St Botolph's Church

The stump of the tower at Saint Botolph's Church rises above the surrounding neighborhood, lacking the tall spire its builders originally planned. This fourteenth-century structure sits on a site that has hosted local worship since the middle ages, serving the scholars and residents of Cambridge near the gates of the old town. In sixteen sixteen, the rector Thomas Playfere claimed the church tower would fall if the bells were rung. The locals stopped ringing them for nearly two hundred years afterward.