The charming village of Cumnor sits just a few miles southwest of Oxford. An easy bus ride of 20 minutes, but a more complicated bike ride, as it sits atop Cumnor Hill, a two-mile stretch of incline that slows many cyclists to a crawl. I should know, I barely make it up on my electric bicycle. For over five hundred years it belonged to the Benedictine Abbey at Abingdon, first recorded as Abbey land in 968 and confirmed in the Domesday Book (as “Comenore”). Around 1330 the monks built Cumnor Place as a manorial centre, a house that would later become the setting for one of the parish’s more enduring mysteries.

In September 1560, a young woman called Amy Robsart was found dead at the bottom of a short staircase in Cumnor Place. She was 28 years old. Her neck was broken and there were two wounds to the back of her head. It was, by contemporary account, a short flight of stairs.

Amy was the wife of Robert Dudley, probably the most powerful man in England after the Queen herself, and widely believed to be Elizabeth’s lover. The gossip at court had been running for months: Dudley wanted rid of his wife so he could marry the Queen. On the day Amy died she had sent all her servants to the Abingdon Fair, insisting they go, becoming agitated with those who hesitated. When they came home they found her at the foot of the stairs.

The coroner’s inquest, held the following year, recorded an accidental death. Nobody was ever charged. The coroner’s original report has not survived.

What actually happened has been argued over ever since. Suicide is possible; she was by all accounts deeply unhappy, and one now-doubted theory attributes her death to advanced breast cancer causing her neck to break under minimal strain. Murder is possible too. Murder is possible too, though whether Dudley ordered it, or Cecil arranged it to destroy Dudley’s reputation, or someone else entirely was responsible, nobody has ever established.

The names still linger in the village today. Anthony Forster, Cumnor Place’s tenant at the time of Amy’s death, has Forster Lane. Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, the 1821 novel that turned the story into a national sensation and hardened the murder theory in the public mind, has Kenilworth Road. And Amy herself has Robsart Place.

Cumnor itself is a quiet, small village: two pubs, the Bear and Ragged Staff and the more traditional Vine, a post office doubling as the village shop, a scattering of churches. Thatched cottages sit alongside brick farmhouses, with open fields running out in almost every direction, laced with paths that go for miles (and much loved by my corgi Nell). I live in one of the newer developments, a five-minute walk from the centre, on Robsart Place, and think of Amy every time I see a sign.