Miss Alice Maud Brett of the Manor Farm, Arbury Meadow Road, circa 1913. There were smiles in one old Arbury family when Campkin Road, the first road in North Arbury, based on the route of the Manor Farm 'Drive' at the Arbury Road end, was named after Algernon Sidney Campkin, local businessman, magistrate, councillor, and one-time mayor. Why was that? Well, let's take a trip back to old Arbury... Miss Alice Maud Brett, always known as Maud by her family and fiends, was a lively, kindly and fun young woman - she is remembered to this day for her kindness and good humour, and for being what one family member described as: 'The ideal sister, wife, mother and friend'. Being lively had its disadvantages when you lived out on the Arbury Meadow Road in the early 20th Century, and Alice, a daughter of Richard and Amelia Brett of the Manor Farm, suffered one night simply because of a missing bike lamp, her determination to enjoy some of the fun Cambridge activities of the ti...
Imagine an iron age settlement. It is surrounded by a circular earthwork. People live here. There are houses, and pens for animals within the enclosure. Until recent years, it was not believed to be a fort. The settlement is larger than some, but believed to be very much the equivalent of what we now call a village - the earthwork simply to defend it from wolves and animal thieves. The earthwork is filled with water, and reeds and rushes grow there. Despite the naming of the Arbury earthwork as 'Ring Fort Road' in the Arbury Camp Farm Arbury/Orchard Park development, the original height of the earthwork and its enclosed area were not believed to indicate that Arbury was a fort (compare to Wandlebury), and the findings of archaeologists from Cambridge and London from the early 1960s to 1970 discounted the notion. Comment from Arbury Camp, Cambridge, A Preliminary Report on Excavations - by John Alexander and David Trump, 1970: The excavations therefore tend to confirm earlier s...