History
In the 1790s the only building at Six Mile Bottom was a paddock run by a stable keeper. In 1802, a sizeable country house was built nearby. Early residents were George and Augusta Leigh, the latter being Lord Byron's half-sister. Their residence is now the Country House Hotel, Swynford Paddocks. There was little additional building until the 1840s, but it grew from there until there were 22 homes housing around 170 people in around 1920, most owned by the Six Mile Bottom estate.
The hamlet derives its name from its distance from the start of Newmarket Racecourse and because it lies in a valley bottom.
According to some local accounts the name also bears witness to a 12 mile horse race (perhaps more of a courtly procession than a race proper) which started in Newmarket and, at the valley bottom, required riders to turn and head North East back to the town. Supposedly the races occurred during the time of King Charles II's regular visits to Newmarket, where he stayed at his Palace. A small incline half way between Six Mile Bottom and Newmarket is known locally as Nine Mile Hill - remarkable in as much as it only has a name when travelling North East (towards Newmarket).
Six Mile Bottom railway station served the village from the 1860s (by the Newmarket and Chesterford Railway) until 1967.
Read more about this topic: Six Mile Bottom
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)