The town of Cambridge.
The Roman fortress lay on the left bank of the river, at the hamlet of Grantchester (Granta, castrum); the town of Cambridge proper, on the same bank, being called Grantabrigge. Here it was that William the Conqueror’s castle was built on the site of a British earthwork still known as Castle Mound, and here British as well as Roman coins and other Roman remains have been discovered. The British town of Cair-Graunth has been identified with both sites; while the Roman station marked in Saxon maps as Camboritum or Camboricum has hitherto been confounded with the site of the Norman fortress. We do not know where Camboricum was, but we no longer identify it with Cambridge.[3]
In the time of Bede, and earlier, Grantchester was a desolate ruin,[4] but Grantabridge was a place of some importance at the time of the Domesday survey, and we find that nearly thirty of its four hundred houses were destroyed to make room for William’s castle.[5] The town which is still called Grantabridge in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in Domesday, and in Henry I.’s charter, becomes Cantebruge before the middle of the xii century, and Cantebrigge in Chaucer.[6]
Roman roads.
Two great Roman roads met near the Castle Mound, the one being the only way across the pathless fens, running from the coast of Norfolk through Ely to Cambridge and thence on to Cirencester and Bath; the other—via Devana—was the great highway (along the site of the present Huntingdon road) which led from Cambridge out of the fen country, stretching from Chester[7] on the north-west to Colchester on the south-east. This road crossed the only high ground in the flat country round Cambridge—the low range of hills called the Gogmagogs and Castle Mound itself.
The river.
The river Granta gave its name to the British and Roman towns (Cair-Graunth, Grantchester), to the university city, and to the whole shire. The Granta or Cam, for it is now called by both names, is made by the confluence of two small streams which meet beyond Grantchester; the eastern branch, the Granta, rising in Cambridgeshire, the western, the Rhee, in Hertfordshire. What other river in England can boast that it has been celebrated by our poets in every age? For Milton it is Camus, for Byron Granta, both names serve the muse of Gray; it is Wordsworth’s Cam, but Spenser calls it Guant, and also Ouse, the name it takes before reaching Ely, although the waters of the “plenteous Ouse” join the Granta much lower down.[8]
The ford.