A riverside village on the north-east edge of the city, with a 12th-century church and a rowing connection.
Fen Ditton is a small parish beside the Cam where Cambridge's north-eastern edge gives way to open land; it counted 760 residents in 2011. Neolithic stone tools have turned up on its meadows, and the name, recorded about 950 as Dittone, means "the village by the ditch". The ditch in question is the Fleam Dyke, a prehistoric earthwork that ran from the river to the fen edge and can still be traced just east of the village.
The river shaped the place. At the west end of the High Street a big wharf received goods for the Stourbridge Fair from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, and it was still working in 1845 before the railway ended its purpose. Around 1550 a paper mill opened on Coldham's Brook near Newmarket Road, only the second recorded in England; it has long since stopped.
St Mary the Virgin, the parish church, is twelfth-century in origin, with a thirteenth-century tower carrying a weather vane shaped like a rowing eight. The vane nods to the Bumps, the rowing races that take place each year on the water beside it. Facing the church, three almshouse cottages date back to 1665, when six were built for poor widows. The Plough and the King's Head are the two pubs, and the war memorial of 1921 has Grade II listing.
The village sits on the road running from Cambridge to Clayhithe, near junction 34 of the A14. The closest railway station is Cambridge North, in Chesterton. Ditton Walk and the Wadloes footpath mark the old line towards Cambridge and are the natural route on foot. The city has grown out to meet the parish: Fen Ditton Fields, formerly part of it, was handed to Cambridge in 1938.