Huntingdonshire

Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, is the greatest of the men of small Huntingdonshire, smallest of English counties after Rutland and Middlesex. He was born at Cromwell House ( I ) , in Huntingdon, in the last year of the sixteenth century. Samuel Pepys (2) (1633-1703), a gayer character, lived as a boy at Brampton, near Huntingdon, where he went to school. The seal of Huntingdon (3), a huntsman, a tree, hounds and a deer, assumes that the name had to do with hunting and forests. It means either “the hunter’s hill” or the hill of an Anglo-Saxon named Hunta. We associate this little county rather with fen and reed and willow and yellow water-lilies and the slow winding water of the Ouse, and church spires cutting into the sky. Fluttering over the river are two of the rare butterflies of the Huntingdonshire natural reserves of Wood Walton Pen and Monks Wood, the Large Copper (4), re-introduced at Wood Walton in 1927, and the Black Hairstreak (5) of Monks Wood. Skates (6) are a reminder of the fen skating centre at Earith. In osier baskets (7) are plums ‐ the variety Czar to the left, and Rivers’ Early Prolific to the right ‐ from the greensand area of small orchards north of St. Ives, on the edge of the fens. At Little Gidding in this county, near Stilton, the saintly Nicholas Ferrar (1592-1637), lord of the manor, maintained his famous religious community.