A walking tour of the Cambridge I know for 20 years, with its cafés, colleges, chapels, and the Cam

Walking along the backs in Cambridge this week, with views of the chapel of King’s College and the buildings of Clare College (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

I spent a day in Cambridge earlier this week, meeting a friend from Ireland who has been staying in Saint John’s College and taking a short top-up course in theology organised by the Diocese of Ely.

Cambridge is always beautiful in the sunshine, even if it is suffering under the crush of over-tourism. The weight of tourism means many colleges have signs saying they are closed to visitors, even though this is the height of the tourist season and the pressures of exams and graduations have passed.

Still, it was good to introduce my friend to the Cambridge that I have known so well for almost 20 years and still feel a part of.

We met at the train station, walked along Station Road and Hills Road back into the centre of Cambridge and stopped for a long coffee and the opportunity to catch up on old times before beginning our walk around Cambridge in earnest.

First Court and the chapel in Christ’s College (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

We had dropped into Our Lady and the English Martyrs Church, and had glimpses of Downing and Emmanuel, of Parker’s Piece and of Saint Andrew’s Baptist Church. But our first real stopping point was Christ’s College, where the castle-like gatehouse on Saint Andrew’s Street has had its vibrant colours and paintwork repainted in a project that was completed in 2018.

The statue of the college founder, Lady Margaret Beaufort, has been spruced up too, although the tourists peering into First Court were more image in the plaque with an image of Charles Darwin, a former undergraduate. I tried to explain how I once, in vain, searched for the supposed links between Darwin and the Comberford family, but recalled how it is said that even before the chapel was consecrated Lady Margaret heard Mass from a gallery now represented by a window in the south wall of the chapel, although the chapel was not formally consecrated until a year after her death.

I preached in the chapel and was a visiting lecturer in Christ’s College in 2009, and I stayed there again the following year before taking part in the summer school at Sidney Sussex College organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies.

From Christ’s College, we strolled along Petty Curry into Market Square, then along Peas Hill and into Saint Edward’s Passage to see David’s Bookshop, the most charming bookshop in England, and Saint Edward’s Church where they recently marked the 500th anniversary of the sermon by Robert Barnes at midnight mass on Christmas Eve 1525 that is said to have sparked the Reformation in England.

Inside the chapel at King’s College, Cambride (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

On King’s Parade we gave the tourist shops a healthy miss and instead looked at the Senate House, Great Saint Mary’s, the University Church, and Gonville and Gaius College, turning into Senate House Passage, and passing Trinity Hall and Clare College, where I have also stayed, to visit King’s College.

There we spent some time admiring King’s Chapel, and, although it thronged with tourists there were quiet places to sit and reflect, think and pray, and to talk quietly.

We strolled through Back Lawn, filled with wild flowers and still without its summer mowing, and walked along the Backs and the banks of the Cam, crossing King’s College Bridge to enjoy views of the punters on the river – some with copious supplies of Pimm’s – and to catch a glimpse of Clare Bridge, where one of the 14 decorative stone balls is missing a neatly sliced wedge or segment.

Cambridge lore says the builder cut out the wedge in a pay dispute or to avoid taxes, but the true explanation is probably that it is a weathered repair.

The Corpus Clock, where the Grasshopper is eating up time (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

We walked back through Front Court onto King’s Parade, where we watched the Corpus Clock, unveiled by Stephen Hawking, where the Chronophage or the Grasshopper clock is eating up time.

We had to step into the Eagle, where Crick and Watson announced in 1953 announced they had discovered the ‘Secret of Life’ or the double helix structure of DNA, and then visited Saint Bene’t’s Church which, for the years I was following courses with IOCS at Sidney Sussex College, was almost like a parish church for me.

We were soon back on Margaret Street, and we skipped through Market Passage with its associations with Oliver Cromwell, to see Sidney Sussex College, where lingering wisteria is still trailing over the wall onto Sidney Street. Walking through Sussex Street and the commercial developments owned by Sidney Sussex, we ended up the corner of King Street and Hobson Street, and shared stories of the ways in life we have often been confronted a ‘Hobson’s Choice’ – take it or leave it.

