The Orchard at Grantchester lies beside The Old Vicarage one time idyllic home to Rupert Brooke who immortalised both the house and The Orchard in one of his best know poems ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ which ends with these most quoted lines

‘Stands the church clock at ten-to-three                                                                                                           And is there honey still for tea?’

I much prefer the lines earlier on in the poem where Brooke describes uncharitably his neighbouring villagers

‘For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.’

Brooke also wrote The Soldier, for me he best poem, his death in 1915 was made all the more poignant by its speculative prediction.

IF I should die, think only this of me:
    That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
    In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
    Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
    Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
    A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
        Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
    And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
        In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

This morning I sat in The Orchard and sketched the chairs and trees and my cup of coffee, it was quiet and warm, Bullfinches and Blackbirds came and sat with me, not for my company but for my carrot cake obviously. It is lovely to draw in The Orchard this time of year as it is empty save for a few walkers passing through or whispering ladies out sipping earl grey or wholesome country sorts thickly wrapped in Barbour coats and up-to-their-knees in green wellies. If you sit far enough into the trees, hidden from the tearooms up against the hedge you can loose yourself in the moment and be taken back to 1909 and a time when Brooke and fellow students would sit under the bee rich blossom of the apple trees.