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THE ICKNIELD WAY

UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME

THE OLD ROAD

By HILAIRE BELLOC

Illustrated by William Hyde

THE STANE STREET

By HILAIRE BELLOC

Illustrated by William Hyde

THE FOREST OF DEAN

By ARTHUR O. COOKE

Illustrated by J. W. King

Streatley Mill and Church

THE
ICKNIELD WAY

BY
EDWARD THOMAS

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
A. L. COLLINS

LONDON
CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
1916

[DEDICATION]
TO HARRY HOOTON

When I sat down at the “Dolau Cothi Arms” this evening I remembered my dedication to you. You said I could dedicate this book to you if I would make a real dedication, not one of my shadowy salutes befitting shadows rather than men and women. It seems odd you should ask thus for a sovereign’s worth of—shall I say—English prose from a writer by trade. But though I turn out a large, if insufficient, number of sovereigns’ worths, and am become a writing animal, and could write something or other about a broomstick, I do not write with ease: so let that difficulty give the dedication its value.

It is right that I should remember you upon a walk, for I have walked more miles with you than with anyone else except myself. While I walked you very often danced, on the roads of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire. This evening when I went out on the Sarn Helen everybody was in chapel, I think, unless it was the Lord, for he also seemed to me to be walking in the cool. I was very much alone, and glad to be. You were a ghost, and not a man of fourteen stone, and I thought that perhaps after all that shadowy salute would be fittest. But I have put my pen to paper: I have set out and I will come to an end; for, as I said, I am a writing animal. In the days of those old walks I could have written a dedication in Norfolk jacket style, all about “the open road,” and the search for something “over the hills and far away”: I should have reminded you at some length how Borrow stayed at this inn, and that Dolau Cothi is the house where he could have lived with satisfaction “if backed by a couple of thousands a year.” To-day I know there is nothing beyond the farthest of far ridges except a signpost to unknown places. The end is in the means—in the sight of that beautiful long straight line of the Downs in which a curve is latent—in the houses we shall never enter, with their dark secret windows and quiet hearth smoke, or their ruins friendly only to elders and nettles—in the people passing whom we shall never know though we may love them. To-day I know that I walk because it is necessary to do so in order both to live and to make a living. Once those walks might have made a book; now they make a smile or a sigh, and I am glad they are in ghostland and not fettered in useless print. This book for you was to have been a country book, but I see that it has turned out to be another of those books made out of books founded on other books. Being but half mine it can only be half yours, and I owe you an apology as well as a dedication. It is, however, in some ways a fitting book for me to write. For it is about a road which begins many miles before I could come on its traces and ends miles beyond where I had to stop. I could find no excuse for supposing it to go to Wales and following it there into the Ceidrych Valley, along the Towy to Caermarthen, and so to St. David’s which is now as holy as Rome, though once only a third as holy. Apparently no special mediæval use revived it throughout its course, or gave it a new entity like that of the Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury that you and I walked on many a time—by the “Cock” at Detling, the “Black Horse” at Thurnham, the “King’s Head” (once, I believe, the “Pilgrims’ Rest”) at Hollingbourne, above Harrietsham, past Deodara Villas, above Lenham and Robert Philpot’s “Woodman’s Arms,” and so on to Eastwell; always among beech and yew and Canterbury bells, and always over the silver of whitebeam leaves. I could not find a beginning or an end of the Icknield Way. It is thus a symbol of mortal things with their beginnings and ends always in immortal darkness. I wish the book had a little more of the mystery of the road about it. You at least will make allowances—and additions; and God send me many other readers like you. And as this is the bottom of the sheet, and ale is better than ink, though it is no substitute, I label this “Dedication,” and wish you with me inside the “Dolau Cothi Arms” at Pumpsaint, in Caermarthenshire.

EDWARD THOMAS.

NOTE

I have to acknowledge the very great kindness of Mr. Hilaire Belloc, Mr. Harold T. E. Peake, and Mr. R. Hippisley Cox while I was writing this book, though I do so with some hesitation, because I may seem to make them responsible for some of my possible mistakes and certain shortcomings. A man could hardly have three better guides than Mr. Belloc for his grasp and sympathy with roads, Mr. Peake for his caution and curiosity, and “documents, documents!” and Mr. Cox for his ardour and familiarity with trodden turf; and I must add my testimony to that of my betters to the merits of Mr. Belloc’s Old Road, Mr. Peake’s chapter on prehistoric roads in Memorials of Old Leicestershire, and Mr. Cox’s Avebury. To Mr. Peake I am indebted not only for suggestions that were invaluable to me, notably in the matter of the Ridgeway and the Bishop of Cloyne’s pernicious theory, but for the use of his copies of the greater part of the materials of my second chapter. I have also had great kindness from the Rev. E. H. Goddard and Mr. W. Gough.

EDWARD THOMAS.

Llaugharne,
Caermarthenshire.

[CONTENTS]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE ICKNIELD WAY

CHAPTER I
ON ROADS AND FOOTPATHS

Much has been written of travel, far less of the road. Writers have treated the road as a passive means to an end, and honoured it most when it has been an obstacle; they leave the impression that a road is a connection between two points which only exists when the traveller is upon it. Though there is much travel in the Old Testament, “the way” is used chiefly as a metaphor. “Abram journeyed, going on still toward the south,” says the historian, who would have used the same words had the patriarch employed wings. Yet to a nomadic people the road was as important as anything upon it. The earliest roads wandered like rivers through the land, having, like rivers, one necessity, to keep in motion. We still say that a road “goes” to London, as we “go” ourselves. We point out a white snake on a green hill-side, and tell a man: “That is going to Chichester.” At our inn we think when recollecting the day: “That road must have gone to Strata Florida.” We could not attribute more life to them if we had moving roads with platforms on the sidewalks. We may go or stay, but the road will go up over the mountains to Llandovery, and then up again over to Tregaron. It is a silent companion always ready for us, whether it is night or day, wet or fine, whether we are calm or desperate, well or sick. It is always going: it has never gone right away, and no man is too late. Only a humorist could doubt this, like the boy in a lane who was asked: “Where does this lane go to, boy?” and answered: “I have been living here these sixteen years and it has never moved to my knowledge.” Some roads creep, some continue merely; some advance with majesty, some mount a hill in curves like a soaring sea-gull.

Even as towns are built by rivers, instead of rivers being conducted past towns, so the first settlements grew up alongside roads which had formerly existed simply as the natural lines of travel for a travelling race. The oldest roads often touch the fewest of our modern towns, villages, and isolated houses. It has been conjectured that the first roads were originally the tracks of animals. The elephant’s path or tunnel through the jungle is used as a road in India to-day, and in early days the wild herds must have been invaluable for making a way through forest, for showing the firmest portions of bogs and lowland marshes, and for suggesting fords. The herd would wind according to the conditions of the land and to inclinations of many inexplicable kinds, but the winding of the road would be no disadvantage to men who found their living by the wayside, men to whom time was not money. Roads which grew thus by nature and by necessity appear to be almost as lasting as rivers. They are found fit for the uses of countless different generations of men outside cities, because, apart from cities and their needs, life changes little. If they go out of use in a new or a changed civilization, they may still be frequented by men of the most primitive habit. All over England may be found old roads, called Gypsy Lane, Tinker’s Lane, or Smuggler’s Lane; east of Calne, in Wiltshire, is a Juggler’s Lane; and as if the ugliness of the “uggle” sound pleased the good virtuous country folk, they have got a Huggler’s Hole a little west of Semley and south of Sedgehill in the same county: there are also Beggar’s Lanes and roads leading past places called Mock Beggar, which is said to mean Much Beggar. These little-used roads are known to lovers, thieves, smugglers, and ghosts. Even if long neglected they are not easily obliterated. On the fairly even and dry ground of the high ridges where men and cattle could spread out wide as they journeyed, the earth itself is unchanged by centuries of traffic, save that the grass is made finer, shorter, paler, and more numerously starred with daisies. But on the slopes down to a plain or ford the road takes its immortality by violence, for it is divided into two or three or a score of narrow courses, trenched so deeply that they might often seem to be the work rather of some fierce natural force than of slow-travelling men, cattle, and pack-horses. The name Holloway, or Holway, is therefore a likely sign of an old road. So is Sandy Lane, a name in which lurks the half-fond contempt of country people for the road which a good “hard road” has superseded, and now little used save in bird’s-nesting or courting days. These old roads will endure as long as the Roman streets, though great is the difference between the unraised trackway, as dim as a wind-path on the sea, and the straight embanked Roman highway which made the proverb “Plain as Dunstable Road,” or “Good plain Dunstable”—for Watling Street goes broad and straight through that town. Scott has one of these ghostly old roads in Guy Mannering. It was over a heath that had Skiddaw and Saddleback for background, and he calls it a blind road—“the track so slightly marked by the passengers’ footsteps that it can but be traced by a slight shade of verdure from the darker heath around it, and, being only visible to the eye when at some distance, ceases to be distinguished while the foot is actually treading it.”

The making of such roads seems one of the most natural operations of man, one in which he least conflicts with nature and the animals. If he makes roads outright and rapidly, for a definite purpose, they may perish as rapidly, like the new roads of modern Japanese enterprise, and their ancient predecessors live on to smile at their ambition. These are the winding ways preferred by your connoisseur to-day. “Give me,” says Hazlitt, “the clear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three-hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking!” These windings are created by the undulating of the land, and by obstacles like those of a river—curves such as those in the High Street of Oxford, which Wordsworth called “the stream-like windings of that glorious street.” The least obstacle might bring about a loop, if nothing more, and as even a Roman road curled round Silbury Hill, so the path of the Australian savage is to be seen twisting round bush after bush as if it enjoyed the interruption, though it cannot purl like the river at a bend. Probably these twists, besides being unconsciously adapted to the lie of the land, were, as they are still, easeful and pleasant to the rover who had some natural love of journeying. Why go straight? There is nothing at the end of any road better than may be found beside it, though there would be no travel did men believe it. The straight road, except over level and open country, can only be made by those in whom extreme haste and forethought have destroyed the power of joy, either at the end or at any part of its course. Why, then, go straight? The connoisseur had something of the savage in him when he demanded a winding road.

It is not, however, to a man walking for pleasure that we shall go for a sense of roads, but to one like Bunyan. Pilgrim’s Progress is full of the sense of roads. See Christian going to Mr. Legality’s house. It is a mountain road, and the hill overhangs it so much that he is afraid to venture further “lest the hill should fall on his head.” When Goodwill points out the narrow way, he says it was “cast up by the patriarchs, prophets, Christ, and his Apostles,” i.e. made into a raised track bounded by ditches from which the earth was cast up to form the embankment. When Christian comes to the Hill Difficulty you see the primitive man deciding to go straight uphill, turning not to the left by the way called Danger into a great wood, nor to the right to Destruction and the “wide field full of dark mountains.” How full of plain English country wayfaring is the passage where Hopeful and Christian take a road by a river-side, and then when it turns away from the water they see a stile leading into a path which keeps on, as a path would do, along the bank through By-path Meadow: only, as it happens, the river is in flood and they must turn back again towards the stile. This man knew roads, and one of his temptations after conversion was to try his faith by bidding the puddles on the road between his own village and Bedford to be dry. Cervantes had the sense of roads. He begins, indeed, by making Don Quixote sally forth “upon the plain” like any knight of chivalry “pricking o’er the plain” and taking the way chosen by his horse because thus would adventures best be compassed; but it is upon a road that he and most of his knights, ladies, and enchanters travel. Malory’s book would have less vitality in its marvel if it were not for the roads: the three highways, for example, where Sir Marhaus and Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine were to separate for their adventures each with his damosel; and the wild ways of Sir Launcelot when he “rode many wild ways, throughout marches and many wild ways,” until he came to a valley and a knight therein with a naked sword chasing a lady. Cymbeline again, and some of the historical plays of Shakespeare, give a grand impression of wide tracts of country traversed by roads of great purpose and destiny.

More often in books we move, as I have said, from place to place as in a dream. But it is a dream in the Mabinogion which gives one of the most majestic scenes of travel. I mean the dream of the Emperor Maxen. He dreamed that he was journeying along a river valley towards its source, and up over the highest mountain in the world until he saw mighty rivers descending to the sea, and one of them he followed to a great city at its mouth and a vast castle in the city. At the end of his journey the dreaming Emperor found a girl so beautiful that when he awoke he could think of naught else, while years went by, except her beauty. He sent out pioneers to discover the road of his dream, and at last they brought him to the castle and the same girl Helen sitting in the hall of it. She became his bride, and he gave her three castles—one at Arvon in North Wales, one at Caerleon, and one at Caermarthen in the South. Then, says the tale, “Helen bethought her to make high-roads from one castle to another throughout the Island of Britain. And the roads were made. And for this cause are they called the roads of Helen Luyddawc, that she was sprung from a native of this island, and the men of the Island of Britain would not have made these great roads for any save her.” It is natural to connect with this Helen the great ancient roads leading north and south across Wales known as Sarn Helen or Elen. Nothing could be more noble as the name of a mountain road than Sarn Helen or Helen’s Causeway. It suggests to the ordinary fanciful and unhistoric mind the British Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, and that it suggested this long ago is clear from the old identification of Helen Luyddawc with the only child of King Cole of Colchester. The name has more recently been explained as Sarn y Lleng, the Road of the Legions. Sir John Rhys[1] insists upon Elen instead of Helen, and believes her to be one of the pagan goddesses of the dusk. “There is,” he says, “a certain poetic propriety in associating the primitive paths and roads of the country with this vagrant goddess of dawn and dusk.” These wandering paths are to the hard white highways what dusk is to the full blaze of day. First perhaps trodden by the wild herd and still without terrors for it, they might well be protected by a sort of Artemis, goddess of wildernesses and of forked ways, kind both to human hunters and the wild quarry. They belong to the twilight of the world. No doubt the sun shines no brighter at noon than it did then on a perfectly wild earth, on flowers that were never gathered, on bright plumage that no man had coveted. But all the forest and marsh of primeval earth form in the imagination mists to which the lack of history adds yet another veil. These mists lie over the world, to my mind, exactly as the white mist of summer lies, turning into a sea most of what once was land and making islands of the woods on the steep, uncultivated tracts. The islands rising out of the mists of time are the hills and mountains, and along their ridges ran the first roads, and by them are the squares and circles of the first habitations and the mounds of the first solemnized graves, used sometimes, it is thought, as guides for travellers.

It is particularly easy to think of Southern England as several chains of islands, representing the Downs, the Chilterns and Gog Magogs, the Mendips, Cotswolds and Quantocks. I have more than once caught myself thinking of the broad elephantine back of Butser Hill heaving up, spotted with gorse but treeless, between Petersfield and Portsmouth, as Ararat, though my unfaithful eyes fail to imagine the ark. There are days now when the clear suddenly swelling hills like Tarberry or Barrow Hill in Hampshire, or Cley Hill or the Knolls of Maiden Bradley in Wiltshire, or the abrupt promontories like Chanctonbury or Noar Hill near Selborne, or the long trooping ranges, seem to be islands or atolls looming dimly through the snowy still mists of morning or the clouds of rainstorm. Even without mist some of the isolated green hills rise out of the pale levels of cornland as out of sea; and I have seen, from near Bruton, the far-distant mass of Cadbury, the hill some call Camelot in Somerset, look like a dark precipitous isle. When the early roads along the ridges were made, the hills still more closely resembled islands emerging out of the forest and out of the marsh. The watersheds created the roads, as they still do over hundreds of miles in Africa. The roads keep to the highland, and if this highland were to form a circle they would follow it; and hunters say, as Mr. H. W. Nevinson tells us in A Modern Slavery, that the elephants do “move in a kind of rough zone or circle—from the Upper Zambesi across the Cuando into Angola and the district where they passed me, and so across the Cuanza northward and eastward into the Congo, and round towards Katanga and the sources of the Zambesi again.” Somewhere too I have met the tradition, probably a Welsh one, that this island of Britain was girdled by a road above its shores. The early nomads would descend from the ridges only with reluctance, for fear of the marsh and the dim forest. Doubtless their travelling oxen, especially if burdened, had the same horror of mud—when they are not free to wallow in it—as they have to-day. In a very early age it is likely that men would go down to the rivers only to water their cattle, and then return to the heights. There would be several drinking-places, and at one of them they would discover a ford, unless the animals had already marked one, and then if the river had not become a boundary they might cross and continue their wanderings along a road upon the next island of hills. Thus island would be joined to island. The paths ran along the back of each one and branched over the spurs, and the linking up of these would tend to form highways of great length, like that trodden by Launcelot, “far o’er the long backs of the bushless downs” to Camelot. It were easy to take such a route to-day from anywhere in Berkshire or Hampshire, travelling high and away from cities, except cities of the dead like Avebury, far from towns and villages, through Wiltshire into Somerset or Dorset, on roads which are altogether turf or have so goodly a border of grass and blossom that the wayfarer need never touch the hard white grit which is the same on a metalled road whether in London or in wild country.

The Ridgeway, near Blowingstone Hill, Berkshire.

Down from the realm-long bridge of islands above the world the traveller descended to cities of men. Thus Sir Launcelot after long riding in a great forest came into a low country of fair rivers and meadows and saw before him the long bridge and the three pavilions on it, “of silk and sendal of divers hue.” Thus Sir Bevis of Hampton, cheated of his patrimony by a cruel mother and keeping sheep on the Downs, looked and saw below him the town and the tower that should have been his. Thus Cobbett, looking from Portsdown Hill above Portsmouth, saw the sea for the first time and the English fleet riding at anchor at Spithead and his heart “was inflated with national pride,” and though he had walked thirty miles that day he slept not a moment, but rose at daylight and offered himself for the sea on board the Pegasus. Thus we descend on Winchester or Salisbury out of the hills, glad to get there what we want as we have for many days gladly wanted what we could get. It has been, let us say, a day that should be spring, and in the dark, wet copses there were thousands of primroses. All day the wind, and often rain and wind together, roared in the trees. The pale flowers were soaked and frayed and speckled with dust from the trees, and they hung down or were broken from their soft stalks. But the high land and the neighbouring sky exalt us. Even the sight of these tender-blubbering petals ruined in the drenched grass was pleasant. We should have liked better to see them unspoiled and wide in the sun; but we did not wish them to be so, and their distress did but add to the glory of the storm and to our defiance, just as did the cowering of birds, of bowed trees, of whole woods, under the wild, shadowy swoop of the mist and rain, and the valleys below us humbled, their broad fields, their upthrust churches and clustered villages overwhelmed and blotted out, and everything annihilated save the wind, the rain, the streaming road, and the vigorous limbs and glowing brain and what they created. Not that we did not welcome freely the minutes of dimly shining stillness that were as a secluded garden in a city, when the storm paused; for then we drank in the blue sky and the dark revealed tracts of plain and hill that lay stunned and astonished like a dreamer opening his eyelids after tumultuous dreams; we drank them with easy joy as of a man reading a great adventure when the heroes of it have long been dead, for we ourselves were so much above all that expanse which, powerless and quiet, might almost seem to belong to the past or to a tale. We and the storm were one and we were triumphant; and in mid triumph we came down to the lighted streets.

