Water

         There’s a contradiction at the heart of our parish and it’s to do with water: dry climate, watery land. On the one hand, ours is a low-lying parish, much of it less than 20 metres above sea level. So it never took much for water to collect, when it rained, and there used to be many areas where water would lie and make the ground damp and even marshy. And yet, our climate is one of exceptional dryness. Here in this part of East Anglia we are blessed  (or cursed, depending on your point of view) with a continental climate of hot summers, cold winters and a dearth of rain. By the time the rain-carrying westerly flows have staggered thus far, they’ve shed their load, and we only get the dregs. So shortage of water, particularly in the growing season, can be a problem. A contradiction indeed.

         There are many clues to the watery nature of our parish: the river, with a ribbon of mighty pollard willows growing alongside it, the water meadows which form a wide margin to the river and sprout a crop of rushes and cuckoo-flower, the broad dykes, or drains, which run across our arable fields, the springs which rise from the spring-line where the Gogs run down to the arable, and the old street-names, with not one, but two Water Lanes in the village.

About the weather

         But first let’s talk about our weather. According to the Met Office, Cambridge (and by extension Great Shelford) is one of the driest places in the UK. Spring is the driest time of the year, with rainfall significantly below the UK average. Autumn is the wettest time of year, but still less so than in other parts of the UK. “February is the coldest month and usually has more air frost days than any other - although December is a close second”. July is the hottest month, typically reaching 23˚ C. 

         So that’s us: little rain, hot summers, not overmuch frost. But when the wind’s from the East in winter we certainly feel it. Nevertheless, in this part of Cambridgeshire, we’re in a sheltered spot. It can snow in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, but the snow will pass us by.  Shelford also sits in its own little rain shadow. Shadow of what, I often wonder, since there’s a near total absence of hills in the neighbourhood. But it’s well known locally that there’s an invisible line running along Long Road, on the south side of Cambridge, and there the rain stops. However much it is raining in Cambridge, if you once cross that line, it’s dry. It’s intensely frustrating for the gardener who is waiting on rain, as the spring weather unrolls in an endless sequence of dry days. We Shelford folks can long for rain as much as they long for the monsoon in India. In the autumn and winter, long, long days of cloud, grey and overcast, yet never a drop of rain. How that grey grinds us down. It depresses the spirits and saps the energy. As soon as the sun emerges, it’s reflected in the mood of everyone you meet.

         Our weather locks into cycles, like a mechanism that is stuck. In summer, the clouds gather, it gets darker. Rain! you think hopefully. But no. A brief patter, a few spots, and it rolls on by, somebody else’s rain. Over and over this happens till the sun, brashly pouring down every day without relief becomes as frustrating as the needle going round and round on a scratched record.

         But when finally it does rain, oh! the bliss. The air has that rich moist smell of rain. West Country weather, we call it at home. The everlasting East Anglian dust is laid. Blackbirds take to the trees and sing from sheer joy, then take to the lawns in search of the worms which for weeks have been out of their reach.

         Did the farmers of previous centuries long for rain as we do? Nowadays the farms use spray irrigation, but back then they’d have been dependent on rain for the crops. And if the spring and summer were hot and dry, as they are now, then the corn crop would suffer.

         Of recent years, though, we have begun to see a change to this pattern. Climate Change has forced itself on our attention with increasing urgency. The dry spells seem to be getting longer; the rain, when it comes, is more often torrential; and temperatures are hotter. Momentously, last summer, on 19 July 2022, the Botanic Garden in Cambridge recorded a temperature of 39.9°C. And here in our garden, it was searingly hot. No-one wanted to be out in it. Too hot, far too hot, we all said.

How the water gave birth to our village  

        So that is our arid continental climate, with never quite enough rain. Nevertheless, it’s the water that gave birth to the village, and the river that determines much of the village’s character. Shelford means shallow ford, and, at one end of the village, the early settlers clustered on a little plateau beside a ford across the river Granta. Our oldest buildings are on that plateau: the church, the house called The Grange and the Rectory Farm.

         In the early days, there was no Great and Little Shelford. It was simply Shelford, with houses on both sides of the ford. Only in the 13th century, do we start to hear of Great and Little, and, from then on, it was Us and Them: Great Shelford on this side and, over the water, our smaller neighbour.

         But there was another small settlement, also part of that original Shelford, and which was and still is part of our village. It too took its being from the water, clustering round a spring which emerges from beneath the chalk. That spring lies just south of Granhams Road. It crosses the road, runs over to Vicar’s Brook which flows on northwards. Near the boundary with Trumpington, a further set of springs emerge from under the chalk, the Nine Wells. The resulting stream joins the Vicar’s Brook, which now becomes Hobson’s Brook. It flows on through Trumpington, past the Botanic Garden, along St Andrew’s Street, and eventually into the Cam.