Bikes and cyclists at on Sidney Street at Sidney Sussex College (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

A long and lengthy late lunch in King Street Brewhouse provided more opportunities to catch up on life in Ireland, England and further life, to talk about church life, teaching, theology, journalism and families, and compared notes about working visits to and time in different parts of Europe and Africa.

With Sidney Sussex to our left, we cut along Malcolm Street to Westcott House, where we compared theological education in Ireland and England, had a glimpse of All Saints’ Church, and crossed Jesus Lane to a warm welcome in Jesus College.

On Jesus Lane, we looked at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies and Wesley House, both now within the ambit of Jesus College, and walked on past Little Trinity, the ADC Theatre, home of the the Cambridge Footlights, whose members came to dominate British comedy in the 1970s, the 1980s, and beyond, and we peered into the former Pitt Club, now a Japanese restaurant.

Punters on the Cam below Magdalene Bridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

We squeezed our way along Bridge Street, with the Round Church, the side of Saint John’s College and Saint Clement’s, where we turned in to picturesque Portugal Place, where returning Jews first settled in Cambridge in the 17th century. We ended up back at the Cam and Magdalene Bridge, by Magdalene College. Our time had run out, and we never even considered the offers of taking a short journey on a punt on the Cam.

Cambridge had been beautiful in this July sunshine. In the throngs of tourists, I did not see myself as a tourist or visitor, even for a moment, but felt I was back in the Cambridge I have known and that has been part of me for almost 20 years.

I had shown my friend my Cambridge and the Cambridge that John Betjeman describes as ‘The white of windy Cambridge courts, the cobbles brown and dry’, where choirs and organs join to ‘praise Eternity contained in Time and coloured glass.’ Walking back to catch a train home at the end of my Odyssey in Cambridge and feeling wistful, I could not but have another look at Sidney Sussex College and its glorious wisteria.

I should get back more often. And I should write more about those colleges, chapels and the Cam in the days to come.

A wistful look at the wisteria at Sidney Sussex before leaving Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Back in High Leigh for a USPG conference after a journey through Bedford and Cambridge

A return visit to Sidney Sussex College in this afternoon’s summer sunshine in Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

I am on my way this evening from Cambridge to Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire and to the High Leigh Conference Centre at Hoddesdon, where the annual conference of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) is taking place this week.

I caught an early bus from Milton Keynes to Bedford, and during a brief stopover I went to see the rowing clubs by the River Ouse and in search of the sites of the mediaeval Jewish community and the later 19th century synagogues on High Street, before catching a connecting bus to Cambridge.

I was last in Cambridge in June 2019, on my way to and from that year’s USPG conference in High Leigh. This afternoon’s visit to Cambridge was an opportunity to refresh old memories, to return to Sidney Sussex College, to see the last of the summer wisteria there, to see the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies (IOCS) at Wesley House and Westcott House on Jesus Lane, to stroll by the Backs and to visit some churches and some of my favourite bookshops, before catching a train to Broxbourne, the nearest station to Hoddesdon.

Looking for the last of this year’s wisteria in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, this afternoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

I arrived at High Leigh late this afternoon, in time for dinner, and may go for a stroll back into Hoddesdon later this evening.

I was first in High Leigh 18 years ago when I was the chaplain in 2006 at the annual conference of the Friends of the Church in China and the China Forum of CTBI (Churches Together in Britain and Ireland). Since then, my journeys to and from conferences in High Leigh have offered opportunities to explore nearby towns such as Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire, Saffron Walden and Newport in Essex, to visit Rye House, the venue of the Rye House Plot in 1683, or to return to Cambridge.

My first USPG conference was in Swanwick in Derbyshire in 2008, and I have been at USPG conferences in Swanwick and High Leigh almost every year since then. I missed last year’s conference in Yarnfield Park in Stone, Staffordshire, on the theme of ‘Justice and the Church,’ because I was in Dublin working on a television documentary with a production company from Montenegro. But it is hard to believe that is now two years since I have been at High Leigh and at a USPG conference.

