St Mary, Eynesbury, St Neots, Cambridgeshire
And so to the previous parish church in Cambridgeshire. It could be stated that it has taken me more time to total this county than any other, because I was initial taken into a Cambridgeshire church to be baptised fifty-seven decades ago at the age of two months. Be that as it may possibly, I started off checking out the Cambridgeshire church buildings in earnest about 4 several years back, partly as a end result of an enthusiasm for spouse and children record. Much more than 30 Cambridgeshire parishes and their church buildings have been homes to my ancestors of the very last 4 generations. In this article, they were being baptised, married and sent on their closing journey to the grave.
Cambridgeshire is a curious county. A satisfying parallelogram in condition, stretching some forty miles from corner to corner, it has only existed in its current sort because 1974, when it was produced by the union of the two small-lived counties of Huntingdon & Peterborough and Cambridgeshire & the Isle of Ely. These experienced been made in their switch in 1965 out of four lesser counties, these becoming Huntingdonshire, the Soke of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely. The Isle was returning to its position of in advance of the 1890s, when it had been hived off from Cambridgeshire for administrative reasons. In advance of the 1890s, the Soke of Peterborough experienced been a component of Northamptonshire. However with me? Great. The 1974 iteration of the county took in a single parish each and every from Bedfordshire and Essex, and then in the 1990s shed a person parish to Suffolk.
It all seems a little bit of a hotchpotch, and but it appears to do the job. Of all the amalgamated counties made in 1974, Cambridgeshire is the only just one which has survived by public will. Avon and Humberside have been consigned to background, Leicestershire damaged up again into its constituent pieces. But in Cambridgeshire, the former county of Huntingdonshire has been authorized to survive as a nearby government district, as has the Soke of Peterborough which proceeds in expanded variety as the Peterborough unitary authority.
The towns of Cambridge and Peterborough have the two expanded spectacularly considering the fact that 1965, and the county is the only non-metropolitan place to have an elected mayor directing hundreds of thousands of lbs to advancement assignments. The inhabitants of about a million is split a lot more or significantly less 50 percent-and-50 percent amongst urban and rural configurations. The west and south of the county are extremely affluent, but the Fenland district in the north-east has deep pockets of poverty, as do the metropolitan areas of Cambridge and Peterborough.
I used the initially 20 yrs of my daily life in Cambridgeshire, most of it in Cambridge, and it is however hard not to assume of it as house. And so this has offered a unique resonance to my journeys all over the county. Cambridgeshire’s church buildings are not spectacular. Certainly, it is tough to identify a particular Cambridgeshire style at all, other than a liking for octagonal tower tops, and they are not so extremely plentiful. But Cambridgeshire shares borders with more other counties than any other English county, and the churches in the vicinity of people borders tend to acquire on the traits of the other county – huge, marshland churches up near Norfolk and Lincolnshire, small, homely churches down to Hertfordshire and Essex, grand Perpendicular churches by the Suffolk border, though west of Huntingdon the spired church buildings merge seamlessly into their Northamptonshire counterparts. Strikingly, Cambridgeshire’s very greatest churches are rather substantially all in the vicinity of a border with a different county.
Of training course, the county has two big medieval cathedrals at Peterborough and Ely, as very well as a assortment of college chapels in Cambridge, some of which are medieval in origin, which include the breathtaking chapel of King’s Faculty, as fantastic as a cathedral. I have integrated these on my journey, so by the time John and I obtained to the St Neots suburb of Eynesbury at a quarter to 4 on a late autumn afternoon I had by now frequented 314 Cambridgeshire church buildings. St Mary at Eynesbury would be the closing parish church.
We hadn’t intended to be so late. We would arrived in St Neots at about two o’clock, ready to stop by the a few town centre church buildings, all of which right before 1965 served different towns. If Cambridgeshire is an odd amalgam, then St Neots is odder nevertheless. Five cities and villages merge into each individual other in the south-west corner of the county to sort St Neots, which, with far more than 40,000 men and women, can assert to be ‘the premier city in Cambridgeshire’ (Cambridge and Peterborough equally being towns of training course). The parishes of St Neots city and Eynesbury type the town centre, with the parish of Eaton Socon on the opposite lender of the Good Ouse, and Eaton Ford, which kinds a part of the parish, to the north of it. Tiny Paxton, the poshest parish, retains by itself somewhat at arms size, but once more only by the width of a river. The Bedfordshire border runs alongside two sides of the city, and certainly, until 1965 sections of the city were in Bedfordshire.
All a few medieval church buildings in St Neots town centre are major, and all a few are committed to St Mary, which can be the induce of some confusion. St Mary at St Neots and St Mary at Eynesbury are just a pair of hundred yards apart, separated by a compact bridge, while St Mary at Eaton Socon sits 50 percent a mile or so to the south-west of them. The Eaton Socon church is heartily Evangelical in character, but the Eynesbury and St Neots city churches are each in the Anglo-Catholic custom, and I am challenging place to feel of two other these Superior church buildings so shut alongside one another, in particular in a smaller town, and thinking about that they are in separate benefices.