To read about the Nine Wells, read here .

 A River runs through it 

       When you approach from the south, you can see how Great Shelford sits in a river valley. The Granta rises in the Essex hills, at Widdington, flows through Chesterford, Duxford, Whittlesford – all river crossing places - to Shelford, and then on to Trumpington and finally Cambridge, which was originally named after its river - Granta Bryg or bridge. Another tributary, also the Granta, flows from Haverhill. It flows through Stapleford to join its larger sister between Great and Little Shelford. By the time it flows through Shelford, the little river has grown in size.  Perhaps this increased flow went to its head. Instead of flowing straight on to Cambridge, it gives a sudden lurch westwards, only to turn again at Hauxton, to resume its northward course to the city.

         At some point, though, the river did run straightforwardly northwards from Shelford. You can see it in the soil. The line of Cambridge Road, which runs north-west, is marked by a thick swathe of river gravels, and this is the old course of the river. But this was millennia ago. The river shifted its course, leaving an area of grassland, low-lying, prone to dampness. It became the Shelford Moor. The word moor may surprise you, applied to this flat Cambridgeshire countryside. Not all moors are high up, like the Yorkshire moors. A moor is an area of waste land, a good-for-nothing bit of scrubby grass or other weeds, of no use for arable crops. We will speak of the Moor again later.

  Through the centuries the men of Shelford have tried endlessly to shape the water to their own ends. The river, however, has retained the initiative. It’s still liable to flood if there’s sufficient rain. It’s flanked on either side by meadows. The early settlers kept well back from the river, hugging the drier areas. Even today, most of the meadows remain, and development has kept a respectful distance from the water.

         The river is, of course, friend as well as foe, and early on, men harnessed it for milling. The corn mill was part of the essential apparatus of any arable village, as ours has always been. The Domesday Book lists two mills at Shelford. We can’t prove that they were on the same site as the mill we see today, but I think there’s a good chance they were.

To read about the mill, click here The King's Mill. 

  Drainage

       In the days before Enclosure, the village was divided into big arable open fields, into pasture and "the waste". By looking at which areas were which you can tell how the water stood. Generally the arable was on drier ground, the grazing on the wetter land. There’s a gravel island on Church Street, which runs along as far as the Square and Compasses. This is where the medieval houses were built. Beyond was a damper area, and this was called The Green and was an area of unfenced common pasture (a common). Where Tunwells Lane now is there were also damp pasture fields, and its name then was Water Lane. All along the east side of Cambridge Road was the open area of Shelford Moor or waste. The road was built on a causeway, to keep its (and travellers’) feet dry. It was often called The Causeway. On that eastern side the common grazing tended to be rank and swampy.

         So, when the Enclosure was enacted in 1835, the agenda was not just to divide up the land more efficiently, it was important to consider the drainage of the parish. The Enclosure Commissioners designed a network of drains running through all the wet areas. So successful were they, that we no longer consider those areas wet.

But there’s one drain in particular that I want to talk about.

         The Parish Drain, as it came to be known, runs from somewhere in the region of Granta Terrace and takes a course which eventually sees it run all the way to Cambridge and into the Cam, just down from Jesus College. It has always seemed counter-intuitive to me that, starting so close to the river, that it didn’t drain into it. But it doesn’t. This drain is not described on the Enclosure Award, so I can only think that the parish’s first stab at drainage needed a little subsequent refinement. From its start in Granta Terrace, the drain runs across Woodlands Road, crosses Woollards Lane, somewhere near the library, then runs towards Ashen Green, turns and runs up between Elms Avenue and Ashen Green. Then another turn, skirting the garden of Porch House, across the gardens in Elms Avenue, and across Halatte Gardens. It passes along the drive of Tunwells House on High Green, then turns towards De Freville Road, crosses Granhams Road, skirts Granhams Close and eventually merges into the network of streams and drains which run, parallel with Cambridge Road, to Trumpington. It is joined by water from the spring beside Granhams Farm and from Nine Wells, and once in Trumpington flows along behind Trumpington Road, and alongside the Botanic Garden, until it reaches Hobsons Conduit.

         You will probably be thinking, That’s funny, I’ve never noticed the Parish Drain, and that is because, these days, you have to work quite hard to find it. The reason is that, for much of its length, it is now culverted. When it was constructed, most of its course was across pasture. But since then we’ve done a powerful lot of building - Ashen Green, Elms Avenue, Halatte Gardens - they’ve all cut across its course. However, it still has the power to make itself felt. Some years ago, a resident of Halatte Gardens found his garden unaccountably filling with water. The developer had breached the culvert. The water was flowing out, and residents of High Green and Granhams Close were wondering why their stream had run dry.