This year’s conference theme in High Leigh is ‘United Beyond Borders’ and the guest speakers and contributors include Bishop Anderson Jeremiah of Edmonton, the Very Revd Dr Kelly Brown Douglas of Episcopal Divinity School, Bradon Muilenburg who is working with refugees in Calais and Bishop Dalcy Badeli Dlamini of Eswatini (Swaziland), who is leading the Bible studies each morning.

The conference is an opportunity be inspired, encouraged and refreshed, and to hear about USPG’s support work with refugees in northern France, where they need hospitality, support and care, to engage with topics such as gender justice and racial justice, and the intertwined legacies of slavery and racism, colonialism and empire. They are topics that are also timely and sensitive given the rise of the far-right in elections in recent days in both the UK and France, fuelled by racism and intolerance towards refugees and asylum seekers.

I am looking forward to the opportunities the conference brings to meet many old friends, to hear from the guest speakers and to engage with workshops and Bible studies. And I am also looking forward to walks in the countryside and by the rivers in a part of East Anglia that I have now known for almost 20 years.

Walking by the River Ouse in this morning’s summer sunshine in Bedford on the way to High Leigh (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Hoddesdon and Broxbourne are in a part of Hertfordshire that typifies the English countryside and picture-postcard English towns and villages. As a travelled on the train from Cambridge to Broxbourne I enjoyed the views of the fields and countryside described by Betjeman as

… Clothed, thank the Lord, in summer green,
Pale corn waves rippling to a shore
The shadowy cliffs of elm between,

Colour-washed cottages reed-thatched
And weather-boarded water mills,
Flint churches, brick and plaster patched,
On mildly undistinguished hills

In his poem ‘Hertfordshire’, Betjeman recalls trudging through these fields in his childhood, and he returns to this area, perhaps at this time of the year, to find some of those fields are still there, but the Hertfordshire he knew as a child has been devastated by the spread of urbanisation,

Its gentle landscape strung with wire,
Old places looking ill and strange.

One can’t be sure where London ends,
New towns have filled the fields of root ...

Tall concrete standards line the lane,
Brick boxes glitter in the sun …

But in the sunshine and ‘summer green’ this week, I expect to enjoy some walks through these “mildly undistinguished hills” and lanes, and through welcoming fields, to find some timber-framed houses and pubs, and, perhaps, some ‘Flint churches, brick and plaster patched.’

The White Swan on the High Street in Hoddesdon … a timber-framed Hertfordshire pub rated by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘visually the most striking timber-framed inn in the district’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

‘Hertfordshire’ by John Betjeman

I had forgotten Hertfordshire,
The large unwelcome fields of roots
Where with my knickerbockered sire
I trudged in syndicated shoots;

And that unlucky day when I
Fired by mistake into the ground
Under a Lionel Edwards sky
And felt disapprobation round.

The slow drive home by motor-car,
A heavy Rover Landaulette,
Through Welwyn, Hatfield, Potters Bar,
Tweed and cigar smoke, gloom and wet:

“How many times must I explain
The way a boy should hold a gun?”
I recollect my father’s pain
At such a milksop for a son.

And now I see these fields once more
Clothed, thank the Lord, in summer green,
Pale corn waves rippling to a shore
The shadowy cliffs of elm between,

Colour-washed cottages reed-thatched
And weather-boarded water mills,
Flint churches, brick and plaster patched,
On mildly undistinguished hills—

They still are there. But now the shire
Suffers a devastating change,
Its gentle landscape strung with wire,
Old places looking ill and strange.

One can’t be sure where London ends,
New towns have filled the fields of root
Where father and his business friends
Drove in the Landaulette to shoot;

Tall concrete standards line the lane,
Brick boxes glitter in the sun:
Far more would these have caused him pain
Than my mishandling of a gun.

Wisteria brings the colour of spring and the promise of summer to Farmleigh

Wisteria on the portico at the State Guest House in Farmleigh this afternoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

Patrick Comerford

I have claimed my democratic privileges, exercised by franchise, done my civic duty and cast my ballot, voting in a way that I hope is going to do my country proud.

I spent much of the day marking undergraduate exam papers, working through lunchtime. By early afternoon I needed a break, and two of us headed into the city centre, across the river, and out to the Phoenix Park for a late lunch and double espressos in the Boat House Café at Farmleigh House.