As the first roads were made by men following herds, either as hunters or as herdsmen, so ox and sheep have long helped to keep them up. The great road of pilgrimage from Damascus to Mecca is not a made road, but composed of the parallel strands of old hollow camel paths. These, says Mr. Charles M. Doughty in Arabia Deserta, “one of the ancient Arabian poets has compared to the bars of the rayed Arabic mantle.” To our own day in England drovers took the cattle lazily along the old roads of the watersheds and ridges. “Ox Drove” is the name in several places of an old green road. Travellers in Wiltshire have noticed on the one-inch Ordnance Survey Map a “British Trackway” running W.S.W. out of the road from the Deverills to Maiden Bradley. A large tumulus stands in the first field, as if for a sign at the beginning of the track. Locally this is known as the “Ox Road,” and is said to have been used by droves coming from Mid and East Somerset. It is a continuation of the hard road which it leaves at the tumulus, and following it and its continuations you may travel through Kilmington, and between the Jack’s Castle tumulus and King Alfred’s tower, down Kingsettle Hill, and on close to Cadbury Castle, to Ilchester, and, joining the Foss Way, reach Devon and Cornwall. Only one mile of its course is marked in Old English letters “British Trackway,” and this is apparently not even a path, but a protracted unevenness of the ground, sometimes almost amounting to a ridge or terrace in the grass, for the most part following the hedges, and in one place entering a short, nettly lane. The road, in spite of its romantic Old English lettering, is at this point a very humble specimen of an ancient road and ox drove; for it goes through meadows which are low compared with the fine waves of Down—White Sheet Downs and the Maiden Bradley Hills—on either side of it. A far better one is the ox drove which this joins at Kilmington. It is said to have been used as a road from London to Exeter. Farmers will tell you that the Ox Drove “never touched water,” which they will qualify by saying you could go from Monkton Deverill to Marlborough without touching water or crossing it, and if that also is impossible, at any rate they have the tradition of the road’s character in their heads, seldom as they may use it. Along it, says Mr. J. U. Powell,[2] came “fat cattle from the Somerset pastures to London,” and once he thinks it was a road leading to the lead of Somerset and tin of Cornwall.

It goes through the orchards of Somerset as a good hard road, but often deprived of its right green borders. When these have been lost they have not always disappeared, and its old breadth is shown probably by a long, narrow field lying first on one side and then, after a zigzag, on the other, as near the “Bull” to the east of Bruton. Sometimes with a green space beside the road, or a depression behind the hedge, or an aimless avenue of oak trees as at Redlynch, marking the old course, it is a narrow road going in a determined manner up and down, but with few deviations and having a purpose obviously unconnected with the few cottages on its edge. Here it is called the Hardway. The “hard road” is the countryman’s admiring term for a made road; but it is suggested that the Hardway is the Har- or Harrow-Way, and is a continuation of a road running east and west through Hampshire and Wiltshire. It crosses the little shaded river Brue and ascends Kingsettle Hill between high banks of beech and oak and bluebell. It mounts, like a savage who does not mind being out of breath, straight up the steep wooded wall of the hill until at the top it is eight hundred and fifty feet high instead of four hundred, and takes you into Wiltshire. On the right is the huge square tower of brick erected by one of the Colt Hoare family in honour of King Alfred. The name Kingsettle Hill was thought by Colt Hoare to mark the pass of King Alfred when, with the chief men of Somerset, he issued from Athelney “after Eastertide,” in 878, and marched to Egbert’s stone in the east part of Selwood Forest. This “stone” or “cliff” has been supposed to be White Sheet Hill, a very conspicuous and noble place for the King to gather the people of Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire before leading them to the victory of Edington. On the right and, like Alfred’s Tower, at the brink of the hill is the big tumulus known as Jack’s Castle; and from either you command Somersetshire nearly as far as the curvature of the earth allows. From the oaks and bluebells of the slopes beneath you stretches a low subdivided country of many oaks—and cuckoos calling from them—and the Hardway penetrating it from the south-west. Colt Hoare calls the tumulus “Selwood Barrow,” a beacon above the great Forest of Selwood and possibly a direction post for travellers from the west to Old Sarum. In the north-west the land rises up to a ridge with a comb of beech trees, which is Creech Hill above Bruton, and at its feet the masses of Pink Wood and Norridge Wood. The Mendips are a dim cloud beyond it on the right, the Quantocks a dimmer cloud on the left; and in the low land between them is Athelney, and near it Glastonbury, standing above the full-grown Brue. Sometimes the wind-like sound of an invisible train ascends.

The road takes you through the remains of Selwood Forest. Now it has a fair green border, often of considerable breadth. That you are in Wiltshire there can be no doubt on emerging from the trees. For in front upon the left are those gentle monsters, the smooth Long and Little Knolls above Maiden Bradley, smooth, detached green dunes crested and fringed with beeches. Under this side of the Long Knoll is the tower of Kilmington Church among its trees. Lying across the road a few miles ahead are the bare White Sheet Downs, which are to be mounted, and farther to the right the wooded beacons above Fonthill Gifford and East Knoyle. The road makes for the scar of a high quarry on the nearest slope of White Sheet, a little to the left of a lesser isolated hill, a smooth, wooded knoll or islet. The road is gently and evenly rising, a hard, white road almost straight, between grassy borders with thorns and brambles under beeches that overhang from behind the hedge. They are good trees standing on a strip of turf furrowed as if it had once been the road or part of it; and some young ones have been lately planted, so that all is not yet over with English country, though landlords say so. The road crosses another to Kilmington and Yarnfield, and at once it is older-looking, hard, but winding slightly among bushy and lush steep banks. You see flowers and ash trees, and a linnet on the tip of one, but nothing distant save white clouds and the blue. Here it is called Long Lane, and among its herbage is an old London milestone. Long Lane is often the title of a lane coming from somewhere afar off: there is one south of Hermitage, giving its name to a village, in Berkshire, and one near Cucklington in Somerset, where there is a Tinker’s Hill also. In another mile Long Lane crosses the Maiden Bradley road by a smithy and a “Red Lion”; its name becomes White Sheet Lane, and it goes straight in sight of the high white quarry and the deep tracks up to White Street Castle. Like Long Lane, it is a parish boundary. Both are without a house: the road has hardly passed a house since Redlynch, save at a crossing, and those living in the houses use the road only for a mile or so on the way to a village on either side. Slanting uphill under the quarry, with a parallel green way hollowed beside it, goes the road’s bolder self. The hedges and banks are low, and the cornland or meadow is open round about. The lane turns to climb White Sheet Hill, and beeches and some whitebeam trees cool the beginning of the ascent; there are myriads of primroses in their season and chaffinches singing. You pass a thatched house and the lime-kiln of “Tom Gatehouse, Lime Burner,” by the quarry, and another milestone showing twenty-three miles to Sarum and a date like 1757—when Blake was born. Looking back, the Knolls are on the right and Alfred’s Tower on the left among the woods. There are tumuli on the right as the road comes clear out on to the hill-top and travels between the wired fences of the downland pasture. Here stand cows who do not often see a pencil sharpened. Pewits wheel over and before and behind; all along the high course of the road the pewits cry and wheel. The road is at first rutted, but is soon a green smooth track on the highest land, skirting the upper ends of coombes dappled dusky gold by gorse, and commanding bare downland on the left and wooded hills on the right, and looking along a great bottom to the church tower of Mere, and Mere’s beautiful “Long Hill,” and the wide-arboured vale stretching away to the long ridge of Dorset. It is a high way and a proud way. After crossing an ancient ditch it is labelled “British Trackway,” and ahead it is seen going between a wire fence and a dark line of tussocks. Then it is divided into three or four parallel terraces grooved by wheels, but with a lark’s nest in the green rut. It crosses the Mere road as two hollow ways side by side, but in a little while is only a green track with single thorns on the left. Here is the twenty-first milestone from Sarum, the ninety-ninth from London, inscribed 1750, and it is called the London Drove Road; it is still in sight of Alfred’s Tower, now protruding above White Sheet ramparts. In one place it is so wide that the milestone stands out in the middle, like a traveller asleep or turned to stone among mole-heaps that have blotted the signs of other travellers. On the left, as far as the main Wincanton road, part of the track is embanked; entering the hard motor road to Amesbury and London, the old way is outlined chiefly by the thorns of Old Willoughby Hedge on the left. The road going hedgeless across the downland is but the thin backbone of the old green way. For a time the line of thorns diverges, and then, soon after the crossing of the Warminster road, they come slanting from the right to meet the road and cross it just before another milestone. Hereby are three milestones on different roads, all close together, which has caused the easy winning of merry wagers to run past three milestones in three minutes. The drove crosses several roads going to Hindon, as a broad green track with or without a hedge, marked by its greater profusion of daisies and its paleness and lack of tussocks. Still there are pewits, and somewhere not far away a Pewit Castle. It is joined again by the main Amesbury road beyond Cold Berwick Hill, but presently deserted, the busier white way going boldly off over the ridge, and down to the Wylye River and up again on to Salisbury Plain by Yarnbury, and so past Stonehenge to Amesbury. The green road winds along the south slope of the ridge. Now two lines of thorns show the course far ahead, or the white weals of an ascent are seen; now gorse encroaches on it, and at a crossway corned-beef tins and grey embers mark an encampment of nomads. It passes thickets of thorn and wayfaring trees burying an old milestone to Sarum. Turf or corn lies on either hand or on both. It keeps along the edge of Groveley Woods and within sound of the nightingales until it bends down to Salisbury; once probably it or a higher parallel course went over a ford to Old Sarum, and evidently it is vastly older than the eighteenth-century milestones, perhaps old enough to have guided the Hampshire men and some of the Wiltshiremen to Alfred, a road such as Cobbett loved for the hammering of horses’ hoofs on flints.

Another fine ox drove, and dignified by that name and by old lettering on the Ordnance Map, ran clear for a long stretch along the high land south of the Ebble River, from a point four miles south of Salisbury and westwards by Winkelbury to the south of Shaftesbury. It may some day be proved that one of the most famous of ancient roads, the Icknield Way itself, was an ox drove. There is said to be a charter mentioning the Icknield Way as “the way the cattle go”; and one writer has boldly derived the very name from the British Yken, or Ychen, meaning oxen. Every district in the chalk country has its tradition of an old road, now surviving in a footpath or in broken vertebræ of lane and footpath to provide walkers with endless theories. At Swindon, for example, it is said[3] that the Holy Well stood on a road coming from the east and going westward past Bradenstoke Abbey into Somerset, and on another used by pilgrims to the shrine of St. Anne’s in the Wood, at Brislington in Somerset, which went by Elcombe, Hay Lane Bridge, Bushton, Clyffe, Calne, Studley, Chippenham, Pewsham Forest, Bradford, Keynsham Abbey, and Whitchurch, to Brislington, which is in the south-east of Bristol and has now a station called St. Ann’s Park. But this is not the place to give way to the fascination of a roll-call of country names.

Except that bridges superannuated fords, the conditions for the travelling of cattle cannot have changed much from Alfred’s time until the day of railway trucks carrying thickets of moaning horns and square blocks of sheep. The turnpike system helped to preserve the old roads because drovers using them could avoid the tolls; their cattle could also feed by the wayside. Canon Jackson,[4] in 1862, said that the Ridgeway of Berkshire and Wiltshire was part of the road used for ages and to this day for driving cattle from Anglesey into Kent. Mr. Walter Money, in a note to Miss Gossett’s Shepherds of Britain, said much the same thing. Unfortunately neither has told us anything of their route. I have no doubt they could have covered most of the distance on grass. I should like to have travelled with them. You will find “Welsh Ways” all over England. Walkers or Workaway Hill, where the Ridgeway descends southward from Wansdyke to the Pewsey Valley, is said to be a corruption of Weala-wege, and to have been called Walcway (or Welshway) by a shepherd not long ago. There is a “Welshway” in Northamptonshire making past Northampton for Wales by way of Banbury and the Cotswolds, and said to have been the route of Welsh drovers. There is a “Welsh Lane” in the Cotswolds turning out of the Gloucester road, three or four miles from Cirencester, and going up the hill by Four Mile Bottom towards Barnsley. I met an old man who remembered helping the Welsh drovers with their black cattle there sixty years ago. They were putting up near by for the night, and they liked the boy because his name was David. In the downland these roads would be practicable for the most part all the year round; but Defoe tells us that the clay roads of the Midlands used to be so bad that graziers sold their stock in September and October: they could then be taken to the neighbourhood of London and kept until mid-winter to be sold at a high price. Cheshire men used to send their cheese to London either all the way by sea or overland to Burton, and so by the river to Hull and thence by sea. Gloucester men sent their goods by land to Lechlade or Cricklade, and then onward by the Thames; but their flocks doubtless could travel by Bath and go along the down ways eastward. But he says that now the roads are good, and mutton comes straight from the country in December, and almost as cheap as in summer.

Under Liddington Hill, Wiltshire.

I have not had the fortune to meet drovers from Wales, but where the Icknield Way through Buckinghamshire rounds the promontory Beacon of the Ivinghoe Hills I have seen men with sheep from Berkshire or Dorset journeying towards Dunstable, Royston, and the farms of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. They have to go much on the hard grit to-day, and I have heard that they are kept off the unfenced Ridgeway lest the flock should eat too much of the pastures in their passage. The sheep dislike the grit as much as Mr. Burroughs loves it and I hate it, and what with the traffic and the harshness of the road it is not surprising to hear of a Welsh flock taking a week to get from Warminster to Monckton Deverill.

Where the high down roads are fenced there could be no better wayfaring. The track is twenty or thirty yards wide or more. It is untouched by wheels, and grows nothing but grass and the most delicate flowers. Along similar droves doubtless the sheep go up to the alpine grass in summer, as the shepherd in California told Miss Mary Austin.[5] “We went between the fenced pastures, feeding every other day and driving at night. In the dark we heard the bells ahead and slept upon our feet. Myself and another herdboy, we tied ourselves together not to wander from the road.... Whenever shepherds from the Rhone are met about camps in the Sierras they will be talking of how they slept upon their feet and followed after the bells.” The best time to meet travelling sheep is after one of the fortnightly markets at East Ilsley among the Berkshire Downs, or at the time of the Ram Fair there on August 1st, or at the time of Tan Hill Fair on August 6th, or Yarnbury Fair on October 4th. Tan Hill and Yarnbury fairs are both held within the circuit of an old camp on the high chalk. Yarnbury is a meeting-place of trackways over Salisbury Plain. Tan Hill is close to the great Ridgeway and other trackways. Tan is supposed by some to be connected with the Celtic “tan,” meaning fire, and with Celtic religious festivals having ceremonies of fire. This fair was held at a very early hour, and there is an obvious temptation to suggest a religious origin for the beacons said to have been lighted to guide the drovers.[6] I do not know what number of sheep would be sold at this fair. Defoe says that as many as five hundred thousand were sold at Weyhill Fair, one farmer attending to represent ten or twenty in his own county of Sussex or Oxfordshire. If this number came to Tan Hill it was worth a night’s drenching to see the beacons and the multitudes arriving, to hear the bells and the sea of tired bleating and the sharp chiding of the overstrung dogs and the curses of the sleepy drovers upon that smooth, bare mountain without house or hut or a white road, or anything much newer than Wansdyke except the square of mustard that began to dawn through the mist like a banner not far away.

The Arab’s answer to Mr. Doughty’s[7] question whether he knew all the strange spires, pinnacles, and battlements of the wind-worn sand rock in the desert was that he knew, “as good as every great stone” in all his marches over three or four thousand square miles; and there were drovers who could have said as much of the landmarks on the downs, the tumulus and camp, the furze thicket, the hawthorns, solitary or in line, the beech or fir clump, the church tower, the distant white wall or scallop of a chalk-pit, the white horse carved through the turf into the chalk, the church towers of the valley, the long coombes.

Even when deserted, these old roads are kept in memory by many signs. The grass refuses to grow over the still stream of turf in the same way as at either side of it. A line of thorn trees follows their course, or the hedge or fence or wall dividing two fields. They survive commonly and conspicuously as boundaries between fields, between estates, parishes, hundreds, and counties. It is one of the adventurous pleasures of a good map thus to trace the possible course of a known old road or to discover one that was lost. A distinct chain of footpath, lane, and road—road, lane, and footpath—leading across the country and corresponding in much of its course with boundaries is likely to be an ancient way. By this means much of the line of a road like the Icknield Way might be recovered if document and tradition had not preserved it. Without these signs few men to-day could tell an old from a new road, though, in fact, there are not many great lengths of entirely new road except in new towns and newly drained regions; elsewhere the new roads have been made by linking up or improving old ones. The life of cities has destroyed at once the necessity and the power to judge the expanse of earth under our eyes, and few but soldiers educate whatever gift they have for this kind of judgment. If we learn to use a map, it is without fundamental understanding, without the savage’s or the soldier’s or the traveller’s grasp; we must have inherited glimmerings of the old power, but they help us chiefly to an æsthetic appreciation of landscape. Let a man take an old map—not a very old one, which may be faulty or deficient—of his own district, and see if he can really grasp the system of the hills and rivers, and the bones of the land and the essential roads, and not be long baffled merely by the absence of certain new roads and familiar names; for few old ones will have entirely disappeared. If he is not so baffled he has cause for pride. Many are to be found who can hardly read a map when going from north to south, i.e. down the map instead of up it, with the east on the left and the west on the right and the north behind; and their difficulty is increased by being in a railway train. Such men may be very good walkers and very good men, though they be walking for exercise, or to improve body or soul, which is a reason that has lately been condemned by Mr. Belloc. “The detestable habit of walking for exercise,” he tells us, “warps the soul.”[8] He is perhaps assuming that the man always keeps this one object in view, and is always looking at his watch or feeling his pulse. But even a man walking for exercise may forget his object and unexpectedly profit; he may surprise happiness by the wayside or beyond the third stile, and no man can do more, whether he have the best and the most Bellocian object in the world. Then he condemns also men who ride along the road and into an inn yard and feel that they are “like some one in a book.” This is a rather serious matter. Authors have unintentionally persuaded simple men to suffer many blisters for the chance of drinking ale in the manner of Borrow and meeting adventures, in the hope of being heartily and Whitmanesquely democratic. Even Leslie Stephen half-seriously lamented that he was unworthy of Borrovian adventures; for they never fell to him. A writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine has made a good piece of prose in which he speaks of himself reading the Essays of Elia in an old inn at Llandovery—as Hazlitt read La Nouvelle Heloise at Llangollen on his birthday. A great many must be walking over England nowadays for the primary object of writing books: it has not been decided whether this is a worthy object. Mr. John Burroughs also condemns a walk taken as a prescription, but goes so far as to regard walking itself as a virtue. He says that his countrymen “have fallen from that state of grace which capacity to enjoy a walk implies”; that they pride themselves on small feet, though “a little foot never yet supported a great character.” He says they could “walk away from all their ennui, their worldly cares, their uncharitableness, their pride of dress; for these devils always want to ride, while the simple virtues are never so happy as on foot.” He concludes by singing “the sweetness of gravel and good sharp quartz-grit.” He must be singing the grit of yester-year, or he never walked all day in the full blaze of summer upon the grit between Newmarket and Hitchin. Leslie Stephen thought the true walker one to whom walking “is in itself delightful”; he regarded walking as a panacea for authors, and believed that it could have cured Johnson and made Byron like Scott. A year or two ago Mr. Harold Munro took a month across France into Italy, for a part of the time putting himself out of reach of letters—to prove to himself that he could do it. There are plenty of adventures in modern life, but we still crave for the conspicuous ones which look so splendid when their heroes are distant or in the grave. These are the only adventures which we deign to recognize as such, and walking being a primitive act “natural to man,” as Mr. Belloc says, we feel restored to a pristine majesty, or Arcadianism at least, when we undertake it. Perhaps if we walk long enough we shall discover something about roads. There could be few better objects for walking, unless it be to meet a mistress or to fetch a doctor. We walk for a thousand reasons, because we are tired of sitting, because we cannot rest, to get away from towns or to get into them, or because we cannot afford to ride; and for permanent use the last is perhaps the best, as it is the oldest.

