Grantchester

From what I had heard, every Cambridge visitor needs to take a Sunday walk to Grantchester. I waited for the perfect sunny Sunday, contacted Liz, and the great Sunday Grantchester walk began.

The walk is seriously gorgeous. It doesn’t take many minutes for the busy streets and formidable Cambridge buildings to vanish, replaced by pastoral fields, gurgling river, and of course grazing cows. Liz and I strolled along, enjoying the Sunday sunshine and grappling with the question of the hour: do we fancy a pub lunch or tea in the Orchard. We settled on a compromise position—lunch in the Orchard.

Lunch in the Orchard is amazing experience. Within moments, we felt we had been transported to some charming and lovely time in history. Liz grabbed some of the literature for me to read, and you can see why two budding academics felt at home, given the history of the place:

“From 1909, when Brooke moved into Orchard House, to 1914, when the First World War began, the Orchard, with its wooden Tea Pavilion, which still stands to this day, provided a backdrop to a very remarkable group of friends - Rupert Brooke (a poet), Russell and Wittgenstein (philosophers), Forster and Virginia Woolf (novelists), Keynes (an economist), and Augustus John (an artist). It was an idyllic period. The world had been relatively at peace for nearly a hundred years, since Waterloo. It was an age of relaxed elegance - energetic and optimistic. An age of 25-mile-a-day walking tours, sleeping under canvas and picnicking on the grass.”

It really is an idyllic place and we really did have the most perfect lunch of salmon and asparagus quiche, potatoes with crème fraiche, salad, and lemonade. After lunch, we feasted on tea and cake, and Liz attempted to embrace her inner Lubbock when a friendly wasp wanted to share her pie.
We walked a different and mildly more adventurous way home, as you can see from the pictures. All told, another excellent day!