Walking around the lake at Farmleigh with its water lilies and overhanging trees (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

Later we walked around the small, tree-lined lake, with its artificial island and water-lilies. This was a boating lake for the Guinness family when they lived at Farmleigh, and then strolled through the Walled Garden.

A pair of elegant decorative wrought-iron gates lead into the four acres of the Walled Garden. Inside, a diagonal walk is lined with herbaceous borders backed by high yew hedges. South of the main crosswalk is a small orchard and potager while north of it there is a small rose and lavender garden.

The Walled Garden dates from the early 19th century, when Charles Trench owned Farmleigh. In the Victorian era, the walled garden had several glasshouses. The present cast-iron glasshouse was erected by Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh and great-grandson of Arthur Guinness.

The walled garden was first planned by Charles Trench and redesigned by Lady Iveagh (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

His daughter in-law, Lady (Gwendolen) Iveagh, later created a new layout in the early 20th century, dividing the walled garden into compartments with old-style garden plants and herbaceous borders. A new traditional path led from the wrought iron gateway connecting the Walled Garden to the broad walk at the back of the house. This new axis of the garden was reinforced by tall yew hedges backing the long double herbaceous borders that she also planted.

A stone temple was created as a focal point of the garden by Benjamin and Miranda Guinness in 1971: it has six antique columns of Portland stone with a copper roof and ornamental weather vane. The main cross path either side of the temple has metal structures designed by Lanning Roper for climbing roses and wisteria similar to those in the Bagatelle Garden in Paris.

A paved rose garden was laid out to the north east of the temple backed by a yew hedge and looking across a lawn to the small orchard and potage. Lanning Roper suggested planting a quince, a mulberry, a catalpa, and a magnolia, to complete what he described as a Carolingian Quartet on this lawn. Lady Iveagh later planted the double herbaceous borders, which include yuccas, phormiums, paeonies, astilbe and euphorbias.

Hannah Deacon’s Wedding Scene, inspired by ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

Hannah Deacon’s Sabbath Evening, inspired by ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

From the walled gardens, we walked back past the state guest house to the Gallery for the Intelligent Machinery Exhibition, with exhibits by Sofie Loscher, Jonathan Mayhew and Niamh O’Doherty.

Next door, the Cow Shed is hosting ‘Cross Over,’ this year’s end-of-year graduate exhibition for Ballyfermot College of Further Education. The exhibition opened last Tuesday and continues until Sunday.

I was particularly captivated by three scenes inspired by Fiddler on the Roof, the work of Hannah Deacon.

Wisteria in the Courtyard before leaving Farmleigh this afternoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

Before we left, I lingered a while in the courtyard to admire the wisteria which is in full bloom there and throughout Farmeligh.

Naturally, I particularly associate wisteria with the Courts of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where the wisteria has been in full bloom in recent weeks. The botanist Thomas Nuttall said he named wisteria in honour of Dr Caspar Wistar (1761–1818), an American physician and anatomist from Philadelphia, but I wonder why he changed the spelling.

Wisteria blooms in late spring, and is often at its fullest in early summer. Certainly, Farmeligh was filled with the promise of summer this afternoon.

Here are some extra photographs from the Walled Garden in Farmleigh this afternoon:

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‘And death shall have no dominion’

‘Where blew a flower may a flower no more / Lift its head to the blows of the rain’ … wisteria flowering in the rain at the Castle Golf Club in Rathfarnham this afternoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Patrick Comerford

After writing last night about Dylan Thomas and his poem Do not go gently into that good night, I was pondering another of his poems on death as a family funeral continued today.

When Dylan Thomas wrote And death shall have no dominion in 1933, he took the title of the poem from a verse in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him” (Romans 6: 9).

Last night, I sat in the garden long after dusk had turned to dark, watching a young bat flitting in the fading lights and listening to the flow of water from the lion’s mouth of the fountain.