The Icknield Way and Old Parallel Tracks, near Newmarket.

CHAPTER II
HISTORY, MYTH, TRADITION, CONJECTURE, AND INVENTION

Few in the multitude of us who now handle maps are without some vague awe at the Old English lettering of the names of ancient things, such as Merry Maidens, Idlebush Barrow, Crugian Ladies, or the plain Carn, Long Barrow, or Dolmen. Not many could explain altogether why these are impressive. We remember the same lettering in old mysterious books, and in Scott’s Marmion and Wordsworth’s Hartleap Well. We are touched in our sense of unmeasured antiquity, we acknowledge the honour and the darkness of the human inheritance. Most impressive of all, because they recur across many counties, are the names of roads, like the Sarn Helen of Wales, the Pilgrims’ Way of England. It is part of their power that they have no obvious and limited significance, and were certainly not bestowed by king or minister as names are given by a merchant to his commodities. Instead of “London Road” we see “Watling Street”; instead of “North Road” there is “Foss Way” or “Ermine Street.” But all these make some appeal, however fantastical, to the intelligence. “Icknield Street” or “Icknield Way” makes no such appeal. It is the name of two apparently distinct roads: one with a Roman look running north and south through Worcestershire and Warwickshire, the other winding with the chalk hills through Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire. I shall confine myself as far as possible to this second road. It runs south-westwards from East Anglia and along the Chilterns to the Downs and Wessex; but the name is mysterious. For centuries—since Holinshed—it was supposed to be connected with the East Anglian kingdom of the Iceni: only fifty years ago Guest confidently translated it as the warpath of the Iceni, and connected it with the names of places along its course, such as Icklingham, Ickleton, and Ickleford. To-day, it is pointed out with equal confidence that “according to philological laws Iceni would have produced in England a form beginning with Itch- or Etch-.” Dr. Henry Bradley cannot believe that there was any knowledge of the Iceni in Berkshire, but finds it “a natural supposition” that the road was called after a woman named Icenhild, though he points out that no such person or name is known in myth or history.

It is a pleasure to see a learned man of the twentieth century thus playing at the invention of a twilight deity as the patroness of an old road, like the Helen or Elen of Wales. Two hundred years ago his invention would have been wholly serious and generations of equally serious and less inventive antiquaries would have followed him. There have been other explanations. Camden, at the same time as Holinshed, accepted the connection with the Iceni, but “what the origin of the name should be,” he says in his Suffolk, “as God shall help me, I dare not guess, unless one should derive it from the wedgy figure of the county, and refer to its lying upon the ocean in form of a wedge. For the Britons in their language call a wedge Iken....” John Aubrey had it from “Mr. Meredith Lloyd” that “Ychen is upper, as to say the upper country or people,” and that “Ychen” also signifies “oxen.” Wise, in 1738, linked it with the name of Agricola, because of the significant core of Ick, or in the form “Ryknield,” rick. Willis, in 1787, said that the road took its name from the Itchen, believing that it began at Southampton and went parallel to that river to Winchester; and that Iken-eld was the Saxon name for the Old Iken Street. The poet William Barnes, lover of ancient Britons, said that it might come from a word meaning high or upper, either because it was “an upcast way” or because it was the “upper or eastern road,” while Ryknield seemed to him to come from a word meaning a trench, and therefore a “hollow way.” And still nobody knows or believes that anybody else knows. The name, therefore, throws no light at present on the use or history of the road.

Much has been written about the Icknield Way by antiquaries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Most of them regarded the road as one of the four royal roads or Roman roads of Britain, on the authority not of local evidence and direct examination, but of half-mythic laws and histories. The earliest of these are “The Laws of Edward the Confessor.” Here four roads are mentioned—Watlinge strete, Fosse, Hikenilde strete, and Erminge strete—two of them extending across the breadth of the land and two throughout the length; and travellers on them were protected by the king’s peace. But Liebermann assigns as a probable date to these laws a year between 1130 and 1135: Pollock and Maitland, in their History of English Law, condemn the work as a compilation of the last years of Henry I; having something of the nature of a political pamphlet and being adorned with pious legends, “its statements, when not supported by other evidence, will hardly tell us more than that sane men of the twelfth century would have liked these statements to be true.” The French version of the “Laws of William the Conqueror” is almost word for word the same as the Laws of the Confessor in the matter of the royal roads: the Latin version omits Hykenild strete. Roger de Hoveden, in 1200, uses almost the same words: so does Henry of Huntingdon in 1130, except that he describes the Icknield Way as going out of the east into the west.

Mr. Harold Peake suggests to me that these writers may all have had as their inspiration the brilliant Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote the History of the British Kings in the early twelfth century. He tells us, in language not more credible than that of “The Dream of Maxen” in the Mabinogion, that King Belinus commanded four roads to be made over the length and breadth of the island:—

“Especially careful was he [King Belinus] to proclaim that the cities and the highways that led unto the city should have the same peace that Dunwallo had established therein. But dissension arose as concerning the highways, for that none knew the line whereby their boundaries were determined. The king therefore, being minded to leave no loophole for quibbles in the law, called together all the workmen of the whole island, and commanded a highway to be builded of stone and mortar that should cut through the entire length of the island from the Cornish sea to the coast of Caithness, and should run in a straight line from one city unto another the whole of the way along. A second also he bade be made across the width of the kingdom, which, stretching from the city of Menevia on the sea of Demetia as far as Hamo’s port, should show clear guidance to the cities along the line. Two others also he made to be laid out slantwise athwart the island so as to afford access unto the other cities. Then he dedicated them with all honour and dignity, and proclaimed it as of his common law, that condign punishment should be inflicted on any that should do violence to other thereon. But if any would fain know all of his ordinances as concerning them, let him read the Molmutine laws that Gildas the historian did translate out of the British into Latin, and King Alfred out of the Latin into the English tongue.”

This great north-and-south road is like Ermine Street, the slantwise roads might be Watling Street and the Foss Way, and that across the width from Menevia to “Hamo’s port,” the Icknield Way. As Geoffrey makes one road go from the Cornish sea to Caithness, so Henry of Huntingdon takes his Fosse Way from Totnes to Caithness. Henry, as is known, had read part or all of Geoffrey’s book before it was given to the world and made an abstract of it; and the romancer had warned him to be silent as to the British kings, because he had not that book in the British tongue, brought from Brittany by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, and translated into Latin by Geoffrey himself. Here, as usual, it can safely be said that Geoffrey’s words are not pure invention; but what his authority in writing or tradition may have been appears to be undiscoverable. He may have used some tradition which was the basis also of the account of the Empress Helen’s road-making in “The Dream of Maxen.” He may have used the so-called laws of Dynwal Moel Mud—“before the crown of London and the supremacy of this island were seized by the Saxons”—who measured the length and breadth of the island, in order “to know its journeys by days.” (Laws and Institutes of Wales: Vendotian Code.) Henry of Huntingdon may well have been a meek adapter of Geoffrey’s majestic statements, and some local knowledge of his own may have helped him to put names upon the roads of Belinus. To this second road from St. David’s (Menevia) to Hamo’s port or Southampton he gives the name of Ichenild or Ikenild. Walter Map, in De Nugis Curialium (circa 1188), speaks of Canute holding London and the land beyond Hickenild, and Edmund the rest; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Edmund had Wessex and Canute the “north part” or Mercia; and these two together help to define the road.

Whether Henry of Huntingdon’s history owed anything to Geoffrey, Robert of Gloucester’s metrical chronicle (circa 1300) certainly did, for he refers to Belinus as the road-maker; but, like Henry, he calls the road from Totnes to Caithness the Fosse. Of the Icknield Street he says that it went from east to west, and also, apparently, that it was the road from St. David’s to Southampton through Worcester, Cirencester, and Winchester. A writer of circa 1360, Ralph Higden, mentions Belin, and he gives two theories about the Fosse, but evidently himself knows nothing. He calls the east-and-west road from St. David’s to Southampton Watling Street. His fourth road goes from south to north, from St. David’s, by Worcester and Birmingham, Lichfield and Derby, Chesterfield and York, to Tynemouth; and its name varies in different manuscripts from Rikenildstrete to Hikenilstrete. Guest has pointed out that Higden was following Geoffrey. In the Eulogium Historiarum (1362) this road goes from south to north from St. David’s to Tynemouth, and is called once Belinstrete, and three times Hykeneldstret or Hikeneldstret. The author does not mention Ermine Street, but two Belinstretes, the other going from St. David’s to Southampton. It is likely that none of these men except Geoffrey and perhaps Henry could have mapped the roads.

The one map of the period showing the roads is such as they might have been expected to make. It belongs probably to the thirteenth century and was reproduced by Hearne, from a British Museum manuscript, in Vol. V of his edition of Leland’s Itinerary (1710). It shows the four roads by means of lines and a brief description—his Fosse going in the approved manner from Totnes to Caithness, the Ermine Street due north and south, the Watling Street from south-east to north-west. Ykenild Street goes straight across from west to east. The artist’s description of this as of the other roads is almost word for word from Henry of Huntingdon. But there are these differences and additions: the western extremity of the Icknield Way is not called St. David’s, but Salisbury, which is thus placed due north of Totnes where St. David’s should be; the eastern—or, as he calls it, the southern—is St. Edmunds. At the point of intersection with Watling Street he writes “Dunstaple,” which is accurate. Thus he is original only in his description of the Icknield Way. In putting “Meridies” by St. Edmunds he made a slip due to his drawing the map with its north end on the right side. It is impossible to decide the extent of his mistake in marking Salisbury at the west end of the road. He may have believed that it went to Salisbury, but have been afraid to deviate from the received opinion that it was an east-and-west road; or he may simply have put Salisbury in mistake for St. David’s. Giving Bury St. Edmunds as the eastern termination suggests local knowledge which the accurate position of Dunstable confirms. He may have been a man of the eastern counties who thought that Salisbury was not only the end of the road, as travellers told him, but a city in the west.

Holinshed, in his Chronicles (1586), mentions Geoffrey as the authority for the origin of the four great roads, and, after quoting him, goes on to describe an “Ikenild or Rikenild” beginning somewhere in the south and going through Worcester, Birmingham, and Chesterfield to the mouth of the Tyne. “I take it,” he says, “to be called the Ikenild, because it passed through the kingdome of the Icenes. For albeit that Leland and others following him doo seeme to place the Icenes in Norffolke and Suffolke; yet in mine opinion that cannot well be doone, sith it is manifest by Tacitus that they laie neere unto the Silures, and (as I gesse) either in Stafford and Worcester shires, or in both, except my conjecture doo fail me.” Here it is to be noticed, first, that he gives Ikenild and Rikenild as alternative names of one road and, second, that he sees the resemblance between “Ikenild” and “Iceni.” He has evidently thought about the matter, but he shows no trace of local knowledge or curiosity. Camden (1586) also only mentions the road in his introduction to the subject of the Iceni; though he has to speak of many places touched by the road, he ignores the fact, if he ever knew it. The poet Drayton, in his Polyolbion (1616), substitutes “Michael’s utmost Mount” for Totnes at the south end of the Fosse Way, and takes Watling Street from Dover to “the farth’st of fruitful Anglesey,” and he writes like a Warwickshire man of the country where those two roads cross (Song xiii, II, 311 et seq.; Song xxvi, II, 43 et seq.). In the “Sixteenth Song” of Polyolbion he makes Watling sing of herself and her “three sister streets”:—

Since us, his kingly ways, Mulmutius first began,

From sea again to sea, that through the Island ran.

Which that in mind to keep posterity might have,

Appointing first our course, this privilege he gave,

That no man might arrest, or debtors’ goods might seize

In any of us four his military ways.

Having sung of the Fosse, Watling continues:—

But O, unhappy chance! through time’s disastrous lot,

Our other fellow streets lie utterly forgot:

As Icning, that set out from Yarmouth in the East,

By the Iceni then being generally possest,

Was of that people first term’d Icning in her race,

Upon the Chiltern here that did my course imbrace:

Into the dropping South, and bearing then outright,

Upon the Solent Sea stopt on the Isle-of-Wight.

“Rickneld” he takes from St. David’s to Tynemouth.

It is very clear that Drayton had read Geoffrey or a disciple. The notes to Polyolbion reveal the fact that Selden accepted Molmutius and his laws. “Take it upon credit of the British story” are his words. He accepted also King Belin and the making of the four roads; but having noticed that authorities vary as to their courses and even their names, he is content to say, “To endeavour certainty in them were but to obtrude unwarrantable conjecture, and abuse time and you.” Evidently he knew these roads as a whole neither from personal knowledge nor from contemporary report, but only from books. Had he known anything he would have betrayed it, for he digresses to tell the little that he knows of “Stanstreet in Surrey.”

Drayton apparently knew more, though perhaps all his knowledge was not available for verse. He is the first to distinguish clearly between the Ricknield and the Icknield Street. He takes the Icknield Way from Yarmouth to the Solent; the definite “Yarmouth,” now for the first time connected with the road, the use of the variant Icning, the connection with the Chilterns, the crossing of Watling Street—all suggest local knowledge. Here more than ever it is to be wished that Drayton had either written his book in prose or had given his authorities and his actual notes of local lore. He was a great lover of England and of Wales, and could have written one of the finest prose books of the seventeenth century had he put down what he knew without ramming it into the mould of rhyme.

Of all these men except Drayton and the man who drew the map, none betrays personal knowledge of the road. They are all writing of something either too generally known to need explanation or of something which they know only from other writers. All their words together hardly do more than prove that there was or had formerly been a road, known as Ricknield or Icknield Street; or at most that there were or had been three roads bearing those names—one from St. David’s east and then north to Tynemouth; a second running south-westwards across the east of England from Norfolk to Southampton; and a third from St. David’s to Southampton. The second seems to owe nothing to Geoffrey, and all the local knowledge, such as it is, is so far connected with this.

In 1677 appeared a book by one who had not only heard of the four royal roads, but had met with what he believed to be one of them. This was Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire. He says:—

“Of the four Basilical, Consular, or Prætorian ways, or Chemini majores, I have met with but one that passeth through this County, the discovery whereof yet I hope may prove acceptable, because not described before, or its footsteps any where noted by Sir H. Spelman, Mr. Camden, or any other Author that I have read or could hear of: whereat indeed I cannot but very much wonder, since it is called by its old name at very many places [Ikenildway] to this very day. Some indeed call it Icknil, some Acknil, others Hackney, and some again Hackington, but all intend the very same way, that stretches it self in this County from North-east to South-west; coming into it (out of Bucks) at the Parish of Chinner, and going out again over the Thames (into Berks) at the Parish of Goreing. The reason, I suppose, why this way was not raised, is, because it lies along under the Chiltern Hills on a firm fast ground, having the hills themselves as a sufficient direction: which is all worth notice of it, but that it passes through no town or village in the County, but only Goreing; nor does it (as I hear) scarce any where else, for which reason ’tis much used by stealers of Cattle: and secondly, that it seems by its pointing to come from Norfolk and Suffolk, formerly the Kingdom of the Iceni, from whom most agree (and perhaps rightly enough) it received its name Icenild or Ikenild; and to tend the other way westward perhaps into Devonshire and Cornwall, to the Land’s End.”

He adds, with some triumph, that Holinshed was much mistaken, but he suspends his judgment because he has read in Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire of an “Ickle-street” in that county. He prints a map showing the road passing, all on its right hand as it goes south, the villages of “Kempton,” Chinner, Oakley, Crowell Kingston, Aston Rowant, Lewkner, Sherborne, Watlington, the Britwells, Ewelme, Croamish Gifford, Nuneham, Warren, Mungewell, the three Stokes, and then south of Goring Church. He adds that under “Stokenchurch Hills,” about Lewkner and Aston Rowant, there are two Icknield ways, an upper and a lower; and here it may be mentioned that Hearne’s diary for September 29th, 1722, has the entry:—

“I went thro’ Ewelm, a ¼ of a mile from which is Gouldsheath, and about 2 furlongs east said Ewelm passeth the lower Hackneyway.”

Plot gives a substance to a name. He proves the existence of a road bearing the name of Icknield and variations of it, and having a course along the Chilterns, like Drayton’s road. He does not exaggerate; in fact, he thinks it a poor sort of road when compared with the Icknield Street through Staffordshire, of which he says:—

“I look upon this of Staffordshire as the most remarkable of the two, and so to be that Iknild street, which is usually reckoned to be one of the four basilical or great ways of England, and not that of Oxfordshire, this being raised all along and paved at some places, and very signal almost wherever it goes, whereas that of Oxfordshire is not so there, whatever it may be in other counties.”

