There is a quick way to Grantchester, and there is the long way. The long way starts where the town gives up: past the last college gardens at Newnham, through a gate, and out onto the meadows, where the river slows and the city noise falls away behind you.
Upstream of Cambridge the Cam is often called by its older name, the Granta, and it feels like a different river here. Willows lean low over the water. Cows graze the far bank. Punts drift past at walking pace, and the path wanders through long grass, cow parsley and, in early summer, the sweet smell of honeysuckle in the hedges.
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
About two miles on, the meadows give way to the village. Students have walked this way for generations to take tea under the apple trees of the Orchard. In the years before the First World War, the poet Rupert Brooke lodged in Grantchester, and friends such as Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes came to visit, swim and talk late into the evening.
Brooke wrote his famous poem about the village while homesick in Berlin. It ends with the lines above, and people have been asking the same question ever since. The answer, happily, is still yes.
If you have the time, carry on a little further to Byron’s Pool, a shaded bend said to be named after the poet who swam there as a student. Then turn round, and take the long way home.
[Fact-check before publishing: dates, distances and historical details.]