As the funeral today moved between the rain and the never-to-be-realised promises of sunshine, from the church to the graveyard to a family reception in the Castle Golf Club in Rathfarnham, I contemplated the wisteria below where we were gathered, and thought of how Dylan Thomas spoke in this poem of how:

Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

And I thought too how in this poem the poet weaves together the deepest questions of faith and life as he wrestles with the meanings of life, death and existence.

Dylan Thomas speaks in the very male language of the 1930s. Yet, poignantly, in the 2003 movie Rosenstrasse, this poem is quoted as two Jewish women await deportation to Auschwitz.

In early 1933, Dylan Thomas became friends with Bert Trick, a grocer who worked in the Uplands area of Swansea. Trick was a would-be poet and had several poems published in local newspapers. In the spring of 1933, Trick had the idea that he and Dylan Thomas should write a poem on the subject of “immortality.”

Trick’s poem was published in a local newspaper the following year, and included the refrain “For death is not the end.”

Meanwhile, in April 1933, Dylan Thomas wrote his poem And death shall have no dominion. Trick persuaded him to seek a publisher, and the poem was published the next month (May 1933) in the New English Weekly.

On 10 September 1936, two years after the publication of his first volume of poems, 18 Poems, Dylan Thomas published Twenty-five Poems, in which he wrote about his personal beliefs and the forces of nature. The poems in that collection And death shall have no dominion.

The poem celebrates the undying and eternal strength of the human spirit. It is because of this strength that death does not claim ultimate victory over humanity. The dead are never truly lost to us but live on through the beauty of their memory and spirit. The struggle continues.

Three unrhymed verses make up the work. Beautiful universal imagery focuses on the sea, bones, and burial. Each verse starts and ends with the phrase: “And death shall have no dominion.”

Even as Dylan Thomas brings the reader face to face with the physical reality of death, he disarms it. He gives death meaning by allowing the reader to see the beauty behind it, especially the beauty of human courage and dignity. Timeless values live on in the stories of those who have died, for to live on in the memory of loved ones is to never die.

In the first verse, the poet shows that in death all are one. Race and skin colour have no more meaning when skin is no more. After death, the body is united with nature:

Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon.

In death, we shall all be naked, as we are from our mothers’ wombs. In death, the innocence of Eden is restored. It is here that we become the stuff of legends. Here one person becomes part of a constellation, part of a grand design bigger than myself.

Though his bones are naked, they may become clothed in eternal glory instead of mortal skin:

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbows and foot

Their foibles will be forgotten and their glories remembered. Their confusion forgotten, they will attain an eternal perspective of clarity. Those who have drowned in a universal sea of human sorrow shall be restored and taste joy again. Lovers will be reunited:

Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

In the second verse, Dylan Thomas takes us to a graveyard on the sea floor. The dead here appear to be either sailors or other souls lost at sea. These dead died bravely, having suffered in their lives. The wheel of time has tested, tortured, and tried, but not broken them:

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

The unicorn is an old, symbolic motif often used to symbolise Christ and God. Has God or religion let these souls down? Unicorns’ horns were said to be harder than diamonds and to be able to neutralise poisons. Unicorn tears could heal both physical wounds and sorrows of the heart. The refrain And death shall have no dominion symbolises this triumph.

In the final verse, the poem wraps up on land, by the seashore. He draws out the fact that the dead are no longer aware of the physical elements that once made up their home with the words:

No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores.

Yet new life may spring up in their place, an intrepid life like a flower that may “lift its head to the blows of the rain.”

Their innocence shall burst through like daisies. This innocence ultimately wins over even the sun, breaking it down. To break down the sun is to steal death’s power. The phrase “Heads of the characters hammer through daisies” implies that it is the character of those dead that hammers through the pain until innocence breaks through. The daisy flower, pure and childlike, pushes stubbornly through the hard earth of the grave to rise defiantly and bloom:

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

The daisy blooms as dawn breaks, symbolising the burst of innocence or day star as the night loses out. In the same way, death starts to lose its power as humanity regains purity and embraces hope, thus discarding pain and hate. To break in implies breaking in a horse until it serves the master, instead of the other way around. In this way, death can be made to serve humanity.

Listening to the water spouting from the lion’s mouth in the fountain in the garden last night (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

And death shall have no dominion

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.