The next evidence is eighteen years later, and comes from the maps by Robert Morden illustrating Gibson’s edition of Camden’s Britannia (1695). His map of Hertfordshire suddenly introduces us to a road called the Icknal or Icnal Way, running west from Royston—perhaps even from Barley, three miles south-east of Royston—through Baldock, then more and more south-east, over the Lea to the north of Luton, through Dunstable, and so, leaving on its right hand Toternhoe, Edlesborough, Ivinghoe, and Marsworth, going out of the map with Wilston on its right. In the map of Buckinghamshire this road is continued through Wendover, and passes Princes Risborough and Bledlow. In the map of Oxfordshire it is called “Icknield Way,” and follows a line like that in Plot’s map, crossing “Grime’s Dike,” leaving Ipsden and Woodcot on its left, reaching the Thames on the south of Goring Church. The Berkshire map does not show any road of this or similar name, or any one corresponding to it. Nor is the road to be found on the maps of Essex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, or Norfolk. The extension of it through Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire may well have come from the local knowledge of Morden or a collaborator. There must have been abundant information of the kind used by Plot which escaped antiquaries who were thinking about a royal road, a majestic basilical or consular way, running from St. David’s to Southampton, or farther. John Aubrey (died 1697), the man to tap this local lore, had nothing to say of any such road in his own county of Wiltshire, but he left some rough notes. He connects “Iceni” with “Ikenild,” and remarks (on the authority of Wren) that there were three Itchings on Ikenel Street, including Itching Stoke in Hampshire, where the Pilgrims’ Way fords the Itchen. He says also that a Mr. Sherwood told him of “an Ikenil way from North Yarmouth to Plymouth; the country people will say, ‘Keep along the Ikenil Way,’ scilicet the Wallington Hills.” Wallington is two miles south-east of Baldock and south of the Icknield Way, and through it ran a parallel road (mentioned in Archæological Journal, Vol. XXV) from Barley, by Therfield, Strethall, Sandon, and Wallington to Clothall; but the term “Wallington Hills” does not exclude the Icnal Way marked in Morden’s map. The precise North Yarmouth may also have been accurate, and I should be inclined to believe that at that day men sometimes went between Plymouth and North Yarmouth by a road or chain of roads known through perhaps a very large part of its course by some such name as Ikenil Way.

A period of antiquarian conjecture and invention was now beginning, with exploration often of an active kind, but usually kept sternly in obedience to speculation. At the end of the sixth volume of Hearne’s Leland (1710) is an essay supposed to be by Roger Gale (1672-1744). He has no doubt about “four great roads,” but regards the story of Molmutius and Belinus as exploded, and says that “nobody now questions but that” the Romans made them. He distinguishes, “as does Mr. Drayton,” between Icknield and Ricknield, and complains of the old confusion. The Icknield Way, “which has its rise and name from the people called Iceni,” he finds first “with any certainty near Barley in Herts,” as in Robert Morden’s map; but he suggests an eastern continuation through Ickleton, “and so by Gogmagog hills, and over Newmarket Heath to Ikesworth, not two miles south from St. Edmundsbury,” and possibly to Burgh Castle, near Yarmouth. Returning westward, he describes a course which might have been taken from Morden’s map, except that in the neighbourhood of Luton it touches Streatley instead of Leagrave, and goes to Houghton Regis as well as to Dunstable. But having reached Buckinghamshire, he cannot find it “anywhere apparent to the eye ... except between Princes Risborrow and Kemble in the Street, where it is still call’d Icknell Way.” These are words which suggest that the eye was not his own. In Oxfordshire he leaves the road to Plot. At Goring and Streatley he does not know what to do, because his guides—Henry of Huntingdon and Drayton and others—disagree. He conjectures a continuation to Southampton, another through Speen to Salisbury and beyond, where he has found the name “Aggleton Road,” locally given to the road near Badbury Castle, the Roman road from Old Sarum to Dorchester. He thinks “Aggleton Road” can have no connection with Ickleton, but he shows no other reason for believing that his Roman road is the Icknield Way.

In 1724 appeared the Itinerarium Curiosum of Gale’s friend William Stukeley (1687-1765), M.D., F.R.S., F.R.C.P. Here he describes an exploration of the Icknield Way. He takes it through Ickleton and, like Gale, through Streatley, near Luton; he mentions the lovely prospect from the northern sides of the Chilterns and a few more place-names. East of Ickleton, or his newly discovered Roman camp at Great Chesterford, he speaks of the road going along the boundary between Essex and Cambridgeshire “towards Icleworth in Suffolk.” He thinks the road Roman. Beyond the Thames he has no uncertainty like Gale. He says straight out that at Speen “the great Icening-street road coming from the Thames at Goring ... crosses the Kennet river”; also that he found it a little north of Bridport going to Dorchester, and accompanied it “with no small pleasure.” If he had any reason for calling any part of this road “the great Icening Street of the Romans,” it has never been discovered, nor has anything else confirmed his view, except that Leland saw two Roman milestones between Streatley and Aldworth, which have been seen since, but never described except in rumour. William Stukeley, M.D., F.R.S., F.R.C.P., who read “Oriuna” for “Fortuna” on a coin, and so invented the belief that one Oriuna was the wife of Carausius, was soon afterwards unanswerably questioned and plainly contradicted on matters of fact by Smart Lethieullier (1701-60) and Richard Willis. He is chiefly memorable here because the now venerable title of Via Iceniana was conferred by him on the road which he chose to believe the Icknield Way. The title, translated back into Icknield Street, is still generally accepted.

Francis Wise (1697-1767) found the road where Gale had lost it, beyond the ford at Streatley. In his book on Some Antiquities in Berkshire he says that it loses its name at Streatley, but is “visible enough” to Blewbury and known as the Great Reading Road. From Blewbury through Upton and Harwell this road is called the Portway, yet he thinks that it may be the Icknield Way notwithstanding; or, if not, there is an alternative to the south, lost in the ploughland until near Lockinge it becomes a raised way called “Icleton Meer”; while after Wantage it is the “Ickleton Way,” going “all under the hills between them and Childrey,” Sparsholt, Uffington, so under White-horse-hill, leaving Woolston and Compton on the right, thence to Ashbury and Bishopstone. He thought that it was making rather for Avebury than for Salisbury. This road is marked as Eccleton Street in Roque’s fine eighteenth-century map of Berkshire, though it is not easy to be certain of the road indicated by the name, except that it runs at the foot of the hills.

Richard Willis, in an essay posthumously published in Archæologia, VIII (1787), claims to be the discoverer of two Roman roads which “fortunately” crossed one another near his house at Andover. One of these was the road from Southampton by Winchester and Cirencester to Gloucester, and this was, he says, “I doubt not the Ikeneld Street.” He does not say why he is certain, but his authority or inspiration was probably Geoffrey or a disciple. He had an eye for old roads, but too generally honoured them with the name of Roman. He noticed the old road leaving his supposed Icknield Street on the right a mile south of Ogbourne St. George, and going north-east to the inn now called “The Shepherd’s Rest” at Totterdown, which is on the Roman road from Speen to Cirencester. Among several roads connecting this Roman “Icknield Street” with the Ermine Street he mentions a road which he calls a causeway, from Royston to Ogbourne St. George, or at least to Bishopston and Wanborough. This has been called Icknield Street, but he will call it the “Oxford Icknield Street,” which, he says, from coinciding with his real Icknield Street at Wanborough, acquired its name. It would be as reasonable to say that London took its name from the London County Council, or that Julius Cæsar took his from Julius Cæsar Scaliger. The unquestionable fact—known to him from Morden’s map, from Plot, and from Wise—that there is a road with the name of Icknield Way, or a variant of it, between Royston and Wanborough, he regards as a “stumbling block,” because it stands in the way of theorists less insolent than himself.

Lysons’ Magna Britannia (1806) brings together two more such opposites as Wise and Willis. In “Berkshire” a letter is quoted from a Mr. Church, surveyor of Wantage, describing the Berkshire road, where Wise had been uncertain, in its eastern half. Mr. Church writes:—

“The Ickleton-way has been ploughed up across Wantage East Field till it enters Charlton (a hamlet of Wantage); it then passes through West Lockinge. It is lost across Mr. Bastard’s park in East Lockinge, but appears again from that park to Ginge Brook, in Ardington parish. It passes by White’s barn in Sparsholt-court manor, and is afterwards ploughed up for some way, but appears again, after crossing the Newbury-way, by Wiltshire’s and Halve-hill barns, in East Hendred parish; from thence through the parishes of Harwell, West Hagbourne, and the hamlet of Upton, to the village of Blewbury, and through the parishes of Aston Tirrold, and Cholsey, to Moulsford on the Thames, and thence to Streatley; from Upton to Streatley it forms part of the new turnpike road from Wantage to Reading.” From Upton station to the east edge of Lockinge Park this road is now an almost continuous series of cart-tracks known—at least, in the neighbourhood of East Hendred, which it leaves half a mile to the north—as Ickleton Street or Ickleton Meer. This evidence of 1911, confirming statements made a hundred and two hundred years ago, is sufficient to identify that portion of the road as Ickleton Street. Beyond Wantage, Wise’s description can be applied only to the modern road from Wantage to Bishopston, or as far as the “Calley Arms” at Wanborough. East of Upton the modern road to Streatley—the old Reading turnpike—has a rival in a series of cart-tracks through Blewbury and the Astons, and possibly to be connected with the “Papist Way” near Cholsey.

“Ickleton Meer,” Hagbourne Hill, near Upton, Berks.

Thus there is traditional authority for giving the name of Ickleton Street or Way to a series of roads in Berkshire between Bishopston and Streatley, and the name of Icknield or Icnal Way to a road leading from Royston to Goring; and hence a probability that the two were united by the ford between Streatley and Goring. To this can be added a strong impression that this road came from a Norfolk port and went westward to Avebury, and thence or by another route into Devon or Cornwall; but not one writer, except perhaps Aubrey’s friend, proves or even implies a contemporary use of this road throughout its course; while Drayton and Plot suggest that it had fallen into decay in their time.

Along with “Mr. Church, surveyor of Wantage,” in Lysons’ Berkshire, appeared a bishop, John Bennet (1746-1820), Bishop of Cloyne from 1794 until his death. Without any argument or evidence he makes the following pronouncement, heralded by the editorial opinion that “his researches have enabled him to speak with certainty on the subject”:—

“The Ikeneld enters Berkshire from Oxfordshire at Streatley, where it seems to have divided: one branch by the name of the Ridgeway continued on the edge of the high ground by Cuckhamsley and White-horse-hill into Wiltshire; pointing, as Mr. Wise observes, rather to Avebury or the Devizes than Salisbury; while the other branch went from Streatley, perhaps by Hampstead and Hermitage, under the name of the West Ridge, to Newbury, and thence it may be to Old Sarum.”

At first he seems to misunderstand Wise, and to suppose that his Ickleton Street was a road on the unpopulated ridge and not in the valley past a string of villages, and he goes on afterwards to assert that this valley road is Roman and seems to come from a spot near or rather below Wallingford. In 1806 the Rev. Henry Beeke (Archæologia, XV) expressed the opinion that the Icknield Way crossed the Thames at Moulsford. As Bennet gives no reason he makes no apology. His reason for giving the name of West Ridge to a road running east of its fellow must have been that it went through the village of Westridge, where doubtless the road was called the Westridge Way, as the road from Chevington is called the Chevington Way, and so on. He had apparently no reason for choosing the Ridgeway except that it came from the same ford at Streatley reached by the Icknield Way at Goring. Nevertheless, he has been so persistently followed that the Ridgeway is now given by the Ordnance Survey the alternative title of “Icknield Way,” and also of “Roman Road,” which even the bishop said it was not; some Berkshire people even call the Ridgeway the Icknield Way because it is the “Government name”; and “West Ridge Way” is attached with all the honour of Old English lettering to the more easterly road. Bennet equals Stukeley in the grandeur of his fiction and the veneration which it has earned. In Lysons’ Cambridgeshire (1808) he takes the road through Newmarket, herein coinciding with later-proved facts, but continues it to Ickleton on the east of the modern turnpike along a course never yet identified.

Men who were not bishops now begin to exercise themselves in suggesting roads which may have been continuations of this Ickleton or Icknield Way. They print their opinions with varying degrees of certainty. In 1829 Dr. Mason, rector of Orford, in Suffolk (Archæologia, XXIII), traces it, “after it leaves Ixworth,” to Buckenham and thence by two forks to Caistor and to Burgh Castle. Samuel Woodward, in 1830 (Archæologia, XXIII), also assumes that it passes through Buckenham, Ixworth, and Bury St. Edmunds. In 1833 Alfred John Kempe (Archæologia, XXVI) takes it for granted that the road “crossed the kingdom from Norwich towards Old Sarum.” With an “I need hardly observe,” he connects the road with the Iceni, and explains it as “the Iken-eld-strete, that is, the old street or way of the Iceni.” Arthur Taylor (Archæological Institute: Memoirs, 1847; Norwich volume) connects the road with Norwich Castle Hill, which he believes to be British. Like the Ordnance Survey map, he takes it through Newmarket, Kentford, Cavenham, Lackford, and Thetford. Like Bennet, both Woodward and Taylor regard the road as a British trackway. But Taylor earns his chief distinction by the possession of a deed “apparently of the reign of Henry iii,” relating to premises at Newmarket and “extending upon Ykenildweie.”

In 1856, in the form of a discourse afterwards embodied in his Origines Celticæ (1883), Edwin Guest wrote a long account of the Icknield Way. He mentions as evidence charters of the tenth century referring to estates in Berkshire between Blewbury and Wayland’s Smithy, so minute, he says, as almost to be sufficient foundation for a map, but not to enable him to trace the road; for he accepts Bennet’s substitution of the Ridgeway. North of the Thames his earliest evidence is a parchment, possibly of the fourteenth century, relating to the foundation of Dunstable Priory at a place where the two royal roads of Watling and Ickneld cross, a place of woods and robbers near Houghton. He quotes a “letter testimonial of 1476” proving that this trackway, west of Dunstable, was known as Ikeneld Strete. He takes the road from Icklingham and through Ickleton and Ickleford because that is a possible course and because he believes those names to be connected with “Iceni” and “Icknield.” What was the one great road described as Icknield Street in the Laws of the Confessor he finds it hard to define. But he can find no traces of Roman construction in the road. Inspired by the map showing Salisbury at the end of the road, he suggests that “most probably” it joined the Ridgeway east of Avebury and continued along its course, as recently described by Sir Richard Colt Hoare.

Messrs. Woodward and Wilks, in their history of Hampshire (1861-9), are well acquainted with the many theories of the road, and “on the whole see most reason” for agreeing with Drayton, but also for giving the name to the Roman road from Winchester to Cirencester and Gloucester, or another Roman road running north-west of Basingstoke. They speak of the allegation that in ancient deeds the road to Gloucester is designated as Hicknel or Hicknal Way; but these have not been identified.

C. C. Babington, in his Ancient Cambridgeshire (1883), speaks of the road as easily traced from Thetford to Kentford, and he regards Woodward’s British way from Norwich by Wymondham and Attleborough to Thetford as a continuation. But he has no documentary evidence, no tradition, and no local name to support his conjectures at any point between Norwich and Royston, except at Newmarket. He could not find Bennet’s road from Newmarket east of the turnpike. Probably the bishop meant the roads west of Westley Waterless, past Linnet Hall, west of Weston Colville, West Wratting and Balsham; it is improbable that he did more than fly over them in fancy. He is satisfied that where the parish, and afterwards the county, boundaries coincide with the present road from Newmarket it is the Icknield Way, especially as at Stump Cross the county boundary follows the sudden turn out of the main road along a little-used lane leading over the Cam to Ickleton. From Ickleton to a point near Chrishall Grange and a tumulus—where for a mile the lane is a county boundary—it is uncertain; but from that point to Noon’s Folly he is content with the “nearly disused track,” which near there again becomes a county boundary. Thus he connects Newmarket and Royston by a road of the same character as the well-warranted parts of the Icknield Way without any evidence but probability.

The Rev. A. C. Yorke (Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1903) prefers the road known as Ashwell Street, which runs for some miles nearly parallel with the supposed Icknield Way and is most clear from Ashwell, north of Baldock, to Melbourn, north-east of Royston. In a lucid and vigorous article he says that “there can be no doubt” that “Ashwell Street is the original Icknield Way.” He is willing to give up the name of one road, take away the name from another road which has borne it since 1695, and in one place since Henry the Third, and give it to the first which has never borne it, so far as he knows. He thinks the so-called Icknield Way from Newmarket to Hitchin, Roman; just as others think his Ashwell Street Roman, Mr. F. Codrington, e.g., holding that Ashwell Street was an alternative course, leaving the Icknield Way at Worsted Lodge and returning at Wilbury Camp.

Wilbury Camp.

Mr. W. G. Clarke (Norwich Mercury, Oct. 8, ’04, etc.; Knowledge, II, 99) attempts to connect Newmarket with Norwich and call the road the Icknield Way. He suggests a route over the Kennett at Kentford and the Lark at Lackford; then to Icklingham All Saints, and following the boundary of the hundreds of Blackbourn and Lackford to Thetford, having crossed the road from Newmarket to Thetford at Marmansgrave, and that between Bury and Thetford a few yards north of Thetford Gasworks, where the remains of a British settlement were found in 1870. He crosses the Little Ouse and Thet where the Nuns’ Bridges now are. On the other side “the logical and undoubtedly correct continuation of the Icknield Way” is by Castle Lane and Green Lane. A find of Celtic and Roman pottery at the south end of Green Lane, old thorns in the fields between Green Lane and Roudham Heath, old banks on the heath near Peddars’ Way, “which it crosses about half a mile from where Peddars’ Way is joined by the Drove,” a “Bridgham tradition” of a waggon road over Roudham Heath, and the battle of Ringmore, fought there between Sweyn and Ulfketel, the find of bronze weapons and flint axes at Attleborough, and the supposed British origin of Norwich Castle Hill, take him by these places. From Norwich he goes by Sprowston, Rackheath, Wroxham, Hoveton, Beeston, over the Ant by the “Devil’s Ditch,” or “Roman Camp,” at Wayford to Stalham and to Happisburgh. Except that Stalham is near Hickling, this route has nothing—no local map, no documents—to entitle it to be called the Icknield Way.

Mr. Beloe (Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, VII) suggests an easterly line beyond Newmarket by a supposed junction with the Ailesway from Newmarket, by Brandon Ferry and Narford to Hunstanton.

Mr. J. C. Tingey (Norfolk Archæology, XIV) agrees that such a junction may have been used, but prefers a line through Ickburgh and Cockley Cley, crossing the Wissey at Mundford. He also proposes another route from Lackford almost to Thetford, which he avoids, crossing the Ouse on to Snarehill, with its many tumuli, because he thinks an early traveller would have done this. Then, with no trace of a road, he goes over Snare Hill to Shadwell Park, the Harlings, Uphall, Kenninghall to Banham, where a street was once called Tycknald Street (Blomefield’s History of Norfolk); or he could reach Banham from Elvedon, Barnham, and Rushford. After Banham he leaves a gap of twelve miles, hastening to Swainsthorpe, south-east of Norwich, where he has found a Hickling Lane, called “Icklinge Way,” in a seventeenth-century conveyance, where it is said to lead to Kenninghall. He has also found in Blomefield a mention of “the way called Ykeneldsgate,” in that parish, dated 1308.

