Stand in the Market Square and look west towards the bridge, and the Old Falcon fills the corner in front of you: three storeys of painted brick, a central carriage arch, neat rows of sash windows and a small curved oriel window on the first floor. For around twenty years it has stood empty, its paint peeling and its windows boarded. Now plans to restore it have been approved, and one of the oldest buildings on the Market Square is set to come back to life.

Older than it looks

The smart frontage facing the square is something of a disguise. Behind it, the southern end of the building dates back to the late 15th century, making the Old Falcon one of the earliest surviving buildings in the square. The part north of the carriage arch is largely 17th century, possibly with earlier timbers inside, and the long wings running back towards the river were added in the late 1600s. The brick front came much later, as Georgian and then early 19th-century owners gave the old timber-framed building a fashionable new face, a pattern repeated right across St Neots.

The layout of the site tells an even older story. The Market Square was laid out by the priors of St Neots in the 12th century, and the Old Falcon sits on two of the long, narrow medieval plots that once ran from the square down to the River Great Ouse, either side of a passageway that survives today as the carriage arch.

Inside, the surviving rooms still carry that history. The ground floor room at the south-east corner has heavy, ornately moulded ceiling beams and large open brick fireplaces at either end, along with what is thought to be an original jowled corner post, a feature typical of medieval timber framing.

Coaches, horses and the Great North Road

The first written record of the inn dates from 1693. St Neots was prospering at the time: the river had become navigable around 1630, bringing grain and goods into the town, and the Great North Road was carrying a growing stream of travellers. In 1753 Mary Stacie, a spinster of Hackney, sold the inn to John Bailey. By 1792 Thomas Small was the landlord, followed by Suzanna Small, and in 1809 the property included stables and a yard with nine grain stores.

By 1823, under William Thornton, the Old Falcon was a posting house, where travellers could rest and change horses for the next stage of their journey. In 1830, under George Briggs, the Perseverance coach called every afternoon on its route to and from Boston, one of several coaches including the Regulator, the Regent and the Rockingham that passed through St Neots in the coaching age.

The arrival of the railway in the mid 19th century brought that trade to an end. The inn went into decline and let off its valuable frontage to tenants, while a cottage in the yard became the public house. From around 1825 the part north of the archway was home to a veterinary surgeon, Thomas Levi Wilmer Gaudwell. South of the arch, William Lee, plumber and glazier, took one shop in 1848, and in 1854 Henry Elkins, tailor and draper, opened at the corner, staying for over fifty years until he retired around 1906.

It was not until after 1938 that Miss Betty Jewson brought the whole building back together as a hotel. A 1940s photograph shows the St Neots Home Guard lined up outside, and later decades added a porch and, by the 1980s, a set of striped Dutch canopies that many people in the town will remember. The Old Falcon closed around 2005 and has been empty ever since.

Down by the river

At the far end of the site, right on the riverbank, is one of its most charming survivors: a 19th century brick cottage known as the boat house, with an undercroft below that once let boats come in straight from the river. It is easy to spot from the town bridge and from Riverside Park, and it gives the Old Falcon a second face, looking out over the Ouse rather than the Market Square.

What happens next

The scheme is a partnership between the building’s owner, Whitfield Property Investment Ltd, and Huntingdonshire District Council, through the Future High Streets Fund. It forms part of a wider investment of around £15 million in St Neots town centre, which also covers the Market Square, High Street, the bridge and the Priory Centre.

The plans will create two commercial units facing the Market Square, using the existing shopfronts either side of the carriage arch, with the historic beams, floors and brick fireplaces kept on show inside. Behind and above them will be 14 new town centre homes. The front windows will be carefully repaired, or copied exactly where they cannot be saved, and the frontage repainted. The boat house will become two flats with balconies over the river. Run-down 20th century additions at the back will be replaced with new buildings that step down towards the river and echo the stables and stores that stood on the site in the 1940s. The old yard will become a quiet, landscaped courtyard with a tree at its western end.

None of this will be quick or simple. Years of water getting into the building have left areas of dry rot and decay, particularly in the south wing, and specialist surveys have set out a careful programme of timber repairs. Archaeologists have also flagged a moderate to high chance of medieval and later remains surviving below ground, so groundworks will be watched closely, and may yet turn up new clues about the town’s past.

For now, next time you are in the Market Square, take a moment to look up at the Old Falcon. Picture the coaches rattling in under the arch, the tailor at work in his corner shop and the boats slipping in beneath the cottage by the river. After two decades of waiting, its next chapter is about to begin.