We had found the Eaton Socon church locked. The signal appeared to suggest that if you tipped up in the morning on a weekday you could come across the adjacent place of work open, and presumably they just could permit you into the church, even though as magnificent as the Perpendicular exterior is there would not be much to see, as the church was gutted by fire in 1930. The only old matter still left is the font. Still, this was our thirteenth church of the day, and the 1st one we had located locked, so we weren’t far too upset.
We headed off and parked close to the Eynesbury church. This was also locked, but there was a keyholder detect, so I rang him up. He seemed a very little astonished, but instructed us he’d be coming down in about an hour’s time, would that do? I reported it would. We walked the short length up to the St Neots city church, which was open up of study course, as it is just about every day. Another massive, spectacular Perpendicular church, but not ample inside of of it to fill an hour, so we drove out to Terrific Paxton and its late Saxon church, which John had not visited just before, and then back into city to hold our appointment.
Eynesbury church is massive, even though as opposed to its two sisters it is mainly Early English in origin, with before arcades and later aisles. The tower was considerably rebuilt in the 17th Century, and seems it. The tower is most unusual in that it is set against the most easterly bay of the south aisle of the nave. The nave extends westwards to the street line, which is also against the north side, and so this clarifies the tower’s position. Of the a few church buildings, this is the most urban in visual appeal, and would not glimpse out of area in the centre of Cambridge.
The Early English interior is at to start with relatively dim, for as at St Neots, this church was pretty much completely glazed in the 19th Century with colored glass, considerably of it by Hardman & Co. But, whilst the nave is just about as vast as at the other church, it does not experience like a barn. Instead, the reduced roof and the dusty furnishings give a sense of litter, even though not in a negative way. This is a rough and prepared church which has formed alone to the wants and dreams of its parishioners over the generations. Arthur Blomfield led the 19th Century restoration, and his acquainted atmosphere lies heavily right here. The look at east is to the terrific rood, the 1933 do the job of Albert Richardson who experienced just concluded restoring Eaton Socon.
I was happy to find out that what I experienced taken for reticence in our host turned out to be a cheerful dryness. He was really welcoming, answered our queries, but left us just to wander all over as he pottered about. I requested him about the Anglo-catholic custom of the two churches. He didn’t seem to imagine it was unusual to uncover two city church buildings in the Anglo-Catholic tradition so close collectively, which I found surprisingly reassuring. “We like to feel we are just that minimal little bit larger than that great deal up the road,” he observed. I asked him how to pronounce Eynesbury (I have generally rhymed the very first syllable with traces). “Effectively, we get in touch with it Ains-bury,” he reported, “nevertheless I really don’t know if which is proper.”
Still we wandered. The 17th Century pulpit was declared unusually gorgeous by Pevsner’s revising editor, and he is right, the influence partly the consequence of its resetting on an sophisticated stem in the 1970s. Other woodwork contains the most effective medieval bench finishes we had witnessed all working day, carved with animals including pigs, bulls and a camel. Some of them seem to have been adapted and additional to somewhat crudely, potentially in the 17th Century. Could this have been an endeavor to maintenance the outcomes of iconoclasm? If so, it would be appealing to know what was there in advance of.
In the middle of the nave is a present day memorial slab to an Eynesbury parishioner who died two hundred yrs back. James Toller was just 20 one decades outdated. What helps make him extraordinary is that he was a single of the tallest folks who have ever lived. In close proximity to this area lies all that is mortal of James Toller (The Eynesbury Giant) who died 4th February 1818 aged 21 many years, 8 ft 1½ inches in height. James Toller was born in the highway beside the church in 1797. Tall from an early age, in his teenagers he was exhibited in London and offered to the Russian Tsar. He was toured all through Europe with a Dutchman named Simon Paap who was only 20 eight inches tall.
The good folks of Eynesbury feel to have handled James cheerfully as one particular of their possess, but his prevalent fame inevitably produced it not possible for him to live a regular existence, and, as his well being deteriorated, he put in his final several years guiding the large walls of the rectory backyard garden. He was buried inside of the church for, it was claimed, a bounty of £20 experienced been issued for his corpse by dissectionists. In his life time a height of eight foot 6 was claimed for James, but a measurement of his skeleton when it was reburied after the 19th Century restoration of the interior gave a truer measurement, which was even now remarkable.
And so, that was it, the previous parish church in Cambridgeshire, a suitably quirky spot for a quirky county. There are nevertheless a good deal of non-conformist chapels to visit, as effectively as the chapels of cemeteries, faculties and other institutions of program. But for now, the pleasure of a position accomplished accompanied me as we headed back to Ely station.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-11-11 08:36:47
Tagged: , Eynesbury , St Neots , Cambridgeshire , Cambs , Huntingdonshire , Hunts , church , East Anglia
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