St Ives-a new millennium - Flipbook - Page 10
St Ives-a new millennium
4/10/02
3:40 pm
Page 8
A famous symbol of St Ives is the Cromwell statue. It was originally
intended for Huntingdon, to mark Cromwell’s 300th anniversary
(in 1899) but fund-raising failed owing to Huntingdon still being very
much a royalist town. St Ives folk, however, were much keener on the
idea and the statue, sculpted by Frederick Pomeroy, was unveiled
in 1901.
St Ives’s ‘trade-mark’, however, is not Cromwell but the chapel bridge .
It is the finest of only 7 such medieval bridges surviving in England.
This 200ft long stone structure replaced an earlier wooden bridge and
was completed in 1426, when the chapel altar was consecrated.
The chapel was dedicated to St Leger, but after 1570 it became a private
dwelling.
The two arches on the Hemingford side were demolished and a
drawbridge installed in 1645 during the Civil War as a defensive
measure by Cromwell’s forces, who held the town. The drawbridge
remained in use until 1716 when presumably it became unsafe. That
end of the bridge was then rebuilt with rounded arches instead of the
original pointed mouldings.
Cromwell’s statue
Photo: Stuart Littlewood/Pentax MZ-M
(from a colour slide)
Page 8
