Orwell, Great Eversden, Little Eversden

This post is a compilation of several walks over the last couple of years with the Cambridge Rambling Club in this area, which is close to Wimpole Hall. The captions on the photographs describe the villages in more detail.

The route starts at Orwell village car park; Orwell is a rural village outside Cambridge, particularly noted for

1) its clunch pit, a 4.4-acre former stone quarry with a rich chalk grassland flora (scarce in Eastern England), and now a biological Site of Scientific Interest (clunch is a traditional building material, and is a hard, compact form of chalk or limestone used historically in East Anglia for constructing walls and buildings).

2) the Prime Meridian passing the eastern edge of the village.

We cross the A603, and then ascend the hill up to Mare Way, an ancient, prehistoric ridge route, and follow this to the path that turns off for Wimpole Hall; we walk in the other direction towards Great Eversden; this is a small village of about 85 houses that broadly takes the shape of a cross, with roads towards Harlton to Kingston road forming the East and West arms and no-through-roads of Chapel Road and Wimpole Road forming the North and South arms. We then take the footpath across to Little Eversden.

From here, it is over the A603 again and to Harlton, also noted for a clunch pit, and then on to Barrington - see earlier posts for details of these villages - before heading back to Orwell.

It is a lovely walk.Read more