A time-travelling Tudor peasant might return to the place of their birth and find reassurance in the sight of Madingley’s medieval church. They could stand before its sturdy tower and run their fingers over stones embedded in mortar, as I did, then step inside to rediscover the font where they were baptised, and look up for re-acquaintance with exquisitely detailed medieval figures floating in stained glass.
But a hard stare into the nettled field beside the churchyard would make them wonder where their village had gone. The 18th century owners of Madingley Hall, which is about four miles from the centre of Cambridge, desired an estate with a view, and that view did not include a village street. So by the middle of the century the people had been evicted from their homes, their houses razed to the ground. I came to search for evidence of this lost community and found it.
An archaeologist’s eye would see signs of this lowland clearance in a dried stream that was never wet. The sunken channel running through the adjacent meadow was not a stream at all, but the course of West Street, a sinuous route leading parishioners almost to the church door. But the road, the buildings and their foundations were lost, replaced by thick ryegrass and nettles.
Outside the churchyard, however, rabbits had unearthed what I thought was a village midden. An arc of yew trees enclosed the old graveyard and the animals had burrowed into a bank, throwing up spoil from under the yew roots – broken pieces of tile, an oyster shell and what I assumed were domestic animal bones.
In early spring I took away a single small bone, but, before I could store it with my rabbit and badger skulls, mink jawbone and other assorted animal parts, I began to have doubts.
My radiographer mother-in-law confirmed them; it was the knuckle of a human thumb. And now, as I stood again in the place where I had found it, I thought about the person who had died and those who had laid that person’s body in the ground. I reached into my pocket, drew out the thumb bone and put it back where it belonged.
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Derek Niemann is teaching a course in creative nature writing at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, Madingley Hall, on 17 September (ice.cam.ac.uk)