Next time you pop into B&Q on the southern edge of Eaton Socon for paint, compost or a bag of screws, spare a thought for what lies underneath the car park. Around 1,800 years ago this patch of ground was busy with cattle and sheep, crisscrossed by ditches and hedges, and part of a carefully managed Roman farming landscape stretching right across the Great Ouse valley.

We know this because, before the site was developed, archaeologists from Wessex Archaeology spent the winter of 2000 to 2001 excavating it. Their findings were later published by the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, and they paint a fascinating picture of everyday rural life here in Roman Britain.

Priors Gate, before the shops

The dig took place at a site known as Priors Gate, at the junction of what were then the A45 and B1428, just south of Eaton Socon village and around 2.5km south west of St Neots town centre. The ground sits on a gravel terrace of the River Great Ouse, with the Colmworth Brook running just to the north.

The site was first spotted from the air, where cropmarks hinted at buried field boundaries. The excavation was commissioned on behalf of the developers as part of the planning process, and carried out between December 2000 and February 2001.

A farm built for livestock

What the team uncovered was not a village or a villa, but a working agricultural landscape in use from the late 1st century to the 4th century AD, at its busiest in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries.

In its early years the land supported small scale mixed farming. People grew spelt wheat, along with peas and celtic beans, cutting their crops low to the ground with a sickle and processing small batches of grain as they needed it.

Then, some time in the 2nd century, the whole landscape was reorganised. Small paddocks were swept away and replaced with large enclosures, each more than half a hectare in size, laid out alongside a broad droveway. That droveway narrowed from around 14 metres to 10 metres as it ran north towards the brook, perfect for funnelling animals down to water. Smaller ditches inside it may have been used to sort animals into groups, such as separating lambs from ewes, and one gully may have held a hurdle so the drove could be blocked off when needed.

The archaeologists concluded that the farm had become a “producer site”, rearing cattle and sheep to supply people living in larger, less rural settlements further afield. The animals kept and eaten locally tended to be older beasts, suggesting they had spent years providing milk, wool and pulling power before ending up on the table.

Watering holes, windbreaks and a few surprises

Some of the most evocative finds came from two shallow watering holes. One, more than 5 metres across, had waterlogged layers that preserved leaves, twigs, oak bark, worked wood and the only tool found on the site, an iron punch. Seeds of duckweed, and even tiny beetles that feed on it, show these pits held still, standing water.

Two curved gullies, first thought to be the remains of roundhouses, turned out more likely to be animal shelters or windbreaks, as there were no hearths and very little rubbish around them. Insect remains suggest the timber buildings where people actually lived stood nearby, probably just to the south of the dig.

Other finds included a Colchester type brooch, a handful of coins including one of the emperor Valens from the AD 360s and 370s, samian tableware imported from Gaul, and a scattering of fine pottery alongside everyday kitchen wares made in Cambridgeshire. There was also evidence that horse meat may occasionally have been eaten, something unusual in Roman Britain.

Part of a much bigger picture

Priors Gate was just one piece of a much wider Roman countryside. Similar field systems and droveways have been found across the river at Eynesbury, at Little Paxton and at Cambourne, and the old line of the Great North Road nearby would have helped farmers get their produce to market. Archaeologists even suggest that the gravel quarry pits found on the site may have been dug to build or repair roads in the area.

The excavation was also important because it pushed back the story of Roman Eaton Socon. Until then, most Roman sites known around Eaton Socon and western Eynesbury dated from the late 3rd and 4th centuries. Priors Gate showed that farming here began much earlier, in the later 1st century.

Read the full report

If you’d like to dig deeper, the full report, A Romano-British rural site at Eaton Socon, Cambridgeshire by Catriona Gibson, is available to read free on the Wessex Archaeology website. It’s a reminder that some of St Neots’ most interesting history is hiding in the most ordinary places, sometimes right under the trolley bay.

Walk north up Huntingdon Street and, just before the Splash Park, you’ll pass a long, low building with a run of gables, sash windows and a pale blue limewashed front sitting right on the pavement. Many people in St Neots will know it as the old RAFA club. Fewer will know it by its original name, The Limes, or that it has been part of the town’s story for well over two hundred years.

The Limes was built as a single, substantial home. Its front is 18th-century in style, though the timber frame behind it may well be older, a pattern seen across St Neots where Georgian frontages were often added to earlier buildings. Its size and its prominent spot on the main road north out of town suggest it was built for a prosperous family at a time when the Great North Road was bringing stagecoaches, the Royal Mail and a good deal of wealth through the town. Photographs from around 1900 show a row of lime trees in front of the house, which almost certainly gave it its name.