The partly lost line of this lane he has made out through Mulbarton; beyond which he is struck by the place-names of Keningham, Kentlow, and Kenninghall, noticing the other similar names on or near the supposed Icknield Way—Kentford, Kennet, Kensworth (once “Ikensworth”), Kennett, in Wiltshire, and, beyond Exeter, Kenn and Kenn Ford. Other documents of 1482 and 1658 relating to the next parish to Swainsthorpe, Stoke Holy Cross, enable him to extend the road with some probability eastward. They also show that the road was known at about the same time as Hickley Lane in one parish, and Stoke Long Lane in another. Most remarkable of all, he has found in Blomefield mention of “the way called Ykeneldsgate” in the same parish of Stoke Holy Cross, in 1306. He suggests reaching Haddiscoe as his “port in Celtic times,” by Framingham Earl, Bergh Apton, Thurton Church, Loddon, and Raveningham. He sternly avoids Norwich as post-Roman, and Bury for the same reason. At the same time he admits the probability of branches to those places when they became important. Thus he shows that he has in his mind one road, with one name, and that something like Icknield Street, going from sea to sea, not only in the Confessor’s time, but before the Romans.

It is impossible even to outline the multitudinous conjectures at the north-east end of the Icknield Way. At the south-west conjecture has been all but silenced by Stukeley’s invention of the Via Iceniana and Bennet’s substitution of the Ridgeway, both stupefying fictions.

For two hundred years these conjectures have been multiplied and become venerable by repetition. Plot thinks that the road might go from Norfolk to Devon and Land’s End. Gale fancies Caistor and Burgh Castle at one end, and, as Stukeley did, Exeter at the other. Dr. Beeke “supposes” it went from Streatley towards Silchester, also that it crossed the Thames at Moulsford. Colt Hoare speaks of it as connecting Old Sarum with Dorchester and Winchester. Arthur Taylor takes it for granted that it came from “Cornwall or some extreme point in the south-west of Britain” to Norwich and Hickling. Isaac Taylor says that it went from Norwich to Dorchester and Exeter. Mr. H. M. Scarth conjectures that the road crossing the main street of Silchester, which runs east and west, may have been an extension of the Icknield Way from Wallingford to Winchester. In Social England Col. Cooper King, following Stukeley, takes the road to Exeter, Totnes, and Land’s End; following Bennet, he takes it along the Ridgeway. Elton calls it briefly a road from Norwich through Dunstable and Silchester to Southampton, and to Sarum and the western districts.

The theorists and conjecturers have done little to ascertain the course of a road which can safely be called the Icknield Way. By far the greater part of the work has been done by men who used chiefly local tradition. Plot in Oxfordshire, Wise in Berkshire, perhaps Robert Morden or an unknown assistant in Hertfordshire. The best of the conjecturers have only linked up the authenticated parts in a probable manner. Most have been too busy with their own views to be anything but benevolent to others. But in 1901 appeared one with no theory and without benevolence, Professor F. Haverfield. In a chapter on “Romano-British Norfolk,” in the Victoria County History of that county, he pronounces that the Icknield Way is not a Roman road; that it has nothing to do with the Iceni or Norfolk or Suffolk; that the name Icknield and the names like Ickleton and Kenninghall of places on the road, or supposed parts of it, cannot, for philological reasons, be connected with the Iceni. At present he is unanswerable, though his mind is of a type which commands more interest when it affirms than when it denies.

Icknield Way, near Ipsden, Oxfordshire.

Since the time of Wise little has been done except to add proofs of the antiquity of the road under the Chilterns and the Berkshire Downs. In his day it was known from Royston to Bishopston. Taylor showed that it touched Newmarket, but no more. Mr. Tingey shows that it went through Stoke Holy Cross in Norfolk, but little or nothing has been done to fill the gap between his fragment of Hickling Lane and Newmarket. Even the road between Newmarket and Royston depends for its title only on its respectability as a county and parish boundary. Reaching the Thames there is no certainty of the principal ford; but Streatley must have been one, and from there to Bishopston the main line of the road is clear enough. A man may follow the whole of this road in a few days, and be upon a beaten track if not a hard road everywhere, except for a few hundred yards near Ipsden, and two or three miles from the east side of Lockinge Park. The two lengths north and south of the Thames make a road of uniform character, keeping almost entirely to the chalk, but below the steepest wall of the hills. From Dunstable westward this wall on the left or south of the road is an unmistakable guide to the traveller; as far as Swyncombe he has only to cling to the foot of the wall and he is on the Icknield Way. Beyond the Thames the Downs make a guiding wall equally clear and continuous. It belongs to what Mr. Harold Peake, in his “Prehistoric Roads of Leicestershire” (Memorials of Old Leicestershire), calls the “hill-side” type of road, which “winds along the sides of hills just above the alluvium. Marshes and low-lying ground are avoided, but small streams do not offer so great an obstacle as in the case of the ridge-roads.” He compares it with the Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury, which it closely resembles, except that it keeps always on the northern slopes, instead of the southern, and commands throughout its course views of a wide, fertile valley northward.

Until the enclosures and the metalling of roads the ruts and hoof-marks of the Icknield Way were probably spread over a width of from a hundred yards to a mile, according to convenience or necessity; from century to century its course might vary even more. Thus the modern road between Kentford and Newmarket is at several points some distance from the Cambridge and Suffolk boundary, which is supposed to follow the Icknield Way.

A deed already mentioned proves that the road was known in Newmarket itself.

Beyond Newmarket the modern road is marked as the Icknield Way, but is only a parish boundary, or rather close to one, for one mile in the first eight, and is not authenticated by any known documents. Nor is any parallel road in the same direction a boundary line. That it is on an old line of road is certain from the number of tumuli which formerly dotted the surrounding heath. It goes through three dykes, two, eight, and thirteen miles from Newmarket, and it has been conjectured both that the dykes defend the road and that the road was made by an invader to pierce the dykes; one antiquary asserts that the fosse of the Brent Ditch “has evidently been filled up to admit the road.” From a little beyond the eighth milestone and Fleam Dyke the road is a parish boundary, with very short interruptions between the eleventh and twelfth, as far as the fourteenth, where it becomes the Cambridge and Essex boundary. Turning west beyond the fifteenth, it is followed for some distance by the county boundary, and is thrice rejoined by it, the third time for two miles before entering Royston. By this sharp turning to the west it avoids a Roman camp at Great Chesterford, and passes what Camden called the “ancient little city” of Ickleton, where in his time traces of the “Burrough banks” could plainly be seen. Near Abbey Farm at Ickleton are the remains of a priory. Where it is again a county boundary beyond Ickleton, near “a tumulus opened by the late Lord Braybrooke,” it is a farm road, and continues as such in a clear line through arable land and alongside hedges, until it joins the main road into Royston. Here it goes over Burloes Hill, where many indications of ancient burials have been found.

From Royston onwards, as has been seen, the road is marked in a map of 1695. It is mentioned, says Beldam (Archæological Journal, XXV), in documents of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries among the monuments of Royston Priory, as “Hickneld” and “Ykenilde.” There are hut-circles on the heath to the west, associated with neolithic implements. At Royston, as at Baldock and Tring, gold coins of Cunobelin have been found; and here the road crosses Ermine Street. West of Royston the road is again a county boundary, and goes for miles between many tumuli. “A small Roman habitation” was opened at Slip End near Odsey by Lord Braybrooke. At “Slip Inn” it bounds parishes instead of counties. There is a manor-house and moat at Bygrave, and a tumulus on Metley Hill opposite. Here it passes between two unenclosed parishes, Bygrave and Clothall. It goes along the edge of Baldock, where they have found neolithic and Bronze Age implements and coins of Cunobelin and of “Icenian type,” and Roman urns: here is the crossing of Stane Street from Godmanchester to Colchester. For five miles beyond Baldock the road is a parish boundary. It touches a camp at Wilbury Hill, and near it they have found “a great variety of coins of the Roman emperors” and a small copper blade, coins of Constantine, bones and ashes. Ickleford, where it ceases to be a boundary, has produced palæolithic evidences, and the neighbourhood of Hitchin, a mile south, palæolithic and neolithic and late Celtic. Two miles farther on it is a parish boundary for a mile and a half, and then the Hertford and Bedford boundary to the top of Telegraph Hill. Ravenspurgh Castle is a mile north of it on the Barton Hills. It turns along Dray’s Ditches and enters the road from Barton to Luton. Here the parish boundary goes straight across, following a lane, to Great Bramingham Farm and, with a break, to Chalton, from which the road might have gone through to Houghton Regis and “the British town of Maiden Bower,” and to the north of Dunstable. But the line of the road is continued from Dray’s Ditches across the Luton road to Limbury, and over the Lea at Leagrave Marsh, passing, near the moats and the remains of a nunnery at Limbury, the fortification of Waulud’s Bank, and the scene of many finds of coins and neolithic implements. This line is clear on Morden’s seventeenth-century map. A new street called “Icknield Way” and a footpath lead with recent interruptions into the Luton and Dunstable road, which is for some time a parish boundary. Here it begins to follow under the Downs, which have traces of Celtic huts.

Icknield Way, crossing Watling Street, Dunstable.

The crossing of Watling Street at Dunstable is vouched for by Dugdale’s ancient parchment relating to the foundation of the priory, and by the map of the four royal roads. Between two barrows at Dunstable an ancient trackway used to be traceable to the British camp of Maiden Bower. In the Catalogue of Ancient Deeds (I, II, III) there are various references to tenements in the west field or west street extending upon Ikenild-strete, viz. between the time of Edward III and Henry VI. West of Dunstable the direction but not the course of the road is proven by a “letter testimonial” of 1476, where a cross is mentioned standing “in the field of Toternho, the which cross standeth in Ikeneld Stret, to the which cross the way leading from Spilmannstroste directly stretcheth and extendeth, at which place there hath been a cross standing from time that no mind is.” Toternhoe parish now includes three-quarters of a mile of the supposed Icknield Way, from the inn at the turning to Kensworth Common, as far as Well Head, and between these points the cross may have stood. Round about the road here are many tumuli on the open downs, and traces of Celtic huts. Toternhoe has a camp not a mile from Maiden Bower, which is in Houghton Regis. A chalk pit three-quarters of a mile north-east of the “Plough” yielded Roman coins in 1769. The “Ykenyldewey” is mentioned in the description of a piece of land at Edlesborough, south-west of Dunstable, in 1348 (Close Rolls, Edward III); and the “Ikenyldstret” at Eaton Bray, close by, in the time of Edward II and Richard II (Catalogue of Ancient Deeds, I, II, III). The villages of Edlesborough and Eaton Bray are visible a little north of the road. Passing under Beacon Hill and its tumulus, the road enters one from Leighton Buzzard to Aldbury and Wigginton, and out of this road, at points a little north and a little south of the entrance, run two roads marked as the “Lower” and “Upper” Icknield Way, keeping more or less parallel courses as far as Lewknor, where the lower is supposed to join the upper. Neither is a parish or county boundary. At Aston Clinton the “Lower” is crossed and deflected by Akeman Street, which it enters for a mile in a north-westerly direction. Aston has yielded late Celtic pottery. At Weston Turville the “Lower” passes, near the manor-house, a place where a Roman amphora was found in 1855. Akeman Street and several other roads cross and deflect the “Upper” Way. After traversing Wendover you have a camp and barrow on Balcombe Hill, a little to the south. A Danish entrenchment comes down to it from Swyncombe Downs near Britwell. It crosses Grim’s Ditch at Foxberry Wood. Flint implements have been found along its course, e.g. in Pulpit Wood at Great Kimble, and at Bledlow. At Whiteleaf, above Monks Risborough, and also above Bledlow, men have carved the turf into crosses, which may be modifications of much earlier phallic forms. British coins, inscribed and uninscribed, have been found at Wendover and Ellesborough, Roman coins between Ipsden and Glebe Farm. Only beyond, where the upper and lower roads are supposed to have united, does the track coincide with a parish boundary, and that but seldom and only for short distances. In Buckinghamshire it was known in the year 903, and mentioned in a “record by King Eadweard, at the request of Duke Aethelfrid, who had lost the original deed by fire, of a grant by Athulf to his daughter Aethelgyth of land at East Hrisan Byrg, or Princes Risborough” (Cartularium Saxonicum, No. 603). It is there called “the Icenhylte,” and the boundary of the land in question runs along it as far as “the heathen burials.” Through Oxfordshire, from Chinnor to Goring and the Streatley ford, the road is authenticated by Plot’s map; but routes to the other fords are at present conjectural. Streatley meant the longest way round for travellers going west through Berkshire, but it offered the driest approaches on both hands and the narrowest possible strip of wet land at the crossing. In summer at least Wallingford would attract westward travellers; and there is a thirteenth-century reference in the Abingdon Chronicle to Ikeneldstrete as running from Wallingford to Ashbury. Men using this ford would have turned out of the Streatley track at Gypsies’ Corner; and here, or a mile or two beyond, near Ipsden, they could branch to Moulsford and the Stokes.

Beyond Streatley there is at first only one road westward on the dry and rising land. This is the main road between Reading and Wantage, with a fork to Wallingford. Mr. Church, of Wantage (1806), pronounced this road to be the Ickleton Way as far as Upton, and his word may be taken to prove at least that this was the local name. For anyone crossing at Streatley and going west under the hills, instead of along the ridge, there is no other road; and even from Moulsford and Wallingford men would be forced, by the river on one side and bad ground on the other, to enter this road at Upton, if not at Blewbury, or before. The ford at Streatley is said to be Roman. Roman pottery has been found in the river, and coins on the south bank. Roman coins by the hundred, dating from 43 B.C. to A.D. 383, have been ploughed up in the neighbourhood. “Near Aston” coins, A.D. 267-74, have been found. They have dug up Roman things in Blewbury Fields, on Hagbourne hill, at Hendred, on Charlton Downs, at Wantage, at Letcombe Regis, in the Dragon Hill near the White Horse, at Woolston, and at Ashbury. Implements of the Bronze Age have been recorded at Cholsey, Moulsford, Blewbury, Hagbourne Hill, Wantage, Letcombe Bassett. Wallingford has yielded palæolithic, neolithic, Bronze Age, and later evidences.

These things, and more that could be mentioned, suggest ancient settlements and communications below the downs. Ickleton Street would seem likely to have been the main line of travel here, and a series of Saxon charters prove that such it was.

A grant of land by Edmund to Ælfric, and by him to Abingdon, shows that an Ichenilde Wege went through Blewbury in 944, and that the Ridgeway was distinct and at some distance from it; a grant in 903 by Eadweard to Tata the son of Æthelhun and by him to Abingdon, one by Edgar to Ælfric and by him to Winchester in 973, and one by Edgar to Ælfstan and by him to Winchester in 970, show it at Harwell (Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus, Nos. 1080, 578, 1273). In the grant of 903 the boundary starts at a brook, the Swyn Brook, and goes along the Harwell Way to the Icenhilde Wey, then up the old wood-way by the east of Harwell Camp to a warren, and so up to the stone on the Ridgeway, then on and back to the Ridgeway, and down on the other side of Harwell Camp to the Icenhilde Wey, farther down to a spring and an elder bed, evidently in the low land. This shows that the Icknield Way was a road running between the Ridgeway and the lowest land. A grant of land made in 955 by Eadred to Ælfheh and by him to Abingdon at Compton Beauchamp (Kemble, No. 1172) proves the same. The boundary starts at the Ridgeway, and goes to the Icenhilde Wey, and on to the Swyn Brook, and back again past a barrow to the Icenhilde Wey, and up to the Ridgeway, and over hills, slades, and a green way back to Wayland’s Smithy. A grant of Æthelstan to Abingdon, of land in Woolston, Compton, and Ashbury (Kemble, No. 1129), and another (No. 1168) mention as landmarks Ikenilde Strete, then what is probably Uffington Castle, and other places on the downs; then what is probably Ælfred’s Castle and two barrows and the Ikenilde Strete again, and finally a rush bed in the low land. A grant by Æthelwulf to Winchester and Bishop Stigand in 854 of lands at Wanborough (Kemble, No. 1053) describes a boundary passing downs and coombes to the source of the Hlyd (there is a Lyde spring at Ashbury), along the stream to a ditch, past the Dorc stream, the Smit stream, and a black pit, over the Icknield Way at or near some heathen burial place, and so to down country with a white pit, two stones, and a coombe, etc.—and from a study of the district Mr. Harold Peake concludes that “the Icknield Way crossed the parish very near the modern road which on the Ordnance Map bears this name, though I fancy it ran originally a few hundred yards to the north.” It is clear, then, that the Icknield Way ran as far as Wanborough between the highest and lowest ground along a course similar to that of Wise’s Ickleton Street. The road mentioned must either be Wise’s road or another of similar course which has been superseded by it in name and use, and can hardly be other than that now called on the Ordnance Map the Port Way.

Thus the road from Newmarket—or at least from Royston—by Streatley to Wanborough parish is a venerable and continuous one, which bore almost the same name at its extremities—Ykenildeweie at Newmarket in the time of Henry III, Icenhilde Weg at Wanborough in 854. That it is Icknield Street, one of the “four royal roads,” is proved only by its coming out of the east and going westward, and by its crossing Watling Street at Dunstable, as does the Ykenildstrete of the thirteenth-century map. Unlike the other three roads, the Icknield Way appears not to have been Romanized at any point, and, assuming that it had in the Middle Ages the importance suggested by its rank with these roads, its primitive character would explain its decay. Nothing rescued it as pilgrimages rescued that part of an ancient east-and-west road now known as the Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury (The Old Road, by Hilaire Belloc). Its western object had apparently been so deeply lost in Drayton’s time that the poet took it to Southampton, though whether this line is to be traced to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s bold definition or to contemporary usage cannot easily be decided. That this road through Newmarket and Streatley is the one in Drayton’s mind is certain.

Of the other roads called Icknield Street, most, if not all, of them difficult, where not impossible, to connect with this road as continuations or as branches, one is particularly interesting here.

Dr. Macray’s “MS. Catalogue of Magdalen College Deeds” contains several mentions of Ikenildwey or Hykenyldewey in descriptions of boundaries at Enham, near Andover, in Hampshire. One belonging to 1270 refers to land “in the east field of Enham, on the north of the highway called Ikenildwey”; another of 1317 to two acres of land in Enham Regis in a field called Bakeleresbury; “of the which one acre lies between the land of Gilbert Slyk on either side, extending south to Ikenildwe ...”; one of 1337 to arable land in the fields of Andover, of which half an acre extends “above Hykenyldewey to the east,” between other estates in the north and south, while another acre in the same field extends “above Laddrewey to the north.” I conclude from these descriptions that the Hykenyldewey here ran east and west, and it is not a region of winding roads. Batchelor’s Barn and Walworth cottages, about a mile east of Andover, seem to contain memories of “La Werthe,” “La Walwert,” and “Bakeleresbury.” Both the barn and the cottages lie close to the south side of the Harrow Way, which here goes east and west on its way from Farnham to Weyhill. Walworth cottages are on the east of the intersection of the Harrow Way and the north-westward Roman road from Winchester to Wanborough Nythe, and not a mile south of the intersection of this Roman road with the north-eastward Port Way from Old Sarum to Silchester. Between the Harrow Way and the Port Way, and in this part of its course almost parallel with them, is a road from Stoke and Newbury. One of these roads is perhaps the road referred to in the deeds as “Hykeynldewey.” The Harrow Way, which still bears its name in the neighbourhood, is not likely to have been the road. The Port Way appears to be purely Roman. If the road from Stoke were the Icknield Way, it might have connected Streatley with Winchester and Southampton, yet if it went to Winchester and Southampton, it can hardly have been the road which is several times called Ikenilde Street in records of the perambulations of the Hampshire forests. The survey of Buckholt Forest, under Edward I, for example, contains the passage: “Begin at the Deneway ... and so always by the divisions of the counties of Southampton and Wilts to th’ Ikenilde Street, and thence by the same to La Pulle”; and “from Pyrpe-mere to th’ Ikenilde and so by the same road to Holeweye.” This road I cannot identify, but a road touching both Enham and Buckholt Forest would probably reach Old Sarum.

