Jesus Ditch: Mud and Bones
The moorhen came paddling along Jesus Ditch with a tangle of roots. She slipped under the brambles, tucking the roots into some secret niche along the far bank. I’m assuming she’s working on a hidden nest, but it could be a devotional niche filled with moorhen offerings: roots and branches in interesting tangles; a bunch of last year’s sloe; a bright Walkers crisp packet.
Jesus Ditch has oozed along for centuries upon centuries. These days it serves as a moat between Jesus Green and Jesus College — both named after Jesus Lane, which in turn was named after the lay chapel dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus, within the medieval convent of St Radegund’s. Jesus Ditch might be as young as the 1500’s, but likely far older as its head seems to connect to the now-lost ditch King’s Ditch (going back to the 12th century). Jesus Ditch stands in geographic conversation with earlier Bronze and Iron Age as well as Roman ditches now hidden beneath lawns and chapels and houses, but perhaps it has always been a moat between town and gown, and town and wimple when the college was a convent.
The ditches of Cambridge served to drain low-lying fields and meadows into the Cam, to mark boundaries, to flush midden heaps, and to hold waste and rubbish. The land around Jesus Ditch is full of bones — a Roman cemetery at 37 Jesus Lane, a plague pit to the northeast and medieval convent’s burial grounds to the northwest. And then there was Coroner’s deposition for 15th September 1849, reporting on a newborn female child found dead ‘of natural causes’ in the Ditch (Cambridgeshire Archives CB/Co/P14/25).
Perhaps the moorhen will find a tiny triquetral bone from a little hand, and reverently place it in her shrine.
I used to love those cutaway books which showed the rumbling subway lines, the tight bands of cables, the rat nests and sewers and water-mains all there beneath our feet. Mud and bones and the occasional bronze age horde, here in Cambridge. Growing up in Chicago, the world underground was very real and surprisingly accessible. One year the Chicago River broke into an old railway tunnel – not just any railway, but a tiny underground line, clandestinely built, where mules (thought I always imagined the city’s urchins at work), and in due course locomotives, would carry cars of coal to feed the furnaces of downtown buildings, deliver mail, smuggle liquor, and even sell the cool damp air as air conditioning to the new high rises. Along the tunnels the newfangled telephone lines were strung. Work had begun in 1899, the first 16 miles dug more or less secretly from the basement of a saloon, the spoils being carried out after midnight under the cover of darkness.
Trespassing across property lines, no one wanted the liability of properly mapping the tunnels. Ignorance seemed the best course, and the Chicago Tunnel Company went. bankrupt decades ago. Then in the 90’s, pilings were being driven along the riverbank to build a dolphin, and the tunnels were breached. For weeks, it was just oozing mud leaking slowly through. But no one minded the mud, and the City thought it had all the time in the world to address the problem. And then a million cubic meters of fish-filled river water flooded nearly all of downtown Chicago, dealing out billions of dollars of damage.
The river broke through three months after my father’s death. I remember looking out that night from a friend’s apartment, with the whole of downtown Chicago. apocalyptically dark. Chicago’s pride could be its 27 miles of lakefront or the glittering Lake Michigan, but in practice our pride is our skyscrapers, some of the first and best in the world, a mountain range of black steel and white lights. That night, and for weeks after, they stood sinister and silent, silhouettes against dim stars and pointing not to the heavens, but to the mud and bones beneath our feet.
Jesus Ditch, (c) 2023 Devin McLachlan
