Eye, Cambridgeshire

Eye is a village in the unitary authority area of Peterborough in England, south of Crowland and Eye Green. It was formerly in the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire.

Its name came from Anglo-Saxon "īeg" = "island" [ cite web|url=http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/tiff/oe_clarkhall/b0174.tiff |title=IA-IELDFUL |accessdate=2008-02-11 |coauthors=John R. Clark Hall |date=Second Edition (1916) |format=.tiff |work=A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary ] , likeliest here "dry ground in marsh".

History

There has been a church there since at least 1543. The present church, St. Matthew's, was built in 1846. Eye Cornmill is a windmill with eight sails. Eye is separated from its sister village of Eye Green by the A47 trunk road. Eye was previously one of the brickmaking villages of the Peterborough area, along with Fletton, Yaxley and Stanground. There was a brickpit (a quarry for clay for making bricks from), which for a while was used by a small commercial diving school, which is now closed and demolished; the brickpit is now a nature reserve.

Eye is a large village by local standards, and contains many amenities now lost in rural England. These include a post office, three pubs, a kebab shop, a fish and chip shop, a butchers, a bakery and a tanning salon. There is a Londis store which stocks a small range of fresh fruit and vegetables.

The three-mile £7m A47 Eye bypass opened in October 1991.

There was an Eye Green railway station on the line between Peterborough and Norfolk, which closed many years ago.

References

External Resources

http://www.eye-village.org.uk -Official Eye Village Website, created by Adam Pallister