A cold start to the day but we’re well wrapped up. Mila has decided to walk more as part of her Duke of Edinburgh Award which gives me the chance to do more local walks. Today we decided to walk from home to Grantchester Meadows then back via town!
DIFFICULTY: 1
DATE and START TIME: Saturday 19th January 2019 Start time around 10 am Finish 2.35pm.
STARTING POINT: Home.
ROUTE WALKED: Home – Newnham – Grantchester Meadows – The Orchard Tearooms – Lammas Land – Cambridge – Carluccio’s for lunch – a mooch around town and back.
WALK DETAILS: 10 miles exactly!
HIGHEST POINT: Enjoying Mila’s company and catching up with a great friend, Vicky over a delicious lunch!
WALKED WITH: A walk with Mila.
The morning started really well with the sighting of this beautiful green woodpecker looking for ants on our back garden.
Then it was off on our walk.
Mila has decided to do more walking as part of her Duke of Edinburgh award and luckily for me that mean’s that I get more opportunities for walking and exploring our local area. The photograph above shows one of the many Cambridge University colleges, Churchill College.
Another photo of Churchill College. From here we took a meandering route to Newnham.
From Newnham we took the sign-posted path to Grantchester Meadows, it doesn’t look it from this photo but the path was surprisingly busy, although maybe it’s not so surprising as there aren’t many places to walk out in the open so close to the city centre.
You can just about see the (River Cam) / River Granta across the meadow on the horizon.
Wikipedia tells us that the original name of the river was the Granta but when the city’s name was developed in Middle English the name was backformed to match – though this was not universally applied and the upper stretches of the river continues to be informally known as the Granta. It has been said that the river is the ‘Granta’ above the Silver Street Bridge – which is in the city next to the Mathematical Bridge and Queen’s College – and the ‘Cam’ below – therefore here it would be the River Granta.
There’s a better view of the River Granta.
We were quite glad to get to The Orchard Tearooms in Grantchester for a cuppa and a warm up! The Orchard Tearooms are renowned for their famous visitors. So the history goes, one spring morning in 1897 a group of Cambridge students having punted from Cambridge up the river, asked the owner of Orchard House if she would serve them tea beneath the blossoming fruit trees – this was the beginning of a long tradition. Among its famous visitors are: Rupert Brooke (poet); Virginia Woolf (author); Maynard Keynes (economist); Bertrand Russell (philosopher); Alan Turing (inventor of the computer); Ernest Rutherford (split the atom); Crick and Watson (discovered DNA); Stephen Hawking (theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author); and HRH Prince Charles (future King of England) – an impressive list!
After enjoying our drinks we returned across the meadows but this time went through the Nature Reserve at the edge of the playground, Lammas Land which was really quiet so Mila and I enjoyed the swings etc.
Then it was off to Cambridge to meet Vicky for lunch at Carluccio’s – a quick walk around town then back home. A thoroughly enjoyable day!