Walk on past Grantchester, beyond the tea rooms and the last of the meadow, and the river changes mood again. The path slips into a little wood. The light turns green and dappled. Then you hear it before you see it: water spilling over a weir into a deep, still pool.
This is Byron’s Pool. Long before it had that name, it was the millpond of Trumpington Mill, the mill that Geoffrey Chaucer chose as the setting for the Reeve’s Tale in the Canterbury Tales, a story about a crafty miller and two Cambridge students who get the better of him. The mill disappeared long ago, but the water still gathers here.
A poet’s name
The pool is named after Lord Byron, who is said to have bathed here while he was a student at Trinity College in the early 1800s. It was Rupert Brooke, a century later, who helped make the story famous. Brooke swam here often while he lived in Grantchester, and Virginia Woolf, then still Virginia Stephen, later boasted that the two of them had swum in the pool by moonlight.
A place where people have come to cool off and dream for over two hundred years.
The old wooden weir was swept away in the floods of 1947 and replaced with the one you see today, and a channel was later added so that fish can make their way upstream. Cambridge City Council took over the land in 1949, and in 2005 it became a Local Nature Reserve: a small, densely wooded corner with ponds, birdsong and a riverbank path.
A quieter bend
Most visitors never come this far, and that is the charm of it. On a summer afternoon you might see a heron standing perfectly still, dragonflies stitching the air above the water, and a swimmer or two drifting in the cool green shade, just as Byron and Brooke once did.
[Fact-check before publishing: dates and details.]