Great Wilbraham is home to a thriving literary community including playwright Edward Bond and art critic Frank Whitford, as well as being the home of Salt Publishing. The village lies about 6 miles east of Cambridge, and its 1,882 hectares form an approximate rectangle, partly bounded to the south-west by Fleam Dyke, and further north separated from Fulbourn and Little Wilbraham by two brooks meeting at its north-west corner.

On the south-east its boundary crosses the line of the Icknield Way. In the 13th century the vill, once partly an ancient royal demesne, was distinguished as King’s Wilbraham, but from the 1260s the village was more usually known as Great Wilbraham.

The parish lies on the Middle and Lower Chalk, overlaid in places with river gravels although in the south-east the village meets the last outliers of the south-east Cambridgeshire downland. The land is virtually level and until the 19th century was mainly fen and marsh, partly reverting to scrub in the late 20th century.

A Neolithic ‘causewayed camp’ in the west of the parish was excavated in 1976. Just within the southern corner of the parish a Bronze Age barrow, where up to eight burials were discovered in 1852, stands by a gap in the Fleam Dyke on Mutlow Hill, probably later a hundred court meeting place. There was a possible Roman dwelling, near which fragments of a lead vat, possibly baptismal, were found in woodland in the 1970s. The population, which comprised 33 inhabitants in 1086, possibly more than doubled by 1279, when there were roughly 85 tenants. In the early 17th century numbers may have reached 250 before declining to 200 in the early 18th.

Except for three large farms built on the former open fields after 1800, two by 1810, there was probably, until after 1850, no settlement away from the village, which stands near a brook in the northern angle of the parish. From a main street, running south-westwards from the Temple, whose eastern and western sections were called in the mid 19th century Temple End and High Street, Frog End, where an isolated group of dwellings survives, runs northwest towards the fen. Angle End and Church Street lead north from the middle of the main street to meet near the church before bending towards Little Wilbraham.

The village retained in the 1980s numerous timber-framed houses and cottages, several single-storeyed, and some still thatched with dormers. Several still had their original 16th or 17th century red or gault brick chimney stacks, some with diagonally set shafts. The largest concentration is along Temple End and the adjoining parts of Angle End and High Street, where habitation was thickest in 1800. At least 25 dated from before 1700, including three bearing the dates 1633, 1647, and 1685.

One cottage on Church Street had two bays of an aisled hall of 1300, the third rebuilt with two floors after 1500. Another at Angle End had a two-bayed hall of 1500, with the original parlour cross wing. The jettied late 16th-century Kennels Farm off Mill Road had hall and parlour in a single four-bayed range. The former Temple End Farm, of 1600, had a 17th century dovecot, while the pargetted Branch Farm has its original three-bayed hall of 1600 with a mid 17th-century cross wing, extended 1720 to a brick gable end. One redbrick house at Angle End is dated 1741. The horse painter J. R. Herring lived in the village in 1851.

The village’s principal communications have always been by road. The road through Newmarket to Bury St. Edmunds (Suffolk), a turnpike between 1724 and 1871, ran along the parish’s southern boundary following the line of the Icknield way. Further north the parallel Street Way, which ran north-east from Fulbourn, crossed field ways such as Balsham, Broad and Wood ways, which led south-east from the village towards the Newmarket road. At inclosure those ways were replaced by straight new roads.

A section of the Great Eastern railway line between Great Chesterford and Six Mile Bottom, opened across the south end of the parish in 1848, was closed in 1851 after a line running east from Cambridge had been laid out, and was formally abandoned in 1859. Its earthworks are still visible today. There’s little by way of public transport, and only three buses leave the village each day, taking nearly an hour to reach Cambridge.

The older village inns included the Carpenters’ Arms or Compasses, in a 17th century cottage, open by 1767 and surviving in the 1980s; and the (Sedan) Chair, recorded from 1765. At the King’s Head the bell ringers and a benefit club dined, while the White Swan’s clubroom later accommodated a local branch of the Ancient Shepherds, founded in 1875 and with 200 members by 1892, and a Conservative Club started in 1887. Both those last two inns closed in the late 1960s.