SACOMBE,
Hertfordshire, England - The town was first named Sacomb but in the following years the "e" was added. It boasts of a Roman road, partly in use, that drops steeply to the Bourne valley, where it crosses the "ancient king's highway" from Hertford to the north. From the Romans it is said to take its name Salvus Campus, an unfortified lodgement probably on the site of St. Catherine's church, in whose graveyard lie the remains of Henrietta, a Countess or Athlone. It also claims that William Pitt the younger often came to the second Sacombe House built by Timothy Caswall in the 1780s at Cold Harbour a mile east of the church, and that here in 1789 he received with his foreign secretary news of the French Revolution from the British ambassador to Paris, then on his way to the king.