There is an Icknield Street, marked as such on the Ordnance Map, going north from Weston sub-edge to Bidford, and, after a gap, from Stadley north towards Birmingham. It goes for some miles parallel to a much higher Ridgeway. It leaves the Fosse Way four miles south of Stow-in-the-Wold, near Bourton-on-the-Water, and is the road described by Codrington as Ricknild Street. But Codrington refers to a part of it—where the railway crosses it at Honeybourne station—as called Ricknild or Icknield Street, and to the lane north of Bidford going towards Alcester as Icknield Street. This road, or a longer one in part coinciding with it, was first called Icknield Street by Ralph Higden in the fourteenth century. It was one of his four royal roads, and went from St. David’s to Worcester, Birmingham, and Derby. Some of the manuscripts of his work called the road Ryckneld, which spelling may or may not have been due to the local knowledge of a scribe; both English translators or their scribes retain the R, calling the road Rykenildes strete or Rikenilde Street. Mr. W. H. Duignan (Notes on Staffordshire Place Names) quotes references to this road in the twelfth century—between Lichfield and Derby—as Ikenhilde, Ykenild, and Ricnelde; in the thirteenth century as Rikelinge and Ykenilde; in the fourteenth century as Rykeneld strete. He also gives instances which seem to prove that there were unconnected roads known as Ricknield Street in the thirteenth century; and mentions a place now called Thorpe Salvin, lying on no known Ricknield Street, but once known as Rikenild-thorp. Selden found a deed mentioning Ricknield Street as a boundary near Birmingham, and Dugdale one of 1223 relating to Hilton Abbey.

The Eulogium of 1362, when it does not call Higden’s road Belinstrete, calls it Hykeneldstret, though when Gale quotes it he makes it Rykeneldstrete. Stukeley calls it “the Ricning Way,” and complains of Plot for calling it Icknil Way; yet he himself heard it called the Hickling Street near the crossing of Watling Street. Holinshed calls it “Ikenild or Rikenild.” In the time of the second and third Edwards there were men named after Ikenilde or Hikenilde strete (Pat. Rolls) in Worcestershire. One of them was a man of Alvechurch, which lies west of the road between Stadley and Birmingham; and there was an Ikeneld street in the sixteenth century within the lordship of Allechurche in Worcestershire.

Drayton first distinguished between an eastern Icknield Street and a western Ricknield Street. He evidently knew the Icknield Way along the Chilterns, and his words about Rikneld Street as coming from Cambria’s farther shore until the road

“On his midway did me in England meet,”

suggest that he knew the road as a Warwickshire man, and that his distinction was not wantonness or the precision of ignorance. Gale accuses the road of taking the name of Ickle or Icknild Street without any just title. Guest also believes that the western road “gradually attached to itself the name of Icknield Street” as a famous name to which it had no right. Wise, in search of something to help him, suggests Hickling as the origin of the name, but knowing of Ryknield, he is tempted also by Rickley in Essex—confesses the temptation—and “must now beg leave to call” the road “the Great Ickle or Rickle way.” This use of Rickling reminds me of a woman living in a cottage beside the Ridgeway, near Chiseldon. I asked her the name of the road, and she said, with some hesitation, “The Rudgeway.” I asked why it was so called, and she said she did not know. I asked where it went, and she answered, “Oh, over there!”—pointing west, “—to Rudge, I suppose,” Rudge being near Westbury. An antiquary in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1787) comfortably explains the variation as due to the British particle “yr” prefixed. But no one has found a Ricknield or a Rickling or any such name along the course of the road from Newmarket to Wanborough.

It seems likely that Icknield, like Watling and Ermine, was a generic name for a road, whether due to its use by cattle, to Professor Bradley’s Lady Icenhild, or to something else. One such road in Worcestershire and the west, and another in the east tending westward, were possibly at one time well known as continuous routes over long stretches of country. The two could be connected. Ermine Street passed through Wanborough Nythe at the west end of the Icknield Way from East Anglia, went north-west to Cirencester, and thence both north-east to Stow-on-the-Wold where it touched the Ricknield Street and the Fosse Way, and north-west to Gloucester, and so to Worcester or to Kentchester and the south-west of Wales. Another ancient road from near Tring, the Akeman Street, would take travellers on the Icknield Way due west to Cirencester, where they could branch as they pleased to Gloucester and Wales or the north. Thus at both ends of Ermine Street and Akeman Street or their continuations there were roads known as Icknield Street; it is even possible that the whole system was officially given the one name of Icknield Street, and such a system might fitly be called a royal road. An eastern extension of the road to a depôt and several ports in Norfolk is practically certain, though it has not yet been discovered or satisfactorily reconstructed. A south-western or western extension beyond Wanborough is almost equally certain. There is no need to look for a road that is all of one type. Without antiquarianism or modern regularity only common and continued travel throughout its course can preserve a road. Even during this extended use of it variants will be discovered from time to time and used as alternatives or substitutes. As soon as this use ceases portions of the road begin to decay, and soon those few having the old need for it will have found another way. Each kind of civilization doubtless has its own special kind of road, and gradually old roads are so transformed or combined as to form such a road. But invaders or newly organized people have to take what roads they find, unless they have Roman will, forethought, and resource to make their own; though by good fortune men suddenly needing a road may find an old one ready as did the pilgrims from the south and west to Canterbury who used the Pilgrims’ Way. Men wishing to travel from east to west, especially in the south of England, would have found many tracks and roads of all types ready to be linked so as to form a connection between important points of trade, government, or religion. When it became possible to traverse England safely, meeting foreign faces and strange tongues but subjects of one king, traders and travellers would piece together according to need the old roads which different ages had confirmed—the high and most ancient roads like the Ridgeway and the Harrow Way, late roads skirting the bases of the hills, pure Roman roads fearing nothing, and Romanized trackways. The Icknield Way may have been such a combination. The Danes might have combined it with the Ridgeway in 1005, when they burnt Wallingford and went by Cholsey and Cuckhamsley to Kennet. They probably used the road along the Chilterns when they burnt Thetford and Cambridge and turned south to the Thames; and other parts of it when they stole inland from their ships through Norwich to Thetford. Sweyn may have gone along it when he went to Wallingford, and so over the Thames westward to Bath, where the western men submitted and gave hostages and he became king of the whole people. Giraldus may have trodden it in South Wales. At an earlier age, as Mr. Moray Williams has suggested, the Icknield Way might have been the line of the Iceni in their alleged migration westward, after the defeat of Boadicea. It should have been Imogen’s pathway to Milford Haven. There are not many early references to the travel upon the road. It would be used chiefly by traders and travellers from a distance. Plot remarked that it passed through no towns or villages in Oxfordshire, and this, in his day, made it convenient for stealers of cattle. A road used by strange travellers and robbers waiting for them was not a likely one for small settlements and local use. When it was spoken of as the way the oxen go—unless the phrase implied a road along which came oxen from a distance—it may already have been degenerating. Guest says: “Your guide will talk of the long lines of pack-horses that once frequented the ‘Ickley Way,’ as if they were things of yesterday; and a farmer in the Vale of Aylesbury told me ... that in the popish times they used to go on pilgrimage along it from Oxford to Cambridge.” Messrs. Jordan and Morris (Introduction to the Study of Local History and Antiquities) speak of the road as connecting the flint-knappers’ settlement at Brandon with Avebury and Stonehenge: “The men of Wiltshire would wish to obtain flint instruments from Brandon; men from Brandon to have access to Avebury and Stonehenge.” But Wiltshire men would not go to Suffolk in search of flints except for a wager.

Whiteleaf Cross.

The Icknield Way is sufficiently explained as the chief surviving road connecting East Anglia and the whole eastern half of the regions north of the Thames, with the west and the western half of the south of England. For the men of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, Bedford, Hertford, Buckingham, and Oxford, it did what the Harrow Way did for men of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and East Hampshire.

CHAPTER III
FIRST DAY—THETFORD TO NEWMARKET, BY LACKFORD AND KENTFORD

As nearly everybody was agreed that the Icknield Way, coming from the Norfolk ports, probably crossed the River Thet and the Little Ouse at Thetford in that county, I went to Thetford. In the railway train I asked a man who knew all the country about him whether he knew the Icknield Way, but he did not. He knew where the oaks and pines grew best and what they fetched, the value of the land, the crops on an acre of it and what they fetched. He knew men’s rents and what each farm cost when it changed hands last. He knew also the men living and dead, and the lives they lived, what they were worth, and whose bed they died in. He was a man himself, a vast handsome fellow nearing sixty, well bearded, whiskered, and moustached, but not so as to hide full red lips and small, cheerful, and penetrating dark eyes. He weighed eighteen stone and a half and was not scant of breath, though he smoked strong tobacco rapidly in a large pipe. After much about the price of potatoes, etc., that came in at one ear and bolted straight out of the other, he told about himself and his family. Everyone at the railway stations knew him, and I suppose he thought I should naturally not wish to remain ill-informed. He was the youngest but one of six brothers, all weighing over sixteen stone; and his two sisters weighed over fourteen. He himself had eight children, the sons above six feet in height, the daughters above five-feet-eight—all of them persons who would not be blown away in a storm. His father before him was six-feet-three and weighed seventeen stone. After a time, pointing to a satchel with my name and address on it, he said:—

“Do you know anyone of the name of Fencer in your neighbourhood?”

“No,” I said.

“Her father,” he said, “used to own the Largease Mill. Polly Fencer. Very likely he has gone away now. She may be dead. It is twenty-five years ago that I am thinking of, and I will tell you what made me ask. My next brother was in love with her twenty-five years ago. She was a well-educated person, good-looking, and had the nicest temper of anyone I ever met, but not soft or at all weak. She liked my brother; but she was a companion to some lady and she did not want to marry at once. He did, however, and when she refused to be in a hurry he got cool for a time. In that cool fit he married another woman and had plenty of time to repent it. He lived with her twenty years and more, and she was always ailing. He never cared much about her and now she is dead, and it struck me, seeing the address on your bag, that perhaps if Polly was alive and free and hadn’t altered her mind, my brother might be glad to marry her. Certainly he couldn’t do a better thing than marry Polly. I know he never forgot her. But twenty-five years is a long time, and she may be married herself.... I should have liked to see him marry Polly, one of the nicest women that ever I saw....

Castle Hill, Thetford.

“I used to be very fond of walking myself,” he said, changing the subject. “And I still do a lot of it. It is very good for the health. I suppose you are walking for your health.”

As he perceived that I was not in business he assumed that I was taking a dose of walking, one of the most expensive medicines, and, as he believed, one of the best. I left him behind me in Thetford.

This was a most pleasant ancient town, built of flints, full of turns and corners and yards. It smelt of lime trees and of brewing. At the east edge was a green “Castle Hill” and a surrounding rampart without a castle, and between the ramparts, round about the hill, a level green where people rest or play in sunshine or under elm, ash, and sycamore. Beside the steep artificial mound, so huge and uncouth, men mowing the grass looked smaller than ever, the children playing more beautiful, and both more transitory. The dark hill seemed a monster watching them at their play and work, as if some day it would swallow them up. It was like a personification of stupid enormous time. Yet this ponderous symbol did not spoil the pleasantness of the grass and trees and the green hill and the little town, but rather increased it; and I walked backwards and forwards lest I should forget that I had been to Thetford, a place sometimes burnt, sometimes fortified, by the Danes, and once a bishop’s see. These things made the old brewery seem older, the lime trees sweeter, the high-walled lanes darker, as I walked about. One of the lanes, Castle Lane, which goes through the ramparts of the castle, is possibly part of the Icknield Way. As you stand at the east edge of the town, a little past the Castle hill, a lane comes slanting from the north-east over the railway to an open, dusty place, at a meeting of five ways, a “five went way.” This lane, now only a mile long to where it is cut short by the Kilverstone and Brettenham road and having no obvious continuation to the north-east, is the Green Lane, or Clover Lane, which has been suggested as a Norfolk portion of the Icknield Way. At the south end of it, in 1870, were found remains of Celtic and Roman pottery. Castle Lane takes up the line of Green Lane and leads through the east edge of the town towards the rivers. Before leaving the town by it, I noticed on the right hand a very strange fish on a signboard, a very curly fish, with curly whiskers, three curled plumes on his back, and a curled tail; and he was himself curled and boldly painted withal; but whether this fish or the landlord was named Mullett I have forgotten. My apparent road took me southward over the Thet, and then the Ouse, by two low bridges called the Nuns’ Bridges. Chestnuts darkened the clear water of Thet. Between the two rivers was only a narrow space of grass and buttercups. Here, and a little east towards Place Farm, is the gravel which fitted this spot for a ford. Beyond the Ouse the main road goes straight away southward to the Workhouse, the open, sandy heath, and ultimately Bury St. Edmunds. On the left was the isolated doorway of a vanished nunnery, and Place Farm standing within a wide, low-walled space. I turned to the right along a road parallel with the river and divided from it by a narrow hedgeless band of grass. This is supposed by Mr. W. G. Clarke to be the Icknield Way, and he has sketched it over the Bury and Thetford road north of the gasworks, near where the remains of a British settlement were found in 1870. But I found nothing to save me from going on to the main road to Mildenhall and Newmarket and then following that for two miles. On the ten miles between Thetford and Mildenhall there is nothing but Elveden Church, motor-cars, milestones, and dust; and Mildenhall is only the half-way village to Newmarket. It is a straight road easily provoked to a fierce whiteness, and it goes through a dry heathy land planted with limes and parallelograms of fir trees. Nevertheless, a nightingale was singing at noon in the blaze of a strong sun close to the left side of the road, not a mile out of Thetford. His voice in the heat was like the milky kernel of a hard, bearded nut.

Less than half a mile past the second milestone, and just over the Suffolk border, I took the opportunity of leaving that road by entering a private drive apparently to Elveden Hall. This was at least in the right direction for Lackford, the next ford, near which the Icknield Way is satisfactorily ascertained. In three-quarters of a mile the drive emerged into a road coming from the main road I had left, and going east to Barnham. I turned to the left along this to reach Marmansgrave Wood, which sounded old, and at that point, as I hoped, a cart track, crossing the road from north to south, looked possible. As it fell out, this track was a parish boundary and the boundary between the hundreds of Blackbourn and Lackford; and for more than half its course it was on one side or the other of an oak or fir plantation. I went southward along it, down the east edge of the long fir plantation marked on the map as “New Barnham Slip.” It was a broad and hedgeless track, often riddled by rabbit burrows which were masked by nettles. At its best it was a rough, tussocky sheaf of cartways. Everywhere sand and flints, parallelograms of fir trees, nettles, and more nettles and the smell of nettles. Rarely it passed a square, now, or several years ago, given to corn. I like nettles, especially with elder trees in blossom above them, as at Lackford Road Heath, half-way along. There was also some gorse. The road was not straight, but wound along in a series of straight lines, slightly up and down, but usually on the high level sand with views of nothing else. I had no company but pewit and stone-curlew and wheatear for those seven miles, and neither passed a house nor saw one anywhere. The sun blazed from the sky overhead and the sand underfoot; it burnt the scent out of the pines as in an oven; it made the land still and silent; but it wrenched no word or thought of blasphemy out of me. On the other hand, I felt no benevolence towards the planters of trees in straight lines; for by doing this they had destroyed the possible sublimity of this sandy land, and at the same time increased its desolation by the contrasting verdure of foliage and the obviously utilitarian arrangement. It was country which, if I owned it, I should gladly exchange with the War Office for Salisbury Plain. For if the nettles, the rabbit holes, and the elders were exceptionally good they could be equalled. The rabbits seemed to love the track as in other places they love tumuli, and for a distance they had wiped out its resemblance to a road.

Crossing the Brandon and Wordwell road at Shelterhouse Corner or Elveden Gap, I reached the east end of the Icklingham belt of firs. From near the west end of this belt goes a south-westerly path called “Pilgrim’s Path,” down to Icklingham All Saints’ Church. This is said not to be the Icknield Way, though Icklingham, partly on account of its name, and partly on account of its great age and Roman villa, has been alleged to be on the road. Two miles east of my road at Lackford Road Heath is a “Traveller’s Hill,” marked by a tumulus, but this is an east-and-west road and ends at a farm. I continued over Jennet’s Hill and along the edge of a second and greater Icklingham belt, and past some cultivated fields, on the right, sunk two yards or so below the level of the track. Then I dipped down among corn and deeper grass, and between good hedges at last, towards the River Lark, the cool valley, and the broader woods of Lackford and Cavenham. At the foot of the descent a road crosses to West Stow, and in half a mile passes a gravel pit and the place where Anglo-Saxon coins, weapons, and arms have been found. After this crossing there were water meadows, with swift crystal flashing among buttercups and flag blossom, the home of snipe. The great meadow on the right is called Rampart Meadow, because of the sudden lift of the land at its far side, which seems to be ringed like an old camp with ramparts. Just before the river the road became merged in the main road from Mildenhall to Bury St. Edmunds. Alongside the bridge was the ford, and the path to it was hollowed out beside the road on the south. Over the bridge the boundary leaves the road and joins the Lark.

Bridge and Ford, Lackford.

Lackford is a village that straggles along a mile of road with such intervals of foliage that I thought I was past the end of it when I came to where I could get tea. There was no inn; but the shop was better than the inn could have been. My hostess was one of those most active, little, stoutish and cheerful women who never go out if they can help it. Being descended from suffering and sometimes roofless generations, they seem to see no reason for returning to inclement nature when they have a good digestion and a water-tight roof; they make good jam and good tea. There were a number of things I should have seen near Lackford, such as the burial mound, north of Culford Church, wittily called the “Hill of Health,” and the road between Pakenham and Stowlangtoft called Bull Road, and some of the moats, at Maulkin’s Hall and other “Halls” of Suffolk. But the Icknield Way turned sharp to the right out of the road I had taken, opposite Lower Farm, soon after the ford of the Lark. When it was more important than the eastward road to Bury the Way curved round westward beyond the river, and its old course is marked by a depression through the furze on the right, which finally reaches the present road and is lost in it.

Near Cavenham.

