Note 167 — Chapter X

And as the river divides, so also does our London Road, one route following either valley. The Granta route goes viâ Bishop Stortford and Epping Forest, entering London by the Mile End Road, the other viâ Royston, Ware, and Tottenham, coming in by Bishopsgate Street. The division comes just as we leave Trumpington, at the lych-gate of the village cemetery, whence the left-hand branch brings us to the twin villages of Great and Little Shelford, with the Granta running between them. Both churches are good, the former with an octagonal steeple, and a churchyard kept like a garden, and the latter with a grand square-headed Decorated window in its transept, where are preserved some nice fragments of the ancient alabaster reredos. There are also various good fifteenth century monuments of the De Freville family, whose name still lives on as that of a suburban district in Cambridge. Great Shelford Church is richly decorated, as it seems to have been of old, for here Dowsing destroyed no fewer than 128 "superstitions." The bridge over the Granta between the two villages was in mediæval times under the charge of a hermit, like Newnham Bridge at Cambridge.[167]