Cambridgeshire very soon develops its flat and fenny character along this route, and Melbourn left behind, the road on to Cambridge is a dead level. The low church-tower just visible to a keen eye, away to the left, among some clustered trees, is that of Shepreth. Shepreth hides its modest self from the road: let us take the winding by-way that leads to it and see what a purely agricultural Cambridgeshire village, set down in this level plain, and utterly out of touch with the road, may be like. It needs no great exercise of the deductive faculty to discover, on the way to Shepreth, that it is not a place of great or polite resort, for the lane is a narrow and winding way, half muddy ruts and half loose stones. Beside it crawls imperceptibly in its deep, ditch-like bed, overhung by pollard willows, a stream that takes its rise in the bogs of Fowlmere. By what lazy, snakish windings it ultimately finds its way into the Cam does not concern us. Here and there old mud-walled cottages, brilliantly white-washed and heavily thatched, dot the way; the sum total of the village, saving indeed the church, standing adjoining a farmyard churned into a sea of mud.
The appearance of Shepreth Church is not altogether prepossessing. The south aisle has been rebuilt in white brick, in a style rivalling the worst efforts of the old-time chapel-builder; and the old tower, whose upper stages have long fallen in ruin, shows in the contorted courses of its stonework how the building has sunk and settled in the waterlogged soil.
Beyond this soddened village, coming to the highroad again, the station and level-crossing of Foxton are reached; the situation of Foxton itself clearly fixed by the church-tower, rising from the flat fields on the right, half a mile away. There is something of a story belonging to this line of railway from Royston to Shepreth, Foxton, Shelford, and Cambridge. As far as Shepreth it is a branch of the Great Northern, anxious in the long ago to find a way into Cambridge and so cut up the Great Eastern's trade. The Great Eastern could not defeat the scheme altogether, but stopped it at Shepreth, to which point that line was opened in 1848. This was awkward for the Great Northern, brought to a halt seven miles from Cambridge, at a point which may, without disrespect to Shepreth, well be called "nowhere in particular." But the Great Northern people found a way out of the difficulty. Parliament, in the interests of the Great Eastern, would not permit them to build a railway into Cambridge, but no one could forbid them conveying passengers by coach along these last few miles. And so, for close upon four years, Great Northern passengers left the trains at Shepreth and were conveyed by a forty minutes' coach journey the rest of the way. Thus, along these few miles at anyrate, coaching survived on the Cambridge road until 1851, when the Great Eastern built a short line from Shelford to Foxton and Shepreth, to join the Great Northern branch, allowing running-powers to that Company into Cambridge station.