black-Death days it held one of the four Great Fairs in the country, and was a hugely important place. It's now a small, prosperous and pleasant market town, with a wide High Street, a couple of well-proportioned churches, and a 15th-century stone bridge over the river with a surviving contemporary chapel (probably the only one of its kind left in the country). I didn't stay long - long enough to do a bit of shopping and visit the town museum - but I am sure I will be back. To be fair, one iof the main reasons I will be back is that my nominal reason for going in the first place - to visit Wadsworth's (a whisky specialist, who do crop up in the least likely places) - was frustrated by the shop having a half-day. Well, at least I know it's there now.
St Ives is no Stamford, but then it's no Harlow either, and more importantly, it has none of the crushing vacancy of purpose that blights smaller East Anglian market towns (I'm thinking especially of Chatteris and Wisbech, though there are many in Norfolk and Suffolk too). Not for a minute did I feel uncomfortable, and that is a pleasure in itself.
Then back home, to wallow in more of the nostalgia of Betjeman's 1962 wanderings round the West Country, which may drive me to expand a putative visit that way later this year into a proper Explore...
Right - second night beckons. No rain. Yet.
