From Priors Barton Farm to St Cross Hospital Walk

Thursday 6th August 2026

For the last walk of the season and on a beautiful balmy evening, Andrew Scott led us on an enchanting stroll through the Eastern part of St Cross. I think that many of us thought that we knew the area inside out but how many of us had ever put their head into Priors Barton or knew that, in medieval England, a ‘barton’ referred to the ‘demesne’ or home farm of a feudal lord, that the Cathedral Priory was founded soon after St Swithun’s death in 862 and that the barton then became Priors Barton and its farm the home farm of the Priory.

From there, we walked along Clausentum Road with Andrew telling us that that area had been a meadow until it was developed between 1900 and 1910 and how Clausentum Fen is a reminder of that past (and has its own Conservation Group). Andrew gave us many other unsuspected glimpses into the past too: that the playing fields opposite St Faiths School used to be allotments; that Andrew himself remembered the St Cross Stores on the corner of Clausentum Road and St Faiths Road; that ‘Mithril’, a house by the traffic lights on St Cross Road is probably on the site of a former toll house; that there used to be a mill – called Sparkford Mill – at the bottom of Cripstead Lane; and that Back Street used to be called Frog Lane because frogs used to cross it in large numbers to reach their spawning grounds in the water meadows !

And so, on, past the allotments and the Parish Hall in Back Street to end at the wonder that is St Cross Hospital - or, more correctly the ‘Hospital of St Cross and Almshouse of Noble Poverty’ – standing serenely in the setting sun (but with its own stories of mismanagement and embezzlement).

It was an eye-opening walk and has transformed and informed how I will see the area next time I walk along its roads.