About Westings Meadow

Over the last four years I've been exploring the biodiversity and history of Westings Meadow, a long-forgotten meadow in north-west Cambridgeshire... Do you know the land along the Maxey Cut? For over six hundred years it was called Westings Meadow, right up until the early 1800s. This page brings together some of the highlights of our research. We're hoping to gather stories of this land's more recent past too; we'd love to hear from you if you remember the Maxey Cut being built, or what this land was like before the gravel quarrying.



For over 600 years until the early 1800s, Westings Meadow was a three-mile long ribbon of meadow managed by the surrounding villages in an intricate system of farming. It's mentioned in documents dating back as far as 1263 and there's even a map dated 1580 (though no one knows why it was drawn). Poet John Clare played there as a child in the late 1700s, and wrote about a walk there 185 years ago, describing the farmworkers, birds and plants he'd seen. He even mentions the carvings on the meadow's old stone bridges, which he said were made by bored shepherds and cow-tending boys! Though very weathered now, the carvings can still be seen when the sun is bright and low.



Much further back in time, Bronze Age and Neolithic families worked this land too, farming sheep, holding summer gatherings and building their vast landscape of cursus, causeways and ring ditches beside a meandering fen-edge river. It was a very significant place for them... though perhaps they would have called it by a different name?

Westings' name seems to have fallen out of use during the early 1800s, at about the time that this land was Enclosed and made private. And before long, it seems this old place with its common rights was forgotten - during the fast-changing times of the industrial revolution. Then, in the mid-1950s, the building of the Maxey Cut to protect nearby towns and villages from flooding, and extensive gravel quarrying once again saw humans physically shaping this land on a huge scale.


Nowadays, the historic location of Westings Meadow is a patchwork of farmland, quarry pits, fishing lakes and found nature reserves managed by Langdyke Countryside Trust.

The nature reserves are mainly ex-quarry sites, and they are living examples of how nature can recover given opportunity and a little help - as those who love this area will know, its biodiversity is very bit as rich as its history. There are Otters, migrating Sea Trout, rare moths, Glowworms, Starling murmurations, wild orchids and more!.

We want to celebrate this place and those who've worked, walked and cared for it by gathering more of Westings Meadow's stories to share with our local communities. The true stories of our rural countryside are so often overlooked and easily become forgotten, yet many of us love to know a bit (or a lot) about the heritage and biodiversity of places close to where we live.

This year it'll be 185 since John Clare walked on the land that was once called Westings Meadow, and the 70th anniversary of the Maxey Cut - so this is the perfect time to celebrate this very special part of our countryside.

I hope you'll follow our project online or via my (occasional) newsletters, and if you live nearby keep an eye out for events celebrating the true stories of Westings Meadow.





With thank to Dr Tracey Partida, who found the Tudor map of Westings Meadow which first sparked my interest. See Dr Partida's (2014) “Drawing the Lines: A GIS study of enclosure and landscape in Northamptonshire” (Doctoral dissertation, University of Huddersfield)