'Getting to know' a city can be the process by which we stop knowing it. At this post-exam juncture we find that, suddenly, the best part of a year has passed since we first chained ourselves to our desks: we emerge, blinking, into Cambridge's budget-sparkling-wine-soaked streets to find that we don't know them much better than when we arrived in September. Like woodland animals we have scurried to and fro, burying parcels of books here and foraging for company there; well-trodden, now, are the paths from bed to library and library to hall. It is with distracted and unseeing eyes, though, that we have become familiar with our surroundings and the way-markers and ornaments that adorn them. 

Our city boasts a smorgasbord of public sculpture, mainly thanks to the commissioning and purchasing patronage of the University over the last century. All major schools and styles are represented – abstraction (in all its strains), figurative work, site-specific interventions, bronze, marble, wood, bas-relief – all, it must be said, with a relatively modern bent. The city can be seen as a three dimensional library, a well-stocked collection of 20th century sculptural endeavour. The Cambridge Sculpture Trail is a laudable initiative, which in effect catalogues this library. Some 60 sculptures are mapped in three manageable walking routes (each route takes roughly two hours, so a pick'n'mix approach is recommended). With their leaflets in hand, I set off to rediscover my city.

The huge variety of work inevitably encourages qualitative comparison, which leads to some surprising realisations. Ever-popular (and heavily editioned) titans such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth are well represented, but their work tends to feel limp and somewhat generic next to more unique, less familiar, pieces. One can't fault the dynamism of Moore's Falling Warrior (Clare, Memorial Court) or the syncopation of Hepworth's Divided Circle (also Clare) but neither really sing in their surroundings. Hepworth's totemic Four Square (Churchill) converses with the college's brutalism – but there's an edition in her St Ives garden which works a little better. I chose instead to look closely at three pieces which enjoy more intimate relationships with their settings.

Christ's chapel plays host to an unusually figurative offering by Anthony Caro. Cambridge-engineering-graduate-turned artist, Caro is (in my view) Britain's greatest living sculptor. This particular mass of rolled steel, Deposition, is as much an essay on weight, tension and physical punishment as it is a biblical depiction. There are loose allusions to Rembrandt and Rubens' paintings of the same subject, though Caro only suggests forms, making the viewer an active participant required to 'fill in the gaps […] in a process like that of reading poetry'. This is the mangled car-crash event that ended a man's life, and the forms are suitably contorted. Sheet metal bears the marks of the 'torture' it has endured, as it's forged, hammered and beaten into shape: Christ's head, folded and welded, is the site of greatest trauma. The pyramidic heap sits silently in the antechapel, its warm patina echoing the wooden panelling. It's a hugely atmospheric space, which the work dominates.

One might easily walk past and not notice Michael Ayrton’s Talos which is tucked behind the Guildhall. A statuesque and deformed bronze, Talos stands proudly, raised up above the heads of passers by. Lamentably, there's no helpful plaque (civic planners clearly have high estimations of undergraduate erudition): Talos was, in fact, the legendary guardian of Minoan Crete (his awakening features in the masterful - now somewhat comic - 1963 Jason and the Argonauts). A bronze giant of unimaginable strength, his shapely calves and highly structured thorax ooze power, whilst his arm-less form resonates with other post-war sculptural suggestions of impotence. 

I also came across Peter Randall-Page's Between the Lines, which is an embodiment of the multi-faceted role that can be played by good public sculpture. Most simply, it provides a locus for the square (the milling space by Carluccio's and Lola Lo's), unifying the disparate buildings which surround it – but it's also a hugely tactile piece, which inspires passing children to touch and climb (children, and the muso undergrad who accompanied me on my expedition). More exciting still is the object's narrative: a glacial boulder, it once gouged a distant valley, scouring, abrading, and sculpting our landscape – now, though, in a neat conceit, Randall-Page has carved geometric valleys into the granitic mass: the chisel has become the chiselled. The rounded bulk sits pregnant in the space between the buildings, like the rocks found in potholes (which gradually carve their own sockets, moved by eddying currents: one can only hope that this process, replicated here, might eventually abrade away Lola Lo's). 

The success of the Sculpture Trail is in its variety, and by exploring the extremities of genre it manages to approximate a definition of what sculpture can be. The most basic and primal urges to create are documented: the Inunnguaq/Inukshuk at the Scott Polar Research Centre is a cairn which alludes to human form, an example of an ancient Inuit custom. Piles of stones like this indicate good hunting ground or past journeys: this is sculpture with practical functions as well as mimetic allusion. Is it so different to our most modern endeavours? Kenneth Martin's Abstract (the heap of metal outside the Engineering Faculty) seems to do very similar things: it way-marks a place and a route, whilst alluding to a form (apparently the formula for a 'helical screw propeller'). The constancy is striking.

Walking through the city, delving into colleges and faculties, one can't help but be moved by the richness of the architectural and sculptural environment that we sometimes take for granted. If nothing else, this well-organised trail encourages the simple act of looking, which, too often, we afford no time.