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The Duke's Head Inn, Thorney


The Inn was at the Thorney Crossroads, at the south west corner. The site is now used by a large house, but the Town Plan of 1848 (in the Museum) shows a building around a central courtyard. This map was prepared by Samuel Sanders Teulon in preparation for his major rebuilding of the village.


Thorney had several inns, and this was the largest. In 2010 Paul Blinkhorn, an archaeologist you may have seen on Time Team and other TV programmes, analysed a selection of pottery pieces and other material which was dug out of Bridge House's garden, and confirmed that this was appropriate as waste from a superior inn. You can listen to a recording, recorded on a very windy day, with the Bedford Hall clock chiming! at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QJqVtKZOPo. (4 minutes long) The Inn was on the turnpike from Peterborough to Wisbech and was a place where coaches would stop.


Fenland Notes and Queries, a "Quarterly Antiquarian Journal for the Fenland, in the Counties of Huntingdon, Cambridge, Lincoln, Northampton, Norfolk, and Suffolk, Volume 4" notes that Queen Victoria visited the Inn before her accession to the throne, in 1836 or 1837 and "the eldest daughter of the landlord, J Laxton, then an infant in the nurse's arms, was kindly noticed by the princess".


The Inn closed after a fire, and was finally demolished in the 1870s. The site was used for a new house in the Twentieth Century.



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