Standing on Queen's Green, you can look up along Silver Street, across the traffic lights and up towards Sidgwick Avenue.

Queen's Green

Sidgwick Avenue crosses a flat river terrace that runs south-north across this part of Cambridge. This course of the River Cam dates from the middle of the last Ice Age. Imagine a large braided river with shifting channels and gravel islands. The flat terrace of Sidgwick Avenue is formed by the abandoned surface of the braidplain. In an excavation near the Law Faculty, plant remains and a bison skull were found! Dr Steve Boreham has radiocarbon-dated the skull at 50 to 35,000 years old, and you can see the skull on display at Sedgwick Museum.

The deposits at Sidgwick Avenue are older than the ones found at the Barnwell Junction railway station site on Newmarket Road behind the Leper Chapel, and although both sites contain Ice Age deposits, they're quite different snap-shots in time. The plant remains, snails and bison skull at Sidgwick Avenue tell us of a prairie (grassland) environment- imagine "herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain" as Basil Fawlty might say! This is different to the usual idea of a frozen and chilly Ice Age.

Meadowsweet

As you walk along the Backs you can see a number of different plants. Meadowsweet grows near ditches, bogs and on river banks. It used to be called 'mead sweet' becasue they used it to sweeten mead.

In the spring, the Backs are famous for being a carpet of colour with daffodils, bluebells, snowdrops and crocuses.

Keep walking along the path on Queen's Green. You're now walking on the Backs - the historic grassy area behind King's College. Walk along the path until you get a good view of King's College and the magnificent chapel.