The bones came from Cornwall. Around 980 the relics of Saint Neot - a 9th-century Cornish hermit said to have stood waist-deep in a holy well to recite the psalter daily - were carried across England and installed in a new priory beside the River Great Ouse. The deal was simple. The local landowners, Leofric and his wife Leoflaed, wanted a pilgrim destination. The relics had healing reputation. Cornwall, miffed, kept the saint's arm. Pilgrims arrived in numbers, dropping coins. The settlement that grew up around the priory took the saint's name and held it. A thousand years later, St Neots is the largest town in Huntingdonshire - 33,410 people in 2021, sliced through by the A1 trunk road, ringed by London overspill estates, and built around a market square where one of the bloodier small actions of the English Civil War was fought in the small hours of a July morning.
Iron Age people lived here. A Roman camp followed. The Anglo-Saxon village became known as Eynesbury, after a local leader called Ernulf, and it was a parish in its own right when Leofric and his wife managed their saint-acquisition in the late 10th century. The priory grew rich. It outgrew the village around it, and between 1113 and 1204 the area around the priory split off as its own parish - St Neots - separated from Eynesbury by a small stream called Hen Brook. The Norman manor at Eaton, west of the river, was called Soka de Eton in French - the soke (district) of Eaton - which over time became Eaton Socon. Where the river had once been waded, locals said Eaton Ford. These names sit on the modern map like fossils. The priory itself was destroyed at the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century, and the relics that had built the town were lost - the holy economy that founded St Neots erased in a generation. The town that remained was a market town, not a pilgrim town.
The Second English Civil War began in April 1648. Charles I was a prisoner of Parliament. His Royalist supporters, refusing to accept the situation, raised forces across England in the hope of restoring him. A column of cavalry under the Earl of Holland attempted to seize London. The attempt failed. The Royalists retreated, exhausted, north up the Great North Road, and on 9 July 1648 they reached St Neots and decided to spend the night resting in the market square area. In the small hours of 10 July, Parliamentary troops under Colonel Adrian Scrope attacked. The Royalists, taken completely by surprise, fought a confused running battle through the streets of a sleeping town. Many were killed where they stood. Many were captured. The Earl of Holland himself was taken prisoner and was later beheaded. It was not a famous battle, and it does not feature in most histories of the war - but for the people who woke that morning to fighting in their market square, it was the war arriving in person. The market still trades on the same square every Thursday.
Through the 18th and 19th centuries the town prospered on corn milling, brewing, and stagecoach traffic on the Great North Road. The river was made navigable from St Ives to Bedford in 1629, and barges carried the town's malt and grain. The railway arrived in 1850, connecting St Neots to London and Peterborough on what is now the East Coast Main Line. The town's most notorious son left for London in the 18th century: John Bellingham, born here, became in 1812 the only person in history to assassinate a British prime minister, shooting Spencer Perceval in the lobby of the House of Commons. Bellingham was hanged for murder a week later. Less infamous local lights have included Winifred Crossley Fair - one of the First Eight women pilots to join the Air Transport Auxiliary in 1940, and the first woman to fly a Hurricane fighter - and the St Neots Quads, the first British quadruplets to survive infancy and, as of 2021, the oldest quadruplets in the world.
Until the 1960s St Neots was a quiet town of a few thousand people. Then came the London overspill plan, designed to relieve pressure on the capital by relocating families and industry to designated growth towns. Cromwell Road was constructed as a focus for light industry. The St Neots bypass opened in 1968. The population doubled, then doubled again. In 2010 the Love's Farm estate east of the railway added 1,400 houses; the Wintringham development from 2021 added another 2,800, with a third phase still to come. The town is now ringed by new housing, served by half-hourly trains to London King's Cross (45 minutes) and St Pancras (55 minutes), and choked at peak hours by the Black Cat roundabout where the A1 meets the A428. A major scheme to grade-separate the junction is due to open in 2027. The parish church of St Mary the Virgin - rebuilt in the 15th century, called the Cathedral of Huntingdonshire by John Betjeman for its tower of ironstone and ashlar - still anchors the medieval centre. The Eynesbury Giant, James Toller, stood over eight feet tall and is remembered in the town museum. Paxton Pits Nature Reserve, on disused gravel pits north of town, is famous for its spring nightingales. The town has grown beyond what its founders could imagine. The bones, still missing, do not appear to be coming back.
St Neots sits at 52.2278N, 0.2667W on the east bank of the River Great Ouse, with Eaton Socon and Eaton Ford across the river to the west. From the air the town is most identifiable by the A1 trunk road running just to its west, the East Coast Main Line slicing north-south through the centre, and Paxton Pits Nature Reserve - the chain of lakes from old gravel workings - just north. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 ft AGL. Nearest airfields: Conington (EGSF) about 16 miles north, Cambridge Airport (EGSC) about 17 miles east, Cranfield (EGTC) about 18 miles west. The A14 lies six miles north.