Bures St Mary

The area is rich with cropmarks that include the eastern end of a cursus. According to the twelfth-century Annals of St Neots, Edmund the Martyr, King of East Anglia, was crowned on Christmas Day 856 "in the royal vill of Burna", which is identified by historians as Bures. In the Domesday Book of 1086, the village is referred to as "Bura" or "Bure", it's documented having a church with 18 acre of free land. The name "Bures" could be derived from either an Old English word "bur", meaning a cottage or bower, or from a Celtic word meaning a "boundary". If the village was not named until after the Norman Conquest, (circa 1066) it could have been called after a French village of the same name,…