St Mary, Eynesbury, St Neots, Cambridgeshire
And so to the very last parish church in Cambridgeshire. It could be stated that it has taken me for a longer period to finish this county than any other, simply because I was very first taken into a Cambridgeshire church to be baptised fifty-7 years back at the age of two months. Be that as it may, I started off viewing the Cambridgeshire churches in earnest about 4 yrs back, partly as a final result of an enthusiasm for family members record. Far more than 30 Cambridgeshire parishes and their church buildings have been households to my ancestors of the previous 4 generations. Below, they ended up baptised, married and sent on their final journey to the grave.
Cambridgeshire is a curious county. A pleasing parallelogram in form, stretching some forty miles from corner to corner, it has only existed in its present sort considering the fact that 1974, when it was developed by the union of the two limited-lived counties of Huntingdon & Peterborough and Cambridgeshire & the Isle of Ely. These had been designed in their transform in 1965 out of four smaller sized counties, these staying 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 needs. In advance of the 1890s, the Soke of Peterborough experienced been a section of Northamptonshire. However with me? Fantastic. The 1974 iteration of the county took in a solitary parish each from Bedfordshire and Essex, and then in the 1990s lost 1 parish to Suffolk.
It all seems a bit of a hotchpotch, and nonetheless it looks to function. Of all the amalgamated counties developed in 1974, Cambridgeshire is the only just one which has survived by general public will. Avon and Humberside have been consigned to record, Leicestershire broken up again into its constituent areas. But in Cambridgeshire, the previous county of Huntingdonshire has been allowed to endure as a community govt district, as has the Soke of Peterborough which continues in expanded type as the Peterborough unitary authority.
The metropolitan areas of Cambridge and Peterborough have the two expanded spectacularly since 1965, and the county is the only non-metropolitan place to have an elected mayor directing millions of lbs . to improvement assignments. The population of about a million is break up a lot more or a lot less fifty percent-and-fifty percent amongst urban and rural configurations. The west and south of the county are very prosperous, but the Fenland district in the north-east has deep pockets of poverty, as do the cities of Cambridge and Peterborough.
I invested the very first 20 a long time of my lifetime in Cambridgeshire, most of it in Cambridge, and it is nonetheless hard not to imagine of it as house. And so this has given a particular resonance to my journeys all-around the county. Cambridgeshire’s church buildings are not breathtaking. In truth, it is hard to recognize a particular Cambridgeshire design at all, other than a liking for octagonal tower tops, and they are not so pretty abundant. But Cambridgeshire shares borders with extra other counties than any other English county, and the churches around individuals borders are inclined to just take on the features of the other county – significant, marshland church buildings up close to Norfolk and Lincolnshire, compact, homely churches down to Hertfordshire and Essex, grand Perpendicular church buildings by the Suffolk border, even though west of Huntingdon the spired churches merge seamlessly into their Northamptonshire counterparts. Strikingly, Cambridgeshire’s really most effective churches are pretty significantly all in the vicinity of a border with another county.
Of class, the county has two big medieval cathedrals at Peterborough and Ely, as very well as a selection of college chapels in Cambridge, some of which are medieval in origin, like the spectacular chapel of King’s Faculty, as good as a cathedral. I have included 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 already visited 314 Cambridgeshire church buildings. St Mary at Eynesbury would be the ultimate parish church.
We hadn’t meant to be so late. We would arrived in St Neots at about two o’clock, completely ready to stop by the 3 town centre churches, all of which in advance of 1965 served different towns. If Cambridgeshire is an odd amalgam, then St Neots is odder continue to. 5 towns and villages merge into just about every other in the south-west corner of the county to kind St Neots, which, with additional than 40,000 people, can declare to be ‘the premier town in Cambridgeshire’ (Cambridge and Peterborough both equally being cities of class). The parishes of St Neots city and Eynesbury type the town centre, with the parish of Eaton Socon on the reverse bank of the Fantastic Ouse, and Eaton Ford, which forms a element of the parish, to the north of it. Little Paxton, the poshest parish, keeps alone slightly at arms length, but once more only by the width of a river. The Bedfordshire border operates together two sides of the town, and in fact, until eventually 1965 elements of the city had been in Bedfordshire.
All three medieval church buildings in St Neots town centre are massive, and all three are committed to St Mary, which can be the trigger of some confusion. St Mary at St Neots and St Mary at Eynesbury are just a couple of hundred yards aside, divided by a compact bridge, although St Mary at Eaton Socon sits fifty 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 town churches are both of those in the Anglo-Catholic custom, and I am really hard put to imagine of two other this kind of High church buildings so close with each other, primarily in a modest city, and looking at that they are in different benefices.