         Well the days are gone when Mr Howard was employed to scour the drain four times every year. More and more bricks and mortar and tarmac have covered the soil. And thanks to the drain, Water Lane is no longer very watery. You probably know it better as Tunwells Lane.

Here are a couple of memories of Mr Howard, an important man in the village:

The ground we are on, which the houses are built on (in Granta Terrace), belonged to Mr Howard. He had a horse and cart, and he would go round and make sure all the drains were clean, and the ditches, and he would clear up all the roads. When I was a little girl, he would come into our garden (off High Green), and there was a manhole - and of course my friend and I would go and look - he would lift up the manhole cover, and would peer down, and there was the water underneath, and there was bricks, and it was a drain.

Mr Howard was the ditch man, that kept the ditch clean so that it kept running. He would go round on his bicycle, about four times a year, with a long old stick with like a bucket on the end. 

River Swimming

Where there's a river, you get swimming, and generations of Shelford children have swum in our river.

         Betty Kennedy, who grew up in the 1930s, remembered how the schoolchildren were taken down to the Rec for their swimming lessons. No mention of the cold: it was what we all expected before heated swimming pools became the norm. But what she did remember was her awful woollen swimming costume. You knitted your own, at school, and those knitting lessons weren’t a bundle of fun either, because Betty wasn’t very good. According to the teacher, she didn’t hold the needles correctly, and consequently, each time she knitted, she earned herself a rap on the knuckles. She never knitted again… But oh! that woollen swimsuit. As soon as you got it wet, the straps stretched, and the bodice would sink down to your navel. Happy days!

In the 1950s, school swimming lessons were conducted, not on the river, but at Coldhams Lane open air swimming pool. In 1960 the school acquired its own swimming pool, initially unheated, but within a few years heating had been brought in as well. The pool is still in use today.

         The river at the bottom of the Rec. isn’t very deep, and was good for the younger children to swim safely in. But in the days before the war, when Mr Pearce was the miller, the level of the water varied according to the opening and closing of the mill gates. Soon after four in the afternoon it would reach a respectable four feet, and all the village boys and girls would go swimming. At the right-hand end was a diving board. You could still see the footings in the 1980s. Some of the boys, most notably Tony Arnold, were really accomplished swimmers, and could dive and somersault into the river. On one occasion, though, an unwary village policeman donned his swimsuit, and climbed the diving-board, dived into the river. Unfortunately, there was no more than a foot of water, and Bonk! He received a nasty crack on the head.

         Shelford people had swum in the river for years. But in 1924 there must have been complaints about the lack of modesty, because the parish council agreed to put up a screen behind which bathers could change. The WI, however, still had concerns about the modesty of village ladies, and lobbied in 1926 for a separate shed for them to change in. The men’s changing room was about 30 yards from the diving board, while the ladies’ shed was at the opposite side. They were built of green-painted corrugated iron, and lasted into the 1950s.

         River kids, then, swam freely in the river. Here Betty tells us about learning to swim:

We could all swim by the time we were five years old.  That’s about the first thing dad taught us, because we lived on the river. What he used to do, he’d walk us out until the water come up to the top of our chest.  Turn us around, and then you'd swim back. And he says, "Anytime anything happens.  Or you feel you're gonna…  Your feet are always touching the bottom.  You’re never out of your depth."  And even at the seaside.  It doesn’t matter where we were.  We never went out any farther than the depth of your chest.  And then you turned around and you swim back in again.  You never, ever swim out. And that’s the way we were brought up. 

It wasn’t just the Rec. of course. Miles Nicholas and his friends used to swim at the end of King’s Mill Lane where the water was deeper, about fifteen feet. And there was the legendary Perch Hole, at the end of Little Shelford Rec. where the river takes a sudden sharp turn, and a deep hole has been formed.

Here are more swimming memories:

there was one particular lady, she was in her eighties, so my father used to say, she went swimming every morning in the river at eight o'clock, went every morning into the changing huts and changed. Betty Woodhouse

During the war, the Recreation Ground was turned into a military camp, and soldiers were stationed there...

they couldn’t shut off the Rec, being public property, and the river at the bottom, which we could swim in in those days - they couldn’t keep the public out, from going down to the river, but we were under strict orders to keep to the paths, one this side and one that side. We had a girls’ bathing hut on the left and a boys’ bathing hut on the right, and we weren’t supposed to contact the soldiers at all. But you can guess a way was found around that! Not only that, the soldiers were allowed to swim too. Nobody could do anything about the soldiers swimming at the same time as we were...

