Anyone searching for the roots of the Real England could do worse than to start with this particular stretch of the A14 just outside Newmarket, for just below it lies the site of one of the first royal palaces of the Kings of England.
A pretty stream runs from the spring known as
St Wendreda's Well through a concrete culvert under the road at this point and thence down to the duck pond and
church of the village of Exning.
It was here that, in the 630 or so AD, King Anna and Queen Saewara were blessed with a clutch of saintly daughters and, being good Christians, had them baptised by
Saint Felix , perhaps in the chilly waters of this very spring. It is possible that he also baptised
King Cenwalh of Wessex here when that unhappy monarch sought refuge from King Penda of Mercia after a family dispute.
Now St Felix, a Burgundian bishop, is said to have been recruited by Anna's uncle Sigebert from
Luxeuil Abbey where you can find a famous series of Roman baths built on the site of an earlier pagan religious site. So it is not improbable that Felix saw the potential of this spring's location to create something similar in Exning and there are, apparently some archaeological indications of baths (or perhaps fish-ponds)along its length.
Luxeuil-Les-Bains as it is now known, has retained its springs as a
therapeutic service (largely, it seems, for women's maladies) but the healing properties of St Wendreda's well are now employed, if at all, rather more privately for the bathing race-horses of the stud which owns the land.
Today the traffic races by above the site of King Anna's palace. No public footpath leads to the royal springs. Here you will find no National Trust tea shop - not even a Ministry of Works signpost. If you want to trace one of the birth-places of our monarchy you may do this only by climbing up the southerly embankment of the A14 where it crosses the Exning Road and making your way along it for a hundred yards or so through a ribbon of motorway trash - shredded tyres, small pieces of lorry, MacDonalds' cartons hurled from passing cars. Stagger down towards a group of horses grazing in a field which has probably been home to such creatures since Boudicca and you will come to this spot.
From here you may make your way upstream towards the source. Do this quietly to avoid scaring the horses and listen, not to the roar of the A14 but to the sound of lively girls playing in the water and their royal father calling them home to their wooden hall as the darkness fell on an evening thirteen hundred years ago.