We had observed the Eaton Socon church locked. The indication appeared to suggest that if you tipped up in the morning on a weekday you may locate the adjacent workplace open, and presumably they just could enable you into the church, though as stunning as the Perpendicular exterior is there would not be much to see, as the church was gutted by hearth in 1930. The only aged matter remaining is the font. However, this was our thirteenth church of the day, and the initial one we experienced identified locked, so we weren’t also dissatisfied.
We headed off and parked around the Eynesbury church. This was also locked, but there was a keyholder observe, so I rang him up. He appeared a small surprised, but instructed us he’d be coming down in about an hour’s time, would that do? I explained it would. We walked the brief distance up to the St Neots city church, which was open up of class, as it is each working day. A different significant, breathtaking Perpendicular church, but not enough inside of it to fill an hour, so we drove out to Good Paxton and its late Saxon church, which John experienced not visited right before, and then again into town to retain our appointment.
Eynesbury church is massive, while compared with its two sisters it is largely Early English in origin, with previously arcades and later on aisles. The tower was considerably rebuilt in the 17th Century, and seems it. The tower is most uncommon in that it is set versus the most easterly bay of the south aisle of the nave. The nave extends westwards to the street line, which is also in opposition to the north aspect, and so this clarifies the tower’s placement. Of the 3 church buildings, this is the most urban in appearance, and would not glance out of spot in the centre of Cambridge.
The Early English inside is at 1st alternatively dim, for as at St Neots, this church was pretty much completely glazed in the 19th Century with colored glass, a great deal of it by Hardman & Co. But, even though the nave is virtually as vast as at the other church, it does not sense like a barn. Instead, the lower roof and the dusty furnishings give a perception of clutter, however not in a lousy way. This is a tough and all set church which has shaped by itself to the needs and wants of its parishioners over the generations. Arthur Blomfield led the 19th Century restoration, and his familiar atmosphere lies greatly listed here. The see east is to the great rood, the 1933 do the job of Albert Richardson who experienced just finished restoring Eaton Socon.
I was delighted to explore that what I had taken for reticence in our host turned out to be a cheerful dryness. He was very welcoming, answered our questions, but remaining us just to wander all-around as he pottered about. I asked him about the Anglo-catholic custom of the two church buildings. He didn’t seem to be to imagine it was abnormal to obtain two urban church buildings in the Anglo-Catholic tradition so shut jointly, which I found unusually reassuring. “We like to think we are just that small bit bigger than that whole lot up the highway,” he noticed. I asked him how to pronounce Eynesbury (I have usually rhymed the first syllable with traces). “Well, we phone it Ains-bury,” he reported, “however I never know if that’s appropriate.”
However we wandered. The 17th Century pulpit was declared unusually lovely by Pevsner’s revising editor, and he’s appropriate, the outcome partly the final result of its resetting on an exquisite stem in the 1970s. Other woodwork involves the very best medieval bench ends we experienced observed all working day, carved with animals together with pigs, bulls and a camel. Some of them surface to have been tailored and added to alternatively crudely, possibly in the 17th Century. Could this have been an attempt to repair the final results of iconoclasm? If so, it would be interesting to know what was there just before.
In the middle of the nave is a contemporary memorial slab to an Eynesbury parishioner who died two hundred decades ago. James Toller was just twenty a person many years outdated. What makes him remarkable is that he was a single of the tallest men and women who have at any time lived. Close to this area lies all that is mortal of James Toller (The Eynesbury Large) who died 4th February 1818 aged 21 yrs, 8 toes 1½ inches in height. James Toller was born in the street beside the church in 1797. Tall from an early age, in his teens he was exhibited in London and introduced to the Russian Tsar. He was toured during Europe with a Dutchman called Simon Paap who was only 20 8 inches tall.
The superior individuals of Eynesbury seem to have dealt with James cheerfully as one of their individual, but his popular fame eventually made it extremely hard for him to are living a normal existence, and, as his overall health deteriorated, he expended his last decades driving the significant walls of the rectory yard. He was buried inside the church for, it was claimed, a bounty of £20 experienced been issued for his corpse by dissectionists. In his lifetime a top of 8 foot 6 was claimed for James, but a measurement of his skeleton when it was reburied right after the 19th Century restoration of the interior gave a truer measurement, which was nonetheless exceptional.
And so, that was it, the final parish church in Cambridgeshire, a suitably quirky put for a quirky county. There are still a great deal of non-conformist chapels to pay a visit to, as nicely as the chapels of cemeteries, schools and other institutions of system. But for now, the gratification of a career accomplished accompanied me as we headed back again to Ely station.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-11-11 08:36:34
Tagged: , Eynesbury , St Neots , Cambridgeshire , Cambs , Huntingdonshire , Hunts , church , East Anglia
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