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If the weather is good, walking to Grantchester takes you on a pleasant three-mile stretch of fields and lanes along the Granta (the name of the local stretch of the Cam, which is also the name of the pub in Cambridge where Kelli and Dunstan first met). The main reason for visiting this pretty village is to have tea at the Orchard, a tradition begun by students in 1897 and continued by many tourists until the present day, including several famous intellectuals, authors and other celebrities. The nearby village of Trumpington is the setting for the Miller's Tale, one of the rudest of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
It is also possible to punt out to the Orchard, although you will need at least four strong passengers to help you drag your punt overland to the lower stretch of the river, using the rollers at the lock near the Anchor pub. You'll then have a fairly clear (if overgrown) stretch of river as far as Grantchester itself, which is quite long - take turns punting to avoid straining your arms. Allow at least a couple of hours for this expedition.
Many are said to have spent time in Grantchester, despite a lack of hard evidence in some cases. These include Byron (who allegedly swam in Byron's Pool), Newton, Darwin, Cromwell, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Marlowe and Spenser. Those who definitely liked to visit the place, or even lived there, included the classicist Henry Jackson; the biblical and theological scholars R. H. Kennett and J. R. Lumby; the philosopher A. N. Whitehead; William Bateson, a pioneer of modern genetics, who pursued experiments on plants in his garden at Grantchester; and members of the so-called Grantchester Group, which had some overlap with the Bloomsbury Group. This included a several people who would later become world-famous, including John Maynard Keynes (the economist after whom the city of Milton Keynes was named); Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein (both philosophers, both geniuses, and both highly obnoxious); E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf (two of the world's most influential novelists); and the painter Augustus John, who lived nearby in a gypsy caravan with ten children and two wives. Later, in the 1950s, an earlier Anglo-American couple lived near Grantchester Meadows: the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Not all such relationships end in disaster and tragedy!
The most famous name connected with Grantchester, however, is that of Rupert Brooke. A handsome, idealistic young man, he lived at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester and wove a cocoon of nostalgia around the place in his poetry, namely this work entitled The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.The second thing that would ensure his immortality was his untimely death through an illness contracted during the war. The Old Vicarage has a statue of him in its grounds. Unfortunately, the property is now the home of a more dubious English celebrity, namely Lord Jeffrey Archer, who is almost as famous for his boring novels as for the perjury which ruined his political career and sent him to prison. (The shoplifting, which he denied for years and then admitted to, never went to court.)
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