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The east window and a tablet close by are in memory of Colonel Jeyns, who rode down the Valley of Death at Balaclava, and survived. Other memorials to this family, whose home, Bottisham Hall, was rebuilt in 1797, show Sir Roger and his wife sitting on their tomb holding hands, with dressing-gowns thrown over their night things as if they had just woken from sleep. Their son, Soame, was for 38 years a Member of Parliament, a keen debater, and is remembered here by angels garlanding an urn.
Bottisham is one of the group of villages in which the village colleges of Cambridgeshire were originally developed. Opened in 1937, Bottisham Village College was the second of Henry Morris' colleges. The first college was built at Sawston in 1928, and the idea of these magnificent buildings is to draw children over eleven from the villages round into an atmosphere in which they will develop a taste and a capacity for rural life and craftsmanship, with facilities for training themselves in whatever career they desire, and with opportunities for practising music or drama, cooking or needlework; the colleges also serve as adult educational and cultural centres - they act as a social focus for the life of the whole community. The buildings at Bottisham are charmingly planned so that all the principal rooms run round a curve and look out onto the playing field. Now, it is more of a community centre and a school.
In the 1940s Bottisham was a minor, but still very important, base for the RAF. See more details here [1]
The park estate makes up just less than half of the houses in Bottisham and was built in the 1960s. The original concept was to have fairly large detached houses, with big open green spaces and a strong community. However half way through the development the building firm went out of business and a new one replaced it. This firm added a lot more houses than planned, more semi-detached and smaller, creating a more compact estate. Despite the changes to the plan it is now a large but open estate, with lots of community lawns and grassed areas. The estate itself is lead by a horse-shoe shape road, Beechwood Avenue, which encloses the housing. At one end is the entrance to Bottisham Primary School, which was built slightly before the estate.
A Ham class minesweeper, HMS Bottisham was named after the village.
[edit] References
- Mee, Arthur, The King's England, New revised edition, London, 1965, pps: 32-3.
[edit] External links
(Source: Wikipedia) |