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CHAPTER IX
AN EAST ANGLIAN RIVER
THE Ouse may fairly be called the most characteristic of East Anglian rivers, as it is unquestionably the most important of them. For in its higher reaches it has all of such sober charms as the leisurely streams of the east may boast of, while in its lower ones it loses itself in the great artificial canal-like arteries by which it drains the fen country. It rises near Brackley in Northamptonshire, begins to assert itself as it passes the town of Buckingham, and by the time it reaches Olney, of name familiar as the home of the poet Cowper, is large enough to be a prominent note in the landscape. A dozen times, within as many recent years, it so happens I have come down the hill into Olney from the north and have learned to hail as a welcome relief to a not very stimulating 20 miles of Midland highway, the pleasing view which the Ouse here discloses on a sunshiny day, spreading its bright coil down the valley below to where in fine isolation the great parish church stands beside its banks. The Ouse, from its source to its mouth, is at least distinguished for the character and variety of the ancient towns it washes. Olney, a quiet typical little old-world country town, of a single street, has lately asserted its position so vigorously as the shrine of Cowper that the world which had begun to forget the fact is not likely, with its new passion for tardy justice to inadequately honoured celebrities, to forget it again. From Olney to Bedford, some dozen miles, is perhaps the prettiest stage of the Ouse. At the delectable and ornate village of Turvey there is a fine whirling mill-pool, and through the meadows beyond and particularly about Bromham, there is some very charming river scenery of the willow, the mill-pool, and the country-house type.
In Bedford, through which town it flows, the Ouse is a conspicuous and ornamental feature. Indeed, it may be truly said to adorn every town it touches. The old bridge, the long reach bordered with pleasant houses or bowery garden walls, the life stirring upon it incidental to a great educational centre given much to boating, are all of an inspiring
kind. But Bedford is, of course, a unique type of place: an old town which would no doubt be given over to John Bunyan, as its obscure neighbour Olney is to Cowper, if the presence of some 3000 school boys and girls and their much less occupied belongings had not submerged its past in a whirl of modernity at work or play. Gliding slowly onward, full of lusty chub and hungry pike, of bream and roach, amid scenery that a certain school of landscape painter dearly loves, and so slowly that the weeds in places almost choke its bed, the Ouse drops down another dozen miles to St. Neots. This place, which seems to have some affinity with the same saint that is honoured in a Cornish town, is very much on the Ouse. It is a fine broad river by this time and washes the back gardens of the houses as you enter the main street of the town, which is dominated by an imposing church of the late Perpendicular period. Hence both the highway and the great northern main line follow the valley of the Ouse to Huntingdon. Much the most important person – though of course fortuitously so, and merely because he kept an invaluable journal which has escaped destruction – associated with this stage of the river is Samuel Pepys, whose house at Brampton is still standing. At Godmanchester, only a mile short of Huntingdon, the Ouse contributes more conspicuously than ever, assisted by a great mill-pool, to the beautifying of an old-fashioned place where, as at St. Neots, and just beyond at Huntingdon, are numbers of those pleasant old eighteenth or early nineteenth century residences standing just back from the road in well-timbered grounds or bowery gardens.
Huntingdon follows quickly, and of course the memory of the great Protector altogether dwarfs that of the poet Cowper, who resided here with the Unwins in a house still standing near the church before he moved to Olney. One ought to quote one or other of the various lines and couplets that this very gentle bard has devoted, incidentally as it were, to this very gentle stream. But it is not, I think, fair to a poet of merit and letter-writer of much more than merit, to print fragments that, taken by themselves, have in this case none whatever. But Huntingdon bridge with its six arches is much older than either Cowper or Cromwell, being almost certainly of early mediæval origin. In the heart of the pleasant town, where its long narrow High Street opens into a square, is “All Saints Church,” with its battlements and crocketts and its fifteenth-century origin written all over it.
Immediately opposite is the little old grammar school where both Cromwell and Pepys – the latter before going to Westminster – were educated; a beautiful little twelfth-century building with a recessed and lavishly moulded Norman doorway surmounted by Norman windows and arcading. Originally the Hospital of St. John the Baptist, when the writer visited it recently the voice of the pedagogue, mingling with that unmistakable subdued murmur of schoolboys in their bridled hours, met us at the entrance in a manner so appropriate to the retrospective nature of the fabric as to more than make up for the loss of anything to be seen inside. Hinchinbrook, now and since the Cromwells sold it prior to the Civil War, the home of the Earls of Sandwich, is the “Great house” of the Huntingdon neighbourhood. Many will have to be reminded that the Cromwells were not such by actual right of name, but were descended from one Williams, a cadet of a respectable Glamorganshire family who, as a relative and favourite of the great Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, took his name for obviously practical purposes. This Richard Cromwell, alias Williams, acquired much Church property at the Dissolution, Hinchinbrook among the plums. A man of parts, he became great and wealthy. His son Sir Henry more than sustained his reputation, and built the great mansion more or less as we see it now at Hinchinbrook. Royalty was several times entertained there, but with the third generation and Sir Oliver, that knight’s continuously lavish living caused the transfer of the property to the Montagues. His younger brother Robert, however, had a generous portion in the Huntingdon estate, as every one knows except some foolish people who think because his only son Oliver is supposed to have had a brewery, and certainly was also a farmer, that he was not what the world calls a gentleman. Cromwell’s position was of course far better than that of most younger sons of landed families, who had rarely any land and were only too glad of an opening in trade – even a humble one.
