We recently went back to my home county of Cambridgeshire for a family occasion. We found accommodation in the town of Whittlesey – I’d heard of it, school friends had lived there but I’d never really thought anything about it. We discovered that it’s a delightful market town with a great deal of interesting history attached… in fact, I would rather like to go back, stay there again and spend time looking round.
You might know that many towns in certain areas which end in ‘ea’, ‘ay’ or ‘ey’ used to be settlements on islands, especially those in fenland areas. So it is with Whittlesey which is between Peterborough and March. The River Nene flows nearby and once the land all around it was very watery indeed. People have lived in the area for thousands of years, and the major archaeological excavations at Must Farm aren’t far away.
There’s a market square, and the Buttercross, an old roofed open sided structure from under which people sold their wares. Now it’s just an interesting feature of the interesting town. We didn’t have a good look at it, nor the two churches dating back to the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The reason for this was that after six dry and sunny weeks, this weekend it decided to sheet it down with rain. This is also why I have no photos!
We stayed in a delightful cottage… which I will describe in more detail another time, and it was in sauntering distance of a very good pub called The Letter B. If you are ever in the area, I recommend it! Here is a link:
Lois Elsden 