A few miles further on, we came on this sign.

Now, Sawtry is a quiet and undistinguished village in deepest Cambridgeshire. What it’s doing twinned with one of the great cultural sites of Europe — home to Bach, Goethe, Schiller and Herder — is beyond me. Apart from giving its name to a period in recent German history, Weimar has (so I learn from Wikipedia) been “a site of pilgrimage for the German intelligentsia since Goethe first moved there in the late 18th century”. It seems that Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche are buried there, and it houses the archives of Goethe and Schiller. I cannot for the life of me seeing anyone making a pilgrimage to Sawtry. So how this this bizarre coupling come about?