The people who lived here offer a lovely snapshot of Victorian St Neots. In 1874 and 1875 a Miss Chapman advertised in the local papers, offering lessons in French, German, drawing and dancing from the house. By 1881 it was home to John McNish, a local brewer and miller, along with his family and four servants, and ten years later Charles Malden, a brewery manager, had moved in with a household of his own. The brewing connection is no coincidence. By the 1880s, the town supported brewing, paper milling and engineering, and its business families wanted homes to match.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the Limes was divided into two houses, Nos. 44 and 46. By 1911, No. 44 was the home and workshop of John Wright, a taxidermist, who lived there with his wife Susan and their granddaughter, a reminder of how varied the street had become, with trades and families living side by side.

In the mid-20th century, the building moved from family life to community life. It became the base for the Royal Air Forces Association and the Air Gunners Association, part of the wave of veterans’ clubs set up across the country after the Second World War. Known for a time as the Astra Club, it hosted reunions, meetings and community events for decades, and the light blue limewash on the front is said to reflect RAF colours. The club closed its doors in 2023.

The Limes was listed at Grade II in March 1974 and sits on the northern edge of the St Neots Conservation Area, acting as a gateway into the historic town. Together with its neighbour The Globe (now Victor Chan restaurant), another 18th-century Grade II listed building, it is one of the few survivors of the old streetscape at this end of town. What makes it special is less any single feature and more the way it carries its whole history in plain sight. You can still read the original house in its gables and windows, the point where it was split in two, and the later additions made for the club, while the rear shows a more decorative face, with bay windows in the gables and sashes from the 1890s to 1910s.

The next chapter is now being written. A planning application is currently with Huntingdonshire District Council to convert the building into homes, so The Limes may soon return to the residential use it was built for. In the meantime, it’s well worth pausing outside, perhaps alongside The Globe, to picture the lime trees, the brewers’ households and the airmen’s reunions that have all passed through its doors.

Discover St Neots and Discover Huntingdon are celebrating a hugely successful first Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Visitor Economy Conference, held at Peterborough Cathedral on Tuesday 29 September. The event drew tourism, hospitality, heritage and cultural organisations from across the region, and has generated an outpouring of positive feedback on LinkedIn in the days since.

Richard Slade of Discover St Neots and Paul Sweeney of BID Huntingdon, both members of the region’s Heritage and Tourism Working Group and official partners of the newly accredited Local Visitor Economy Partnership (LVEP), were part of the “Meet your Cambridgeshire & Peterborough LVEP” Q&A panel on the day, alongside fellow destination organisations from across the county.

“It was a genuinely inspiring day,” said Richard Slade. “To stand on that panel alongside colleagues from across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, in a room as remarkable as Peterborough Cathedral, and talk about what we’re building together for our towns, was a real moment for the Discover network. The response we’ve had since, from delegates and from people who weren’t even in the room, has told us this partnership is landing exactly as we hoped it would.”

Paul Sweeney, whose comment that “an LVEP is a shopfront for our area when it comes to enticing people in” was picked out as a highlight by several attendees on LinkedIn, added: “Conferences like this only work if the room is full of people who actually do the work the rest of the year, businesses, councils, attractions, all pulling in the same direction. Seeing that energy in the Q&A, and hearing it echoed back in the feedback since, is exactly why we started this.”

A special mention for Ramsey

Among those joining the conversation were colleagues from Ramsey Town Council, taking part as the town prepares to launch its own Discover Ramsey website and join St Neots and Huntingdon in the growing Discover Huntingdonshire network. Their presence on the day was warmly welcomed by the wider partnership.

“Having Ramsey in the room mattered,” said Richard Slade. “This network only works if it keeps growing, and seeing Ramsey there, ahead of their own site going live, shows the momentum behind it is real. We’re looking forward to welcoming them properly into the family very soon.”

Building on the day

The conference also heard from Paul Bristow, Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Lyndsey Turner-Swift of VisitEngland, and representatives from Peterborough City Council, DCMS and Bedford Borough Council on the Universal Studios development, alongside the launch of the region’s new Destination Management Plan. Feedback shared publicly since the event has highlighted the strength of the speaker line-up, the setting at Peterborough Cathedral, and the sense of a region genuinely pulling together, Cambridge, Peterborough, Ely and Huntingdonshire alike, rather than competing for attention.

Mayor Paul Bristow said:

“This is the first time we’ve come together to celebrate the Local Visitor Economy Partnership, and it was encouraging to see partners discuss the steps needed to strengthen our region as a tourism destination. “The sector employs thousands of people and contributes £2.4 billion to our regional economy, and this event will be a springboard to building a thriving visitor economy together.”

