known as The Hellfire Club. There were several such clubs at the time, based upon a philosophy of licentiousness. Dashwood’s Hellfire Club met on several occasions in the caves beneath the church and, if perhaps only to play cards, in the golden globe that tops the tower. The nave walls are lined by engaged Corinthian columns and there is good plasterwork and ceiling painting. The furnishings, though, are more curious than beautiful.
WESTON TURVILLE † St Mary the Virgin
3m/4km S.E. of Aylesbury
OS SP859102 GPS 51.7847N, 0.7557W
The church is at the end of a lane near the 18th-century manor house in whose grounds is the motte of a Norman castle. The building is of many styles and of an attractive irregularity with things in it to please everyone – a 12th-century Aylesbury font, 13th-century arcades, 14th-century chancel with good window tracery, 15th-century tower, fragments of old glass (a tantalizing medley, this), 17th-century pulpit, and so forth.
WILLEN † St Mary Magdalene
2m/3km N.E. of centre of Milton Keynes
OS SP878412 GPS 52.0624N, 0.7200W
Like a city church transported to the remote countryside, with dramatic effect, this delightful church is a confection of brick, stone, Classical pilasters, urns, high pews, pedestal font and all the rest; the apsidal chancel is Victorian. The church is to the design of Robert Hooke – Curator of Experiments to the Royal Society and architect of The Monument in London – and was built around 1680 through the munificence of Dr Busby, the famous headmaster of Westminster School. Now the church stands as a bulwark against the sprawling housing of Milton Keynes.
WING † All Saints
3m/4km S.W. of Leighton Buzzard
OS SP880225 GPS 51.8949N, 0.7221W
With a polygonal apse like the prow of a ship, this is the most important Saxon church in the county, and contains much of interest from many dates. The Saxon crypt was opened in 1878, and there is a fine 15th-century carved oak roof, ornamented with back-to-back angels. Conspicuous and flamboyant monuments to the Dormer family abound; in contrast a touching simple brass memorial to ‘Honest Old John Coats that sometime was porter at Ascott Hall, hat now (alas!) left his key, lodge, fure, friends and all to have a room in Heaven.’
MARCH: ST WENDREDA – double hamer-beam roof with its host of flying angels
Modern Cambridgeshire includes the historic county of Huntingdonshire and the Soke of Peterborough, although all three areas retain distinctive characteristics, and Huntingdonshire continues to insist on its separate identity. Perhaps because Cambridge University and Ely Cathedral are so outstandingly beautiful, people underrate the county that contains them. Cambridgeshire scenery is nowhere obvious or dramatic – the famed Gog Magog Hills, south of Cambridge, are modest, nowhere reaching 300 feet. The southern part of the county is rolling and chalky, giving surprisingly fine and wide views. In the north, the fens dominate, where the eye sees mostly sky.
As Olive Cook, author and champion of rural preservation, wrote in Cambridgeshire: Aspects of a County in 1953, ‘It would not be possible to find elsewhere so unexpected a contrast between the chalk uplands with their carpets of delicate grasses and rare flowers, wild yet amiable, and the expanse of the Fens, dyked, drained and filled, yet still boundless, awe-inspiring and alien.’ The towers and spires of the 14th century, the great time of church building here, show the sense of skyline peculiar to the Middle Ages and still dominate much of the landscape, despite the inevitable impact of 21st-century light industrial development, and the unstoppable tide of suburban housing developments.
Cambridgeshire is not a unity. In the south it is like its neighbours, Essex, Suffolk and Hertfordshire. Steep-roofed cottages are reed-thatched, and their walls colour-washed. Parish boundaries are long strips, parallel to the Anglo-Saxon Devil’s Dyke and so designed as to make best use of a variety of resources on every strip. In this rolling scenery are country houses in well-wooded parks, and the thatched villages, which are seen best in sunlight when their colour washes are shown up, cluster round flint churches whose mouldings and carvings are of hard chalk. In the west of the county a coarse rubble is used for the churches.
Until 1836 the northern part of the county, the Isle of Ely, was separate from Cambridgeshire. Until the 17th century, when the Fens were drained on a grand scale, the Isle was mostly shallow water with monastic settlements and churches on raised banks and islands. The greatest of these is the Benedictine Abbey of Ely itself. Whittlesey, Sutton, Thorney, Swaffham Prior, Wisbech and St Wendreda’s March are other examples of island or peninsular medieval churches which rose over the shallow water like ships, made of limestone from Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire. Beside them, the houses and churches of modern Fen settlements seem mean and unimportant.
In 1839 two Cambridge undergraduates, J. M. Neale and Benjamin Webb, formed the Camden Society for the restoration of old churches on what were thought ‘correct’ principles – the abolition of box pews, the removal of plaster and whitewash, the adornment of the sanctuary with stained glass and colour, and the promotion of 13th–14th century Gothic (Early English and Decorated) above every other style. Yet Cambridgeshire remained Low Church with a good deal of Perpendicular Tudor cement affixed to crumbling fabrics. The Camden movement was not without its effect on local churches, though its influence spread later all over England. The Cambridgeshire churches, for this and other reasons, were subject to more than usually vigorous Victorian retooling and refurbishing.
SWAFFHAM PRIOR: ST MARY – inside the late 12th- / early 13th-century tower
Historically, Huntingdonshire was small – the third-smallest old county in England – and is now a local authority district of Cambridgeshire. Its scenery is uneventful, either flat or very gently rolling; it has few recognized ‘beauty spots’. Perhaps because of this, Huntingdonshire has been less able to defend itself than others against the more hideous and cheap manifestations of modern ‘progress’. Bisected by the A1 from north to south, the soulless anonymity and the garish adjuncts of motor traffic have slashed the gentle landscape across and across; though many of the aerodromes and abandoned wartime installations that irritated Betjeman have long since gone. And, of course, in a county where there is so much sky in the landscape, pylons and poles are particularly intrusive.
Yet the Huntingdonshire district still has much beauty. In the west and south its remote, hilly landscape has many oaks and ash trees. The Huntingdonshire elms (ulmus glabra) originated here in the mid-8th century. The churches and cottages in the west and south are of yellowish-grey limestone and approach the excellence of those in neighbouring Northants. From St Neots to St Ives, near the slow windings of the sinuous Ouse, are willowy meadows and villages of reed-thatched cottages where the churches are the only old stone buildings, the stone having been brought here by water in medieval times. The north-east is fen: ‘When first drained (and much Hunts. fen was drained in the last century) the spongy peat stood some feet above the rivers and channels, but it has so shrunk that a water-course may now be higher than your head. It is a new land, and though the soil is rich, much of it coloured with flowers and vegetables, it has a bleak empty look. The villages are modern and poor…’ (Andrew Young, A Prospect of Britain, 1956).
BARNACK: ST JOHN THE BAPTIST – 11th-century carving of Christ in Majesty
Huntingdonshire has five attractive old towns. St Neots, St Ives, Huntingdon, linked with the old red