Qualla: St Neots

St Neots: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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St Neots: Slepe, Ernulf, and a Body Trade

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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....

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St Neots: The Battle in the Small Hours

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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....

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St Neots: Brewing, Bridges, and the Bellingham Bullet

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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St Neots: Overspill and the Black Cat Roundabout

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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