For half a dozen miles through a flat country the road follows the Ouse to St. Ives. On the farther bank are the two Hemingfords, where tall luxuriant timber, mellow old buildings of various degrees, a large mill and wide-spreading mill-pool and forests of tall reeds, strike a fine contrasting note amid the far-spreading meadows. As you approach St. Ives, a huge old tithe barn at some cross roads would arrest the attention from any distance. It is called
after the Protector from a tradition that within it he drilled his first local levies. St. Ives had no connection, like St. Neots, with the Cornish equivalent, but finds its origin in the incredible visitations of a Persian missioner, one Ivo. However that may be, the town was known till near Cromwell’s day as Slepe, and at Slepe Hall, a large mansion within it only removed in modern times, the Protector dwelt when he was farming the surrounding lands.
The town of course contains abundant matters of interest, but is in itself perhaps less attractive to the passing visitor than those higher up the Ouse. But the river itself, now increased considerably here, makes the finest display of all, skirting the houses in wider current and spanned by a bridge of six arches very like its fellow at Huntingdon. Two of the arches are of only Queen Anne date, but the others are lost in the mists of time. The special feature of the bridge, however, is a curious sexagonal chapel of apparently four stories and one room thick. It was originally a chapel, but since the Dissolution has served in many capacities – even that of a public-house – and is now a private dwelling. At the end of the bridge is an ancient Tudor building once the Manor House. Altogether the bridge at St. Ives with its fine swell of waters, its old quays and gable ends on one bank and pendent trees on the other, with the view upstream over spreading meadows and down-stream towards the spacious fen lands, is a notable one, a paradise for oarsmen and the joy of the bottom fisher. In the market-place of St. Ives, too, stands a statue to Cromwell on the strength of his long residence here and general association with the neighbourhood. Many, no doubt, of those who formed the early companies and troops of the “New Model” came from St. Ives. The parish church is a fine specimen of the Decorated style, while its tower has had the unusual experience of losing two spires by wind and collapse in quite modern times.
One is here at the very edge of Cambridgeshire, and well on towards the fen country. The Ouse below St. Ives is no longer confined to its natural course, but canalised and manipulated in various ways for drainage purposes of this great far-reaching fen-land. It is about 15 miles from here to Ely by road, and the journey along it takes the traveller into another kind of country from the ordinary grass and fallow and timbered hedgerow, sometimes flat and sometimes undulating through which the Ouse has hitherto meandered.
It must be conceded that the fen country is forbidding. No doubt it has its compensating moments and aspects, but the intervals of waiting for them must be oppressive. Enthusiasts may be heard anon chanting its praises (theoretically) even as a region of permanent abode, but there is not a little posing nowadays in such matters. In the Middle Ages in the dead of winter the fen country must have been imposing; but the fen from St. Ives to Ely in the height of summer, with its continuously unfenced cultivation, its ever-recurring grain-fields, its lack of wood and of English landscape-graces generally, is very depressing. It is most interesting, however, to watch the isle of Ely rising out of the fat levels and drawing gradually nearer till the road itself at last rises on to it, and the beautiful Cathedral, lifted high above the fen-land and above the East Anglian levels that are not fen, looks southward to where the striking mass of King’s Chapel rises beneath the faint smoke-cloud which marks the famous town of Cambridge.
We meet the Ouse again at Ely. Since University rowing began it has been associated with Cambridge as an object of pilgrimage to enterprising oarsmen, and in a more professional way the time-honoured seat of the Annual race between the University trial eights. For I trust it is not necessary to remind the reader that the river Cam or Granta flows into the Ouse near Ely. At this preternaturally quiet and diminutive little cathedral town we must leave the Ouse to find its devious and much-bridled way to King’s Lynn and to the North Sea. Ely Cathedral is, of course, distinguished for the abundance of perfect Norman work that survives within it, while the old red brick episcopal palace contiguous to it, and the precincts generally, with their snug gardens and whispering leaves, are, as in such a place they should be, the veritable haunts of ancient peace.
