Huntingdonshire is a small historic county of eastern England, taking its name, according to antiquarian tradition, from an Anglo-Saxon word describing it as a county given over to hunting. It is bounded by Northamptonshire to the north and west, Cambridgeshire to the east, and Bedfordshire to the south, extending some twenty-five miles in length and eighteen in breadth, and containing around 240,000 acres divided into four hundreds, with six market towns, seventy-nine parishes and a population of some 41,000 lying within the diocese of Lincoln. Uniquely among English counties, its sheriff was chosen in rotation with neighbouring Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, reflecting a long history of shared administration with the fenland to its east.
The county's economy rested on a familiar contrast between dry arable land, which yielded good corn, and low-lying fenland meadow, whose rich grazing produced fine cattle and, most famously, the cheese made at the village of Stilton on the Great North Road — sold there to travellers in such quantity that it earned the nickname the Parmesan of England, even though it was made on farms some distance away. The county's principal rivers, the Nene and the Great Ouse, bounded and crossed it respectively, while Whittlesey Mere, a shallow lake some six miles long in the county's north-east corner, was noted for its fish and for a curious tendency to grow agitated even in the calmest weather, long before it was finally drained in the following century.
Huntingdon itself, the county town and birthplace of Oliver Cromwell, gave its name to the shire, while Ramsey Abbey in the fens and the episcopal palace at Buckden recalled the county's medieval religious and administrative importance. Small in area but historically significant, Huntingdonshire retained a distinct identity, briefly as its own county again in the 1960s, before finally being absorbed into Cambridgeshire in 1974.