Tag Archives: hamlet

A hamlet with a memorable name in Cambridgeshire

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ONE OF MY FAVOURITE uncles used to be highly amused by the name of a place found on maps of eastern England. The place is Six Mile Bottom. The first time I heard him mention the place was when I was about six years old. As far as I can recall, I never visited the place until today (17 March 2025). As we were passing near it, we took a small detour to see it. There is not much to see, but at least I have at last been there.

Six Mile Bottom is a hamlet in the Cambridgeshire parish of Little Wilbraham, which is not far from Cambridge. The place was so named in 1801 because it is six miles from Newmarket and rests in a ‘bottom’ (an old name for a valley).

Before the 1790s, there was only one building in the place. In 1802, a large dwelling was built close by. One of its earliest residents was Augusta Leigh, who was a half-sister of the celebrated Lord Byron. Otherwise, Six Mile Bottom cannot boast of any other noteworthy former or current residents. There was a railway station at the hamlet, which served passengers between the 1860s and 1967. The hamlet still has a single-track railway running past it and boasts of two level-crossings.

During our brief visit to Six Mile Bottom, we parked outside the only shop, the Six Mile Bottom Spar grocery store. Across the road from it, there a carved stone cross, which serves as a war memorial. This monument records the names of the 16 men from Six Mile Bottom, who died during WW1. A side road leads across one of the hamlet’s level crossings to the Church of St George, which is constructed in brick and flint. Its foundation stone was laid in 1933, and the edifice was built by 1935. Mrs Favell Helen Hall, who laid the stone, was the widow of Major Alexander Cross Hall (1869-1920), who served in both the Second Anglo-Boer War and WW1 (www.iwm.org.uk/memorials/item/memorial/82010). The Major’s father, William Henry (Bullock) Hall (1837-1904), was the first-class cricketer and military historian, who changed his surname from Bullock to Hall when he inherited two Cambridgeshire estates from his uncle General John Hall of Weston Colville and Six Mile Bottom. The major lived and died at Great Rollright in Oxfordshire. Our brief visit to Six Mile Bottom today has satisfied my curiosity about the place whose name used to amuse my uncle. I am not sure that I would bother making a detour to see this hamlet too often. Maybe, once is enough.

Come to good in the countryside of Cornwall

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QUAKERS, MEMBERS OF The Society of Friends are Christians who believe that worship should rely on the guidance of the Holy Spirit without the intercession of ordained ministers and without practising outward rituals. The Quakers worship one to one with God without any external ‘frills’. The Quaker movement was founded by George Fox (1624-1691) in about 1652.

Fox travelled around England, Europe, and North America, encouraging people to adopt his method of worship. In 1656, he came to Cornwall. While there, he was arrested for blasphemy several times. Nevertheless, many Cornish people were keen to hear what he had to say, and became his followers. Soon after his visit, groups of Quakers began to form in Cornwall. One of them began meeting in a farmhouse near to the hamlet called Come-to-Good in about 1653. Then, they began renting another building nearby. When this began to disintegrate in 1707, they raised money to build a new Meeting House: a simple thatched cottage, which was completed in about 1710. This humble edifice is still in use for worship meetings today. It stands in Come-to-Good.

The historicengland.org.uk website noted:

“The Meeting House was built in 1710 using funds’ raised from Quaker subscribers in 1707 and 1710. … Research by Mr Withers of Penelewey Barton shows that the farm, including the land on which the meeting house stands, was owned by James Mayo, a Quaker, and was later leased to Vyvian, whose name with the date 1716 is scratched on one of the window panes at the farmhouse. In spite of the C20 porch on the west end, this little meeting house has been remarkably unaltered since the C19 and still retains much of its original character and fabric.”

We visited the Meeting House in early July 2024. Sadly, we could not enter it because it was locked up. So, we were unable to see its simple interior, which has remained almost unchanged since the place was first used. From the road, the Meeting House looks much as it would have when it was built. A small extension with an entrance hall, kitchen, and toilets was added to the rear of the old building in 1967.

There is a small Quaker burial ground near the Meeting House, but we did not notice it because the burial mounds were levelled in the 1940s. One of the people buried there is a Quaker preacher, Catherine Payton Phillips (1727-1794), who, like George Fox, travelled in the British Isles, Continental Europe, and the North American colonies.  In 1772, she married William Phillips, and lived with him in his home in Redruth (not far from Come-to-Good).

As for the hamlet’s name, Come-to-Good, it is currently believed that the place was only called that after the formation of the local Quaker’s meeting group. Although it is only a small building, which hardly rivals some of Cornwall’s other attractions, it is a pleasant, peaceful place to visit in the heart of the Cornish countryside.