Heritage and Tourism Project Manager, Charlotte Goy, said:

“The Conference was an opportunity to talk about the exciting progress being made across the Visitor Economy. “Together, we have laid strong foundations for the future, including the establishment of the regional LVEP, a five-year visitor economy strategy, a unifying visitor brand, and an emerging public-private sector LVEP Board.

Discover St Neots and Discover Huntingdon say the conference marks another step in a partnership that began with a conversation at the Huntingdonshire Pride in Place event in November 2024, and has since grown into a district-wide destination brand network and a formally accredited LVEP.

Stand on the north side of Market Square and look at 7 and 9. Most people in St Neots will remember them as the Brook and Barter, or before that as The Priory pub, and some will remember the shopping arcade that ran through them. Far fewer know that beneath the floorboards lies one of the most important pieces of the town’s story: the remains of the priory that gave St Neots its name.

A priory before a town

St Neots grew up around a Benedictine priory. Tradition has it founded around AD 972, destroyed in 1010 and refounded in 1082, before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries finally closed it in 1539. Over those centuries the town took shape around its gates, with the market and the main route through St Neots running right past its southern edge.

Nothing of the priory survives above ground today, but part of its site is protected as a scheduled monument, and that protected area clips the western side of 7 and 9 Market Square. Archaeologists working from fragments of evidence gathered over decades have pieced together a plan of the priory, and it places the northern half of this site inside the priory church itself, with the priory boundary wall running across the site just to the south. In other words, the back half of the old pub sits on the nave and aisles of a medieval church.

What the 1950s builders found

The first real glimpse came in the 1950s, when builders dug foundation trenches for a new shopping arcade behind the Market Square frontages. Local archaeologist C F Tebbutt recorded what the trenches cut through: cobble walls, mortar floors, areas of red floor tiles and a number of burials, including two lying beneath a cobbled floor. Further south, he noted a line that appeared to be the priory wall and ditch, with at least one burial and a 16th-century rubbish pit beyond it. Around fifteen burials were recorded within the site, and around forty more of late Saxon to medieval date have since been found nearby.

What Tebbutt’s records could not say was how deep these remains lay, or whether anything had survived the building work.

The buildings on the front

The Market Square frontage tells a later story. Number 7 is an 18th-century building of three storeys in painted brick, with a moulded timber cornice beneath its parapet and gauged brick arches over its sash windows. Number 9 is early 19th-century, with a slate roof and its ground floor altered long ago to form the entrance to the arcade. Both were listed at Grade II in June 1971, not so much for their own sake as for their part in the group of handsome buildings, Numbers 3 to 15, that line this side of the square.

Behind those facades, very little old fabric remains. The rear buildings were cleared for the 1950s arcade, which was rebuilt again from the late 1980s into the 1990s. The arcade later became a restaurant, then in the early 2000s a pub, first named, fittingly, The Priory, and later the Brook and Barter. It closed in 2021.

Back in the ground, 2025

When plans came forward in 2024 to convert the building into nine homes with a commercial unit on the square, Historic England and the county’s archaeologists pointed out that the site sat on the priory and needed proper investigation first. So in February and March 2025, three small test pits were dug by hand at the south, centre and north of the site.

The northern pit delivered the moment everyone had hoped for. Beneath modern floors, a Coca-Cola can and a layer of 1990s rubble, the team reached a dark silt containing late medieval pottery, roof tile, window glass, oyster shell and handmade brick. Below that lay the top of a wall foundation of river cobbles and flint set in white lime mortar, and butting up against it, a floor of red tiles bedded in lime mortar. It sat just 71 centimetres below the present floor, and it may well be part of the priory church Tebbutt glimpsed seventy years earlier. Rather than lift it, the archaeologists recorded it and left it exactly where it was.

The finds also hint at the life of the town after the priory. A layer above the medieval deposits produced Tudor Green pottery from the Surrey and Hampshire border, local blackware, a Staffordshire slipware mug and a clay pipe stem of around the 1680s to 1720s, the kind of mix you would expect in a market town trading well beyond its own region.

Building lightly on history

Knowing exactly how deep the archaeology lies changed the plans. The foundations were redesigned so that new ground beams go down only half a metre, and around half of the floor area needs none at all, with the aim of leaving the priory remains undisturbed beneath the new homes. Any groundwork is to be watched by archaeologists in case anything turns up higher than expected.

There is a pleasing symmetry in the scheme itself, too. Removing the big flat roof at the back would open up a narrow courtyard running from Market Square to Priory Lane, echoing the long yards and passageways that have always run behind the frontages of the town centre.

So next time you walk past the shop frontage, picture what lies under the pavement edge: a church floor laid by monks, the men and women buried around it, and a thousand years of St Neots stacked up in less than a metre of soil.