Stow Longa

Stow Longa – in Huntingdonshire (now part of Cambridgeshire), England – is a village near Tilbrook west of Huntingdon and two miles north of Kimbolton. Stow Longa's original name was Stow or Long Stow, which comes from the Old English word stōw (meaning 'holy place') and the Latin word longa or Old English lang (meaning 'long'). Altogether, Stow Longa's name may mean 'the long holy place' or 'an extended settlement which is a holy place', though this is only a rough guess.

Stow was also thought to have been the name of the pre-Conquest estate, which, in the medieval period, was split between two parishes: one, Over Stow or Upper Stow, the western part, which belonged to the Kimbolton parish, and the other, Estou (also Nether Stow or Long Stow), the eastern part, which was part of the soke of Spaldwick.

Mistakenly described as a hamlet, it has the suitable number of houses and businesses to make it a village. Stow Longa is a village that is, at the current time, void of any street lamps, village shops, a school, a pub, and drains. However, Stow Longa does possess several thatched cottages, a village room, a blocked-up well (on the village green), a stone cross (discussed below) and mature elm trees that survived the Dutch Elm disease crisis.

According to a locally-published collection of short stories, 'Ploughing Songs' by Damian Croft, the reason why the pubs that were in Stow Longa were closed down in the 1950s was because, "returning drovers used it to give a bad name to a few otherwise nameless women."