Kimbolton, Cambridgeshire

On Sunday afternoon we found ourselves driving through the village of Kimbolton in the very west of Cambridgeshire (in what was once Huntingdonshire before shire re-organization). It is a pleasant little place which we used to pass through regularly on our way to Northampton. Now the A14 exists we hardly ever go that way.

The road through is slightly odd. It comes from the west into the village and has to do a sharp right turn to avoid the churchyard straight ahead. Once past the churchyard it turns west again, opening out into a wide street which was once the marketplace. This is around 300 metres long with handsome houses and shops. At the western end is the gatehouse of Kimbolton Castle, once the seat of the Dukes of Manchester and now a public school. The road turns left at this point, continues 50m between houses and the castle wall, and then turns right to resume its journey eastwards, having traversed this kink which is Kimbolton High Street.

We did walk around the town but it was the church we stopped for mainly. The association with the Montagus (family name of the Dukes and Earls of Manchester) is shown in the numerous funeral hatchments on the walls and in various monuments. The most striking is the Tiffany window, installed in 1902, a memorial to the twin daughters of the 8th Duke who both died young. Louis Comfort Tiffany was a leading maker of stained glass in the USA, and a leading exponent of the Art Nouveau movement. His work is not much seen outside the USA and he did not like making windows with a religious theme, so this window is particularly unusual. The fact that the Dowager Duchess, Consuelo, who commissioned the work, was an American (of Cuban extraction) may have influenced Tiffany's decision to take the job on.

The Tiffany window is in a side chapel with a medieval screen (perhaps a cut down medieval chancel screen repositioned).







I am afraid my picture of it from the back is the best you will see as the original paintings in the panels on the nave side of the church are covered with plastic protective panes which reflect the light straight back into the camera.



Outside the churchyard is pleasantly empty of gravestones and on the south side makes a nice lawn for a few very lucky houses. They look across to the entrance to the Montagu family crypt with its elaborate doorway.




The main cemetery of the village is a hundred yards or so from the church across the stream (the River Kim) and is typically and splendidly mid-Victorian (1858). It boasts a grand walk up to a huge Cedar of Lebanon, gatehouse and perimeter wall.