My road was now an ordinary white road between hedges, but with a furzy heath on both sides beyond the hedges. It had no grassy borders, but at the turning to Lackford manor-house there was a little triangular common on the left, of grass, gorse, hawthorns, and an ash tree. On the right there was a larger common, called Clamp’s Heath. On my left I saw corn and a field of pale sainfoin extending to the edge of a dark oak wood. The road was, if anything, slightly embanked over this level ground. After passing the Heath it had grassy borders and low hedges and corn on both sides, and then, after a short distance, no border, and on the right no hedge. Where it descended towards the woods of Cavenham it was sunk a little and had a left-hand border of grass. Just before this I saw the first chalk pit under the road on my left, with wild rose and elder on its floor. At Cavenham a new flat bridge of two arches crossed a tiny tributary of the Lark; but on the left of this was an old single arch about seven feet broad of narrow bricks, still firm but all grass-grown over its high curved crown which passengers used to mount like a barrel. The new bridge probably took the ford’s place. At Cavenham the road went under the trees of Cavenham Park—oak, beech, elm and sycamore, ash and aspen. Turtle-doves were cooing unseen. The house was some way off, the church farther, the village yet farther along a by-road. At each turning there was an open space for trees and men, for example, at the two ways down to Lark Hall. Beyond the second of these the road was lined by beech trees and wych elms standing in grass: it was cool, but gave a view of sunlit barley between the trunks, and soon afterwards of an undulating lowland, heath and corn, and wooded ridges on the right; while on the left the land fell away and I felt the curve of the earth, the wooded horizon being lower than the road. Before reaching Tuddenham Corner the bank of bird’s-foot trefoil was wide enough for a path; only on the left was there a hedge, on the right was tall barley. Past Tuddenham Corner the road was narrow and shaded by beech trees of half a century’s growth; it had hedges and grassy borders, and down the middle two lines of grass between the ordinary course of the horses’ feet and the wheels. On both sides were many long, straight plantations of trees, but in a low, cultivated country where they gave little offence. Presently the road touched a tumulus on the left, and drew near another on the right. Then it was crossed by the Great Eastern Railway, and turning sharper to the right than probably it used to, went due west towards Kentford. Being now a highway between Newmarket and Bury St. Edmunds, it was broader, and had also grassy margins of twice its own width, and beeches in the hedgerows.

Kentford.

Until this I had met and passed nobody, nor had anyone passed me; no man of Lackford or Cavenham, or vagrant bound for Norwich or Newmarket; no long-lost sailor son whom I could tell of his expectant mother selling roses at Piccadilly Circus. At Kentford motor-cars tyrannically owned the road. Here were men going into the “Fox and Bull,” or standing contented by the “Old Cock.” In the shade of the old flint church tower and the chestnuts of the churchyard someone was cheerfully clipping grass at evenfall. I looked up and saw a greyhound as a weather vane, and it was running northward. A ford went through the Kennett and a new bridge over it, alongside of great fragments of an old one. Just beyond, at the cool heart of the dusty roadside shrubberies, a nightingale was singing in oblivion.

From Kentford the road ran straight for four miles into Newmarket, taking with it the Suffolk and Cambridge boundary now on its right and now on its left. Telegraph posts and trees accompanied it, and below them very broad, rough margins, half overgrown by thorns and young elms, and marked by half a dozen parallel footpaths. The old course of the road from the third milestone was doubtless the green track on the right, divided from the new by a broken hedge; for it is this that the boundary follows. Before the second milestone this track traversed the new and was continued thenceforward by a beech grove shadowing deep, narrow horse-paths to the first milestone and the beginning of the Newmarket red brick. On the right no hedge came between the road and an open country sloping down to the treeless fenland of Fordham, Wicken, and Soham, where fifty feet above sea-level makes a hill. Nearest the road were plains from which tumuli have long been smoothed to make an exercising ground for horses.

By the first milestone a child came running up to me to ask if I had found a penny among the trees, and I did not until afterwards suspect that this was a brilliant variation from straightforward begging.

Newmarket.

As I came into Newmarket before dark, but after the closing of shops, the long wide street and a strange breed of men standing or slowly walking about on its pavements made me feel that scarcely after a dozen reincarnations should I enter Newmarket and be at home. The man who discovered that we are “all God’s creatures” had an uncanny eye for resemblance, and I often doubt the use of the discovery, without disputing its accuracy. Everyone was talking of horses except those who preferred lords and professional golfers. I saw some caddies industriously swallowing temperance hot drinks instead of beer, in the hope of earning as much as James Braid at some distant time. As for the horsy men, they seemed to understand lords as well as horses, so well as to illustrate the saying, “To know all is to pardon all”: nay! to go beyond that, to admire all, and to believe that men are more or less worthy as they are more or less lords. One of them was imitating the bad language of Lord ——, and it was admitted perfect; but I can quite believe that to be a lord is very different from being able to imitate one after a glass of ale. There can be little doubt that to the influence of either lords or horses, or perhaps both, we must attribute the brilliant beggar at the first milestone. A Scotch baker directed me to a place—“It is not very elaborate, but it is clean”—where I could get a bed such as I could afford.

I lay awake for some time listening to the motor-cars. Most of them rushed through the town; a few came there to rest and silence; others paused for a minute only with drumming suspense. I thought I should not easily tire of these signals from unknown travellers. Not that I spent much time on definite and persistent conjecture as to who they were, whence they had come, and whither and why they travelled. I was too sleepy, though at any time such a labour would have been irksome. No; I was more than content to let these noises compose a wordless music of mystery and adventure within my brain. The cars could bring together lovers or enemies or conspirators so swiftly that their midnight alarums suggest nothing else. It is hard to connect their subjugated frenzy with mere stupid haste. The little light steals through a darkness so vast that the difference between a star and a lantern is nothing to it. The thing is so suitable for a great adventure that straightway the mind conceives one. Hark! on a winter’s night the sound and the idea are worthy of the storm and in harmony with it:—

Hark ’tis an elfin storm from fairyland,

Of haggard seeming but a boon indeed....

It was easy to imagine myself the partner in magnificent risks quite outside my own experience, and to feel the glory and even the danger with no touch of pain, whilst I lay as careless as the friendly near neighbourhood of sleep could make me. The touch of arrogance in the voice of the motor is to its credit by night. In a measure it revives the romantic and accepted arrogance of horn and trumpet. It gives at least an outward bravery which has long been dropping away from drivers of horses. I do not disparage the sound of hoofs and wheels and the private voice of a solitary traveller on the dark roads, but there is something melancholy in it, and more endurance than enterprise.... But, above all, the sounds of the motor-car have added immensely to the London night, at least for good sleepers with minds at ease. Formerly, to those out of the Covent Garden routes, the only sound of night travel at all provoking to the mind was the after-midnight hansom’s clatter, which challenged conjecture more often than imagination; I pictured most likely a man with bleared eyes and a white shirt who had let his cigar out—at most, a man whose achievement was behind rather than before him; and certainly I was always very well content to be in bed. But the motor-horn is turbulent and daring, though it may be innocent to say so. Even if it is coming home there is a proud possibility of distance left behind, and either it seems that the arrivers have not returned for nothing or the sudden stop suggests at the least a sublimity of dejection from proud heights. As to the car setting out in darkness, it gathers to itself all the pomp of setting out, as we have imagined or read of it in stories of soldiers, travellers or lovers, and as we have experienced it when children, going to fish or to find bird’s nests or mushrooms, and as we still fancy it would be for ourselves, were we ever to advance towards adventures. I suppose, also, that the speed of a motor-car, to the outsider, unconsciously suggests a race, an unknown end, an untold prize.... These thoughts and mere listening to the horns and machinery occupied me and led on to sleep in such a manner that I ignored a man next door imitating a gramophone quite seriously, and in less than half an hour I was asleep and began to dream drivel.

CHAPTER IV
SECOND DAY—NEWMARKET TO ODSEY, BY ICKLETON AND ROYSTON

Next morning I paid two shillings and set out at six o’clock. So far as is known the Icknield Way, which certainly went through Newmarket, is the central street and London road, and along this I mounted out of the town. The road was a straight and dusty one, accompanied by a great multitude of telegraph wires, on which corn buntings were singing their dreary song. On the right was the main stretch of Newmarket Heath, then a few gentle green slopes, with clusters of ricks and squares of corn, rising to a low wooded ridge far off. It was beginning to be hot, though it was windy and the deep blue of the sky was visible only through folds in the hood of grey clouds.

There were dusty tracks for exercising horses on both sides of the road. I like to see fine horses running at full speed. To see this sight, or hounds running on a good scent, or children dancing, is to me the same as music, and therefore, I suppose, as full of mortality and beauty. I sat down for some time watching the horses.

Devil’s Ditch.

Beyond the second milestone, and just before the turning to the right for Cambridge, the road passed through the Devil’s Ditch, a deep ditch with a high bank on the Newmarket edge of it, stretching several miles on either side of the way from north-west to south-east in a straight line. At the gap made by the road stood what seemed to be old turnpike houses. Beyond the ditch the road was a hedged one, shaded by beeches on both sides, and having borders of deep, dusty grass, in which stood the telegraph posts. The long, narrow copse of beech on the right was not strictly closed, but remained unspoilt and tenanted by doves. Yet it was not long before I began to look out for a cart to carry me over the next six miles of the straight road. Such a road is tiring, because either the eye or the mind’s eye sees long, taunting, or menacing lengths before it, and is brought into conflict with sheer distance, and the mind is continually trying to carry the body over this distance with her own celerity, and being again and again defeated and more and more conscious of defeat, becomes irritated, if not happily numbed, by the importunate monotony.

This was country, moreover, which the unaided eye could easily explore. It lay open and without mystery. Nothing had to be climbed or quested for. Therefore still more did the legs resent doing what wheels or other legs could do far better. Any wheeled vehicle, from a motor-car to a legless beggar’s trolley, would help a man through this country. In Wiltshire or Cardiganshire there is nothing so good as your own legs, even if they are bad. But in Cambridgeshire I recommend elephant, camel, horse, mule, donkey, motor-car, waggon, or cart, anything except a covered cab or a pair of hobnailed shoes.

A fine region spread out upon the right as I was approaching Six Mile Bottom—a sweep of arable, mostly corn-covered, but with reddish, new-ploughed squares, and here and there a team at work, rising up to a copse or two on the low ridges—not a building visible but a windmill—and far beyond these, blue hills. A very simple country it was, that might have been moulded by a strong north wind when the land was docile as snow. Over it hung a sky of perfect summer and a sun like a god that made me ashamed to crawl as habit and the necessity of writing a book compelled me to do. It was a country for clouds, but there was none. Had there been, I should not have been so well acquainted with the hard, straight road, often slightly embanked, or having depressions on either side, and in the right-hand one several well-worn paths. By the turning to Weston Colville and West Wratting it went level and straight as usual. On the left the corn was hedgeless; on the right a low hedge separated me from ploughland and the windmill on a mile-distant ridge; and the depression on the left was thrice the width of the road, and used as a cart track, with merely a white centre and ruts among the flowers of plantain and lady’s slipper. Many larks were singing. I became a connoisseur in road-sides, and noticed each change, as that when the road was cut or embanked it usually lost its breadth of margin, and that now there was a hedge on both hands instead of one, and in them roses—the pink roses which have the pure, slender perfume connected by the middle-aged with youth.

Fleam Dyke.

Past the eighth milestone the road went through Fleam Dyke, which is shorter than the Devil’s Ditch, because the fen to which it stretches northward is nearer. The ditch is on the far side, a green farm track goes along the mound on the near or Newmarket side. Just before it I saw a green way, a parish boundary, branching up out of my road eastward between separate thorns and making over the highland to the valley of the Stour. Beyond the dyke was another fine open cornland northward, lines of trees down its slopes, woods on its ridges, and the tall chimneys of Cambridge six miles away. On the other hand a beech plantation lined the road and shadowed the grassy edge on which I walked. After the beeches there were wayside roses, and a low hedge and still a broad, grassy border, where the short-tailed young blackbirds hurried before me among the paper wrappers of sausages, etc., thrown out by motorists from Cambridge.

On my right was an artificial wall of turf going in the same direction as the road. This might have been an ancient earthwork, if the map had not said “Old Railway.” A disused railway embankment gave me more pleasure than a prehistoric dyke. It was also charming in itself, and had thorns prettily growing on its green slopes. Soon it was changed to a cutting, and, above it, a little round rise crowned by eight poor firs in a tragic group, a few hundred yards from the road. Past the tenth milestone the main road reaches Worsted Lodge and crosses the straight line of a Roman road from Grantchester and Godmanchester. The line of my road is continued by a lesser way to Babraham and Pampisford, but the road itself turns abruptly from a south-westerly almost to a southerly course, yet still straight. Nearly all the roads hereabout were as straight as if Roman, the low and even land offering no impediments. There was one, for example, parallel with the Roman road and crossing the Icknield Way exactly at the tenth milestone, having come down from Fulbourn Valley Farm alongside a regiment of beeches, and continuing, after an interruption by a kitchen garden, to Gunner’s Hall beyond. Between this and the Roman road, at the wayside, was a long, flint-tiled building of respectable age, with a mansard roof, small latticed windows in three tiers, and a louvre on top like a small oast cone. The line of the old railway continued to be marked by a slight bank and thickets of thorns. My road had broad green borders which the copse of Grange Farm interrupted. There were now more copses, and the land was more broken up, though still mainly supporting corn and hurdled sheep. At Bourn Bridge, near the twelfth milestone, there was a ford through the Granta, shaded by elms and poplars and occupied by cattle swishing their tails in silence. At the milestone the common road to Royston branches off to the right with broad green borders, but my way lay straight on over the new railway by Pampisford station and through Brent Ditch. After the thirteenth milestone the old railway had gathered quite a copse of ash and thorn and brier about it. Near the fourteenth milestone I began to see a pleasant valley land below on the right, and groves marking the Cam’s course by the spires of Hinxton and Ickleton, and beyond them gentle, bare hills with crowns of trees. At this milestone I saw myriads of a most delicate blue flax shuddering in the wind. Here Essex comes up to the road and pursues it to Ickleton, even though at Stump Cross it turns sharp to the right out of the London road and becomes a lane to Ickleton, a green lane with white ruts making for the church, and crossing an artificial embankment which turned out to be the old railway again. My road forded the Cam at Ickleton. This was a quiet white and grey village, built partly about the road which encircles the church, but chiefly on both sides of a road leading west. The walls were of flint or of plaster, sometimes decorated with patterns in line, and there was abundant thatch. Here and there the cottages were interrupted and a gateway opened into a farm-yard. The church, a flint one, was as cool as it was old, and full of christened sunlight and the chirping of sparrows. There were many tablets in it to the memory of people named Hanchett—a name not in the Dictionary of National Biography. The most conspicuous thing in the church was a circular frame over an arch, enclosing the inscription in large letters: “This church was repair’d 1820. Henry Chambers and John Hill, Churchwardens.” Much smaller letters below said: “Fear God and honour the King.”

Ickleton.

Leaving Ickleton by its chief street, Abbey Street, I entered an open country rising on all sides. I took the south-westerly road towards Elmdon, and then a right-hand turning out of that which went in a straight line to Ickleton Granges. This is probably a new country road, with hedges and only the narrowest of green strips beside it: it is not the Icknield Way. The old road possibly ran along the gently rising ploughland half-way up it, past Rectory Farm. There is still a footpath from near Abbey Farm and the Priory remains to Rectory Farm, which may represent the course of the Icknield Way, continued by a broken line of thorns reaching almost to Ickleton Granges fifty or a hundred yards north-west of the present road. Past the Granges I turned sharp to the right along a drove coming through the corn from Littlebury and Saffron Walden. At a turning on the left to Redland’s Hall this road became a county boundary, and I went uphill to the corner of a copse, where it made another bend westward. At the bend there was a triangle of turf upon the right, so that the right-hand bank, which lies beyond this turf, suggested a road coming from the east, that is to say from Rectory Farm and Ickleton Priory. The road was now well up above the land to its right, and I could see the straight ridge near Cambridge which carries the Mare Way. On the other hand were the gentle Anthony Hill and Clay Hill, and in front the high land above Royston and its straight bars of wood. The road was making almost due west for Royston. It went between corn, clover, or new-ploughed land; white bryony grew in its low hedges, and even sprawled over the dusty, rabbity mound by the wayside; and it had grass borders of its own width. At first it was rough, but hard and white. Soon it became practically a green road, and then wholly so, but level and rideable. In one place it was lined by lime trees; in others all was elder flower, wild rose, and lady’s slipper, and the chatter of young birds. Beyond the road to Dottrell Hall and the lovely group of sycamore and hornbeams at the crossing, it was much worn again. It was a farm road used only by waggons and men between field and field, or at most between farm and farm. It might have seemed no more than a series, four miles long, of consecutive cart tracks, rarely with a hedge on both sides, between it and the cultivated land. It gave a sense of privacy and freedom combined. At a cottage, one of two that had once been a single farm, and still had a thatched shed and a weedy yard, I knocked to ask for water.

Approaching Royston.

A huge wheel and windlass and a seven-gallon tub stood above a well in the yard. A wild-looking cat bounded through the window of one of the cottages which seemed to be empty. The other might also have been empty, in spite of its dirty muslin curtain, for I knocked long and no one came. Just as I was turning to get water for myself a human being with black hair and wild eyes looked out of an upper window and hailed me with a kind of scream. As she was not half dressed, I told her to leave me to look after myself. The well seemed bottomless, but I had the seven gallons of dark, bright water up on the edge by the time my hostess appeared with a dirty cup. She was a thin, hawk-faced woman, bare and brown to the breast, and with glittering blue eyes, and in her upper jaw three strong teeth. She was dressed in black rags. She shaded her eyes to look at me, as if I were half a mile away.

“You’re thin, boy,” she said, “like me.”

“Yes.”

A pause.

“Are you middling well off?”

“Yes, middling. Are you?”

“Oh, middling; but times are hard.”

“They are.”

She looked extraordinarily sad, and I said:—

“Still, we shall have a few years to wait for the workhouse.”

“Have to wait a few years!” she repeated, very serious, though smiling. “Have you come from Royston?”

“No; Newmarket.”

“Newmarket. Are you going far?”

“To Odsey, between Royston and Baldock.”

“It’s a long way. You’re thin, boy.”

“Food doesn’t nourish me. Men cannot live on bread only, not even brown bread made at home.”

“No.”

“Now in the moon, perhaps, I should get fat.”

“Perhaps indeed, and I too. But look at the moon. You give me the horrors. You couldn’t live there.”

It was a thin three-quarters of a circle in a hot sky.

“But,” I said, “I should like to try.”

“Would you?”

“Yes, provided I were someone different. For, as for me, this is no doubt the best of all possible worlds.”

“Better than the moon?”

“Yes, better than the moon; and there is nothing better in it than your well water, missus. Good afternoon.”

Framed clearly against her solitary pink-washed cottage, she stared after me, shading her eyes.

