Sawtry () is a village and civil parish in Cambridgeshire, England. Sawtry lies approximately north of Huntingdon. Sawtry is situated within Huntingdonshire which is a non-metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire as well as being a historic county of England. The village is home to over 6,000 Office for National Statistics - Neighbourhood Statistics - Population and Migration people.
During the Dark Ages, Sawtry was divided into three parishes - All Saints, St. Andrew and Judith Parishes - Sawtry A History of the County of Huntingdon: Volume 3 (pp. 203–212) and originally got its name from the fact that it was a trading centre for salt, an essential commodity in the Middle Ages. The Cistercian Sawtry Abbey was founded in 1147 by Simon de Senlis grandson of Judith of Lens, niece of William the Conqueror who owned land in many parts of Britain but built her Manor in Sawtry and whom the Parish of Sawtry Judith is named after. The abbey took 91 years to complete and ministered to the local area both spiritually and physically. This was demolished in 1540 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries as part of the English Reformation, although traces of the Abbey still remain.A Potted History of Sawtry
Sawtry is sister city with the Gemeinde Weimar region in Germany. Huntingdonshire District Council twinning page
Sawtry was in the historic and administrative county of Huntingdonshire until 1965. From 1965, the village was part of the new administrative county of Huntingdon and Peterborough. Then in 1974, following the Local Government Act 1972, Sawtry became a part of the county of Cambridgeshire.
The A1(M), originally the Roman Ermine Street, then the Great North Road, runs immediately to the east of the village.
Ordnance Survey maps from the 1920s show a narrow-gauge agricultural tramway running for a mile north east from Sawtry Roughs Farm (now demolished) to an interchange with the then Great Northern Railway.
From 1901, a census was taken every ten years with the exception of 1941 (due to the Second World War). The separate parishes of Sawtry All Saints and Sawtry St Judith were combined into the single civil parish of Sawtry between 1931 and 1951.
Sawtry All Saints | 818 | 723 | 702 | |||||||
Sawtry St Judith | 181 | 186 | 213 | |||||||
Sawtry | 994 | 909 | 915 | 1,113 | 986 | 1,749 | 3,651 | 4,865 | 5,568 | 6,536 |
In 2011, the parish covered an area of and the population density of Sawtry in 2011 was 667.3 persons per square mile (257.6 per square kilometre).
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