Cambridgeshire

A1-The Great North Road

[ Eaton Socon ] [ Buckden ] [ North of Royston ] [ Huntingdon ] [ Alconbury ] [ Stilton ] [ Norman Cross ] [ Water Newton ] [ Wansford ]

Cambridgeshire

(or Huntingdonshire, as was)

The Great North Road, now followed by the A1, keeps west of the River Ouse and its mile wide floodplain, through Eaton Socon, Buckden and Alconbury. The much straighter route of the Old North Road from Royston (now the A1198) and Ware, followed the Roman Ermine Street joining the A1 at Alconbury Hill, having kept to higher ground further east except where it crossed the Ouse between Godmanchester and Huntingdon. This route used to be the A14 while the A604 followed another Roman road (Via Devena) from Cambridge to Godmanchester. This has now become part of the new A14, a much longer east-west route from Felixtowe (once the A45) to junction 17 on the M1 and the start of the M6. It runs between Godmanchester and Huntingdon flying high over both the Old North Road and the Ouse. This section of the A14 carries traffic from London and the M11 heading north to join the A1(M) at Alconbury Hill now junction 14 and so might now be regarded as part of the modern Great North Road.

The story is not over. The A14 between the A1 and Cambridge is too busy and there are proposals to build a new road either south of Godmanchester to take the A14 traffic more directly to the A1 or to the east and north of Huntingdon. It seems that a new road has to be built but not in my back yard and certainly not near Port Holme, an area of wet meadow upstream of the old Bridge. Proposals for a guided bus route or light railway for Cambridge commuters and heavy railway for east coast – midlands freight are also around. There used to be a railway linking Huntingdon to St. Ives and Cambridge but no more. The line from Huntingdon to St. Ives, opened in 1847, closed in 1959 and from St. Ives to Cambridge in 1970.

Since the A1(M) was built between Junction 14 (Alconbury) and Junction 17 (A605), the former eastern, south-bound, carriageway of the A1 has become the B1043. This is now a very pleasant and very empty alternative to the motorway alongside, passing such important landmarks of the old road as the Alconbury Hill Milestone, marking the junction of the Great and Old North Roads, and the Norman Cross Monument to French prisoners of the Napoleonic war.

Its not just the old road that has been abandoned. This old gate lodge would make a very des. res. now that the traffic is out of site in a cutting, (though not quite out of earshot).

Jackman described travel on the Old North Road at the start of the 18th century with quotations from an early 18th century source:

A writer who had travelled this road from London to the north of England in 1704, made the following significant remarks upon it: Mar. 31, 1704. "I sett out from Royston, and with a great deal of toyle, travelling about two mils an hour at most, thro' the worst and deepest ways I ever rode, and (I believe) is in England. I gott nine miles to Caxton - but passed on about four miles further, in a road but little better, to Godmanchester," Following this statement of the bad roads, he adds: "This is sayd to be a place of the best husbandry in England". Continuing along this road, "From Huntingdon I travelled nine miles, through a bad road, to Stilton". It will be remembered that this was the very road, to improve which the first turnpike Act was passed, in 1663. Then "from Stilton I came 2 miles, through a very bad road to Yaxley. From Yaxley to Peterborough is still a very bad road o 3 miles".

(British Museum, 10348. ccc.56. North of England and Scotland in 1704, A Journal published from the original MS of an unknown author, Edinburgh 1818.)

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