Phyllis Green

         There were other attractions apart from the soldiers – 

As you go on the left hand side of the rec, right at the bottom, near the river, there is a little concrete piece of path which goes over the stream and you could lay on there, and the stream would be underneath, and it would be full of tadpoles.  As the seasons went on, of course, you would watch them growing legs and losing their tails and then, of course, they would vanish. And we would probably get a few tadpoles and you would catch them in your hand, and the water was clean and it ran freely. Jill Nicholas

 And there was swinging on a rope over the river. Till eventually you fell in, which, of course, was a big part of the fun.

Robert Hyde (b.late 1940s) grew up in Woodlands Road, and relates that their place of play was invariably the river:

a lot of us had canoes and we would all spend quite a lot of time on the river, which is now something which you can't do, because the whole river has completely weeded up and trees have overgrown it. People fished. Even though the river was very polluted. Because the Spiller's paper factory was in those early days putting out disgusting amounts of waste into the river. And so you'd actually see foam and bubbles coming down the top of the river. But we still used to swim in it. And ironically the fish didn't seem to mind it. I was a very keen fisher person as a kid. And I used to go down, and I used to catch lots of fish down the bottom. But then nowadays the river is crystal clear, but it's dead. It's sterile. There aren't any fish in there.

The authorities are none too encouraging about river swimming these days, citing underwater hazards and the risk of Weil's disease. The river is surrounded by arable land, so undoubtedly suffers runoff from the fields, and upstream of us are Sawston and Linton sewage works. But for all that, river swimming, or Wild Swimming as it is now called, is firmly back on the agenda. If you're passing by, you may happen to see swimmers entering the river from the Rec. once more.

The Ballast 'Ole

Behind Four Mile House in Cambridge Road is an enormous pond which for several generations has been known as the Ballast Hole. It was dug out when the level crossing on what is now the Royston line was replaced by an embankment leading up to the bridge in 1850. The hole soon filled up with water because the excavation opened an underground spring. However, it soon began to silt up, and so the pond became increasingly shallow. Shelford people would come and skate on it when it froze over.

When Professor John Davis bought the house in 1979 he decided to clean out the pond:

I got permission to dredge it. They told me that it would take a year, at the rate water was entering, for it to refill. And it actually took 48 hours! The opening that was originally made into the spring had been choked up with mud and branches. And when they scraped them off, it suddenly gushed out again.

Older residents of Shelford had fond memories of the skating there:

At Northern Bridge, just over on the left hand side was a house and there’s a pond in the garden, and that used to ice over and the village used to go and skate on there. It got round the village ‘the pond is ready to go skating’ and they had a big wooden box with skates in and they all used to go.

I remember being so small, father pulling me. All the village people can skate well because they all had the skates there, and my father used to pull me round ‘cos he hadn’t got skates small enough for me.

 ‘When I think about it now, my goodness me, it's a wonder we didn't fall through the ice, you know. My mother and father, as far as I know to this day, never ever knew that's what we were up to. They would have had a fit if they'd known that we used to skate on there. I don't ever remember anyone mentioning how deep it was, but it was quite deep.

We went down the cinder dirt path. We called it that because lots of people had fires and used to throw cinders out there. Right down the bottom a Mr Goat lived and he was the Shelford undertaker and he used to let us go through there. Why he didn't say no… But we used to have some real good fun down there.

And here is a deeply evocative picture of the Ballast Hole in those winters of the early 1900s:

‘My last memory of Shelford is of winter, deep winter, and hard frost. All the village has come to skate, slide, slither and tumble on our pond: we feel very much in the public eye. Though it is only about four o’clock the winter darkness is settling down, the snow piled beneath the willows glows faintly blue, the sky above is a wonderful deep, dark frosty blue in which the first stars are pricking through: the sun, a bloody, angry, winter eye is setting in a thin line of green at the far end of the pond. Warmly muffled figures, only dark blurs in the distance but recognisable at a few yards, swoop back and forth across the wonderful soapy glimmer of the ice: someone has brought a lantern, and threads its light backward and forward by the slide the children have made near the railway line. Out of this hurly-burly, his long thin legs as supple as willow wands, comes Father, all alone, solemnly performing the Dutch Roll. I have never seen anyone do this before or since... Bridget and I, still at the stage of supporting ourselves with kitchen chairs, gaze at him goggle-eyed, trace his tall figure through the throng at the far end of the pond, welcome him back again with unashamed admiration, with bursting pride. This is the winter of 1917-8, the last of the War: we are twelve and eleven years old and learning to skate; and that is our Father doing the Dutch roll all by himself round the Shelford pond. Soon Mother will come out of the house with her green Gordon tam-o’-shanter; and the two of them will do the next round together...simply skating, hand-in-hand, as they skated when they first met at Adelboden’.

         From ‘Father’ by Jane Campion (Jane Campion was the daughter of G G Coulton, appointed University Lecturer in English in 1919. The family lived in Four Mile House, with the pond just behind it). 

v1 © Helen Harwood, uploaded November 2023