Two or three times along these four miles of road I saw a square of trees protecting a farm or “grange,” most of the villages having a grange out in the open country named after them, as Duxford Grange, Ickleton Grange, Chrishall Grange, Heydon Grange. But on the road itself there were no houses except Noon’s Folly and one called Shapens, not even at the crossings of more important roads. For the most part it kept level: where it had to dip slightly after the turn to Great Chishall it was worn several feet deep, but this was exceptional. Beyond that it was worn unevenly into two parallel tracks between hedges with beech trees and elders. To the right the pleasant tree-crowned rise of Goffer’s Knoll stood up on the other side of the main Newmarket and Royston road, now fast nearing my road. Past Noon’s Folly Farm the road had a narrow and embanked course, but parallel with it a depression seamed by paths and cart tracks. Here and for some way past—from half-way between Noon’s Folly and the Barley road—the way is a boundary between Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire. I had not been out of Cambridgeshire since I left Suffolk at the Kennett bridge.

Icknield Way, crossing Ermine Street.

Half a mile west of Noon’s Folly the main road reached my road, and, turning west instead of south-west, made use of its course for the two miles into Royston. For most of the two miles this piece of road, exactly continuing my old way, had broad green edges, and on the left hand, beeches. Coming to a rise it was cut through the ridge and embanked again below. It went straight through the big village or little town of Royston, where it crossed Ermine Street, and took the name of Baldock Street from the town ahead. As it was market day everyone was driving out of Royston with his trap full of chickens and parcels of all kinds, not to speak of wife and children. This was my first real chance of a lift. For between Ickleton and the Royston road only farm waggons went, and they were all in the hayfields; and only motor-cars travelled the road from Newmarket, all passing me as if I needed nothing but more dust to fill eyes, mouth, nose, ears, shoes, and spirit. I have never been offered a lift by a stranger in a motor-car, but friends of mine have told me they have heard of others who have. With the increase of dust and heat the likelihood of a merciful motorist becomes less, because dust and heat do not produce the appearance desirable in a motorist’s companion; in fact, by the end of the day, or of the week, especially if he has forgotten to shave, or has always arrived in a town after shop-shutting, the wayfarer runs the risk of being called “mate” by the baker’s man who refuses to let him ride. “Mate” sounds like liberty, equality, and fraternity, but it can really be contemptuous pity. It is no better than “my man” from a gentleman, or “unfortunate sister” from a lady, or “my friend” from a Nonconformist minister. In London it may be different, and I should say that a navvy would use it in a friendly manner. But from the Wallingford baker’s man on a country round it means “Poor ——,” perhaps even “Dirty ——.” By this time essays on walking and walking tours begin to wear very thin. You pitch Stevenson at any rate over the hedge, and cannot find a place suitable for —— and ——. Borrow is safe, but then, he got really tired, and did not regard walking as an amusement. I have no doubt that he had learned to stick out his under-lip at the end of some of his marches.

Nevertheless, stumping along on a shoeful of blisters is not bad when you are out of Royston and have Pen Hills upon your left; low, insignificant, restful stretches upon your right; and Odsey before you in the cool of evening. For some distance there was no hedge on the left side of the road beyond the town, and the turf, marked for many yards with tracks made before metalling, rose up to considerable swells of chalk cloven sometimes gently and sometimes abruptly into coombes, some smooth as lawns, some beautiful with trees. Tumuli were scattered over this smoothest sward, and down from the ridge of the high land came deep, curving trackways. At Odsey beyond they have found with Samian pottery the shin bones of men who ran instead of walking. People were walking for pleasure on the grass up above, and children were laughing somewhere near but out of sight.

It was one of those delicious cool ends to perfect days which give a man the feeling of having accomplished something, but by no means compel him to inquire what. The road still possessed the hills even when it was enclosed on both sides, for it kept broad margins, the hedges were low between it and the grass or corn land, and it mounted higher and higher. They were the gentlest of chalk hills crested with trees—Thrift Hill, Gallows Hill, Crouch Hill, Pott’s Hill, Rain Hill, Wheat Hill, Windmill Hill, and Weston Hills—and at their highest points there were villages, like Therfield, Kelshall, Sandon, Wallington, Clothall, Weston. I had still four or five miles to walk at the feet of these hills, through a silence undisturbed by the few market carts at long intervals. I am glad now that I walked them. It seems to me now that my purely physical discomfort intensified the taste of the evening’s beauty, as it certainly made sweeter the perfection of enjoyment which I imagine possible at such an hour and in such a place. The road was serpentining very little, but enough to conceal from me for a long time the chief wayside marks ahead, as well as my destination. I could always see about a quarter of a mile before me, and there the white ribbon disappeared among trees. And this quarter-mile was agreeable in itself, and always suggesting something better beyond, though itself a sufficient end, if need were. Moreover, I was looking out for a house which I had never seen or heard described. A wood-pigeon came sloping down from the far sky with fewer and fewer wing strokes and longer and longer glidings upon half-closed wings as it drew near its home tree. It disappeared; another flew in sight and slanted downward with the same “folding-in” motion; and then another. The air was silent and still, the road was empty. The birds coming home to the quiet earth seemed visitors from another world. They seemed to bring something out of the sky down to this world, and the house and garden where I stayed at last were full of this something. I heard rooks among the tall beeches of just such a house as I knew I ought to have been able to imagine, with the help of the long white road and the gentle hills, the tall trees, the rooks, and the evening. There were flowers and lawns, beeches and sycamores, belonging to three centuries, perhaps more, and stately but plain red brick of the same date, and likely to endure for a yet longer period, if not by its own soundness, then by its hold upon the fantasy of men who build nothing like it.

CHAPTER V
THIRD DAY—ODSEY TO EDLESBOROUGH, BY BALDOCK, LETCHWORTH, ICKLEFORD, LEAGRAVE, AND DUNSTABLE

The rooks had been talking in my sleep much too long before I started next day. Their voices and the blazing window-blind described the morning for me before I stirred. I could see and feel it all; and if I could write it down as I saw and felt it this would be a good book and no mistake. The long grasses were dewy cool, the trees lightly rustling and full of shadow, the sky of so soft a greyness that it seemed an impossible palace for a sun so gorgeous. The thrushes sang, and seeing a perfect crimson strawberry, I picked it, and found that it was as hot as a strawberry can be, and therefore at its sweetest and richest.

Deadman’s Lane, Baldock.

Winding a little more than before, and still closely attended on its right by the Great Northern Railway, the road entered Baldock, or rather it approached that town, and then, refusing to be a main road any longer, turned off before the Toll Bar Inn to the right. Thus it dipped into the northern edge of the town close to the railway and the station, as a long, sordid lane called Bygrave Lane or Deadman’s Lane, past the gasworks, past the “Stag,” the “Swan,” and the “Black Eagle” in a row. This was the abode of the “Sand Boys,” who sold sand all over the country, and bought bones and rabbit skins. It is also the reputed scene of the death of Gypsy Smith’s wife and his own conversion. Past the nobly named public-houses the narrow street became a lane, rutted and half green, and edged on the left with nettles of wondrous height and density. The railway was closer and closer on the right; on the left was a new cemetery behind tall railings. At length the railway passed under the road. I was now again between high, extravagant hedges of thorn and wild roses. The road was wider, but rough, half green and half rutted, and in places divided into two by a thicket of blackthorn standing in the midst. A nightingale was singing among the roses above some old chalk pits.

After a road from a level crossing had come in on the left, I kept straight on along the right side of a hedge dividing the railway from a big field, and past the left edge of a shallow chalk pit. There was no road here, but several tracks went through the long grass, and mistake was impossible. On the right two paths went off to some of the new houses of the Letchworth Garden City, and to a building gigantically labelled “IDRIS.” This was, I suppose, the temple of this city’s god, though the name, except as the Welsh equivalent for Arthur, was unknown to me. They say now that Arthur was a solar hero, and when in doubt men might do worse than to worship the sun, if they could discover how. At Letchworth they were endeavouring to do so. The sun was not benign or even merciful in return for these efforts. He responded by telling the truth with his most brilliant beams, so that the city resembled a caravan of bathing machines, except that there was no sea and the machines could not conveniently be moved. At the end of the big field I crossed a new road and entered among the elders and thorn trees of the edge of Norton Common. Here there were several parallel paths, and on the left behind a hedge was a garden-city street called “Icknield Way.” This represented the line of the road, but whether this or the path on the other side of the hedge was more on the old course I cannot say. Past the houses “Icknield Way” ceased to be a road fit for perambulators and became a rough track, chiefly used for carrying building materials. It followed along a hedge and past a sand pit, in one place a little hollowed out. It was miserable with the rank grass of newly “developed” districts. After a road came in from under the railway on the left, it began to curve away north and leave the railway. Once more it was between hedges; but with all its vicissitudes it had remained a parish boundary all the way from Slip Inn Hill near Odsey. It was going uphill, and presently I could see not only the corn, sainfoin, and houses growing round about, but in the south-west the line of hedged and wooded hills above Ippollitts, Offley, and Pirton. Letchworth was still in sight, like so many wounds on the earth and so much sticking-plaster. But, though behind me, it was fascinating, like all these raw settlements. It is a curious pleasure to see them besieged by docks and nettles, and, as sometimes happens, quietly overcome by docks and nettles. They look new until suddenly they are unvenerably old. Letchworth may turn out to be an exception, but as I hurried through it, some back gardens, some forlorn new roads, and the tune of “She’s off with the wraggle-taggle gipsies, oh!” sent my thoughts mysteriously but irresistibly to the desolate new-old settlements I have known.

The Ford, Ickleford.

Ickleford Church.

At the hill-top the road made westward, a shady hedge on the left, sunny sainfoin on the right, and arrived at Wilbury Camp. The north side of the camp touched the Bedfordshire border. The high, irregular earth walls overgrown with thorn trees made an uneven and much delved enclosure, where it was impossible to distinguish gravel pit from camp, and through this hollow and among its thorns went the path I took instead of along the southern hedge and wall, which appears to be the canonical Icknield Way and the parish boundary. Across it goes the hard road coming from Brook End over Wilbury Hill and down to Walsworth. On the other side of this road it was a wide, many-tracked, green way, winding through open cornland down to the trees of Ickleford; and on its left, at the convenient distance of two miles, the tower and roof clusters and trees of Hitchin replaced the spots of Letchworth. There were hedges with elms for the mowers to rest under, and on the right was the white wall of a chalk pit, with roses and privet overhanging, and black bryony and elder growing below. The way descended to be crossed by two lines of railway a few yards apart. Between the two it was grassy and elm-shaded. Beyond the second the road forded the River Hiz, and even waded in it for thirty yards or so. Ickleford village had a green with chestnut trees, a “Green Man” and an “Old George,” and a church wall decorated regularly all over with an incised design of saws, swords, handcuffs, crowns, etc. The road passed St. Catherine’s Church and the “Green Man” on its right, and went out of Ickleford at “Ickleford Gate” on the Hitchin road. This it crossed and went against the course of the River Oughton, which flowed and turned a mill a little below upon the left. At first it was a green-edged road of good surface, with hedges and telegraph posts, making for the downs, for Telegraph Hill, Deacon Hill, and Tingley Wood, between Pirton and Lilley. But at the mill, its modern use gone, the road was once more a broad, green way dipping with many ruts down among the willowy buttercup meads of the Oughton. Doves cooed; blackcaps poured out their cool, fiery wine of melody; and the cattle meditated about nothing under the elms. The road was rising again, crossed the Pirton and Hitchin road at Punch’s Cross, and entered through the gate of an oat-field, travelling along its hedge and out by another gate. At Punch’s Cross it became a parish boundary, which it ceased to be at the River Hiz. Up on the right above the ploughland lay Tingley Wood and a beech clump. On the left charlock and corn divided by elms and hedges extended to a wall of low wooded hills. Out of the field the way was a green-hedged lane entered under the rustling welcome of beech trees. Then it became part of the main road from Barton-in-the-Clay to Hitchin, and at the turning southward to Offley a boundary between Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. This part of the road was partly on a terrace along the side of a hill sloping to the south, and there were roses and traveller’s joy buds in the hedges. At one point the land on the left had apparently been too steep to enclose at its lower side, and the hedge was at the top of this steep portion, which was therefore a broad, rough triangle of open turf beside the road. Beyond this the way had good grass banks or level margins with hazel and thorn hedges, and ash or elm trees above them. It was drawing near to a rough and thorny chalk hill called Deacon Hill, and as it was bent on climbing over this range, the modern road left it, and, going westward, avoided the heights above three hundred feet. The Icknield Way took a south-westerly course, and mounted steeply up as a green, almost rutless lane between high hedges. It was green and even as soon as it left the hard road, and now for the first time made a real bold ascent of the chalk. It looked more like a part of the Ridgeway, but for the high hedges, than the unadventurous road that I travelled from Thetford. There were daisies all over it, and roses hung upon either side. Nearing the hill-top it narrowed, and had steep banks on the left with brambles and thorns over them. But right to the top it kept those high hedges. Below on the right lay a neat, green-hedged vale and a long, gentle slope covered with woods or horizontal lines of trees up to a straight low ridge. Telegraph Hill, which the road crossed, is over six hundred feet high. It is difficult to understand why it should make this climb instead of circumventing the hill by a sharp curve southward. It never again does such a thing or rises to such an altitude. At the summit a green ridgeway leaves it. It was easy to glide into this and wind with it to Lilley Hoo and Lilley. The track was a hedgeless, green band among thistles and isolated thorns, glittering dark hollies, and ash trees. Here and there the sheep rested in the shade of a little bramble and thorn thicket, where an oak or ash buried its trunk, and roses climbed. The clear, high tinkling of the bells on still wandering sheep was almost as gay as if the bells were on dancers’ feet. The turf on the track was the finest, and was bounded by a tussocky line on one side, if not both. And so it serpentined on the high, flat back of the hills, always among old, isolated thorns or small, clear-cut thickets.

On Telegraph Hill.

But this was not the Icknield Way, which went straight over Telegraph Hill, and steeply and deeply worn, down to a green lane on the other side, where it was joined on the left by another track descending from a little tumulus with two thorns on it. The green lane winding south-westward was broad, but the spread of the beeches on its left side was broader and roofed it wholly; the turf was better when this line of trees came to an end. Suddenly a chalk pit on the left narrowed it, and this narrowness had been continued on, and used for wheat as far as the next turning. Thenceforward it widened, and had rough hedges of elder and nettles, holly and ash, between it and the undulating corn. In front bulked the smooth ridge of Galley Hill. Past the turning to Offley there were four or five tracks parallel but on different levels, with an embanked one in the centre. Soon it was again on the turf of the Downs, curving around the right base of Galley Hill, the open land on the left, hedges and fields on the right; past the hill there were two hedges and ploughed land on either hand. Hereby was the entrance into Bedfordshire. Then it came almost at right angles to the straight mound of Dray’s Ditches, but turned to the right along it, followed by the parish boundary into the Luton and Bedford road. If, instead of going alongside the ditches, I had gone straight ahead upon the line of the way, I should have struck this road at the sixteenth milestone, and at the opposite turning to Leagrave which I actually took. The boundary, on the other hand, went on over the main road towards Houghton. The road down to Leagrave was an ordinary hedged road with narrow, green edges. After passing a little copse on the left I turned on the same side, by an ash a century old, into a broad green track to Limbury. It had hedges, but that on the left strayed away round a huge rushy space. Beyond this was the clean orange wall of a sand pit, and then a green field, and then the tree-tops, and the crowd of roofs and the tall chimneys of Luton, and in the midst a tower above all the rest. But the hedge returned and the way narrowed, and it had to cross Leagrave Marsh and the tiny Lea. There was a choice of road or path. Entering the brand-new, jerry-built, slated cages of combined Limbury and Leagrave Marsh, I turned to the right along Limbury Road, and found on my left the Icknield Way, giving its name to an estate and a new street.

Leagrave Marsh was evidently a pleasant little ford village before it became what it now seems to be—a safety-valve for Luton. The harsh, new streets led me to a rushy common threaded by the Lea, and bounded on my side by a road that crossed the stream with a bridge. At one side of the bridge the “Three Horse Shoes” faced over the common and along the water; ponies, traps, and dogs were clustered at the door in the sun. Their owners were either inside, getting hot, or lying on the grass over the way. But one driver was taking his horse and trap through the stream close to the bridge; and the whipped foam was shining and the spokes flashing. Some boys were paddling a little way above; and above them the village geese were nibbling among the rush tufts. In and out among horses and traps, men, dogs, boys, and geese, the martins were flying.

The Icknield Way went between the new houses and across the Midland Railway and so down a field rotten-ripe for building into Oak Road, which leads from old Leagrave into the Luton and Dunstable road. This road interrupted my way, which went formerly as a footpath straight across it and into the main road a little west of the Half-way House, between Dunstable and Luton. This path was ploughed up and its course only in part noticeable among the crops. The Luton and Dunstable road now looked like a river and the footpath a tiny brooklet whose drying up made no difference to the main stream. But in Robert Morden’s map of 1695 the “Icnal Way” is a clear, good road past Leagrave and into Dunstable, while the road to that town from Luton is parallel with the “Icnal Way,” and apparently the same as the road and footpath running half a mile south of the present road and just south of the Hatfield, Luton, and Dunstable branch of the Great Northern line. This main road was a substantial, broad, straightforward highway running along level ground and parallel to the downs on its left. There were a few beeches in its low hedges, and the margins of grass were of the ordinary width and rich in dust. Three or four miles of the clear hills, here and there crowned by trees, curved alongside and then slightly across my course. Opposite the turning to Houghton the lime works of Blow’s Down broke the green wall with white.

Dunstable Downs.

As I entered Dunstable there was already a touch of night in the light, and it fell with a sad blessing upon the low-towered church and the sheep grazing in the churchyard up above the road on my left. The crossing of the Icknield Way and Watling Street makes Dunstable. Watling Street was wider and had the town hall, the post office, the bigger shops, and the chief inns. The Icknield Way, known first as Church Street, then as West Street, was the more rustic, humble, and informal, and beyond the crossing it had trees by its side; and this seemed natural and just. It had become thoroughly suburban before leaving the town and coming to the smooth high downs on the left, where children were playing and girls walking about above a field of barley and charlock beside the road. On my right there was a wide border of level down turf and no hedge between it and the corn. The downs, or I should say the Chiltern Hills, proceeded majestically southward, but six or seven miles away advanced somewhat to the east, half clothed in woods, until the bare Beacon Hill stopped steep and abrupt above a high plateau of cornland which fell away into a broad, wooded lowland on my right. Round this Beacon I could see that my road would bend; I thought I could see the ledge it must follow. In that lower land on my right there were several rises. Such was the smooth, easy sweep of Toternhoe, close to Luton; such the wooded heave upon which rose the dark, noble tower of Edlesborough Church; and such the terraced hill near Edlesborough, with a few thorns on the slopes between the terraces, and at its foot a long, neat orchard of late plums or “prunes.” The broad, wayside strip on the right hand sometimes showed the old course of my way much below the level of the present road; and after Well Head this lower course was beyond and below the modern hedge. On the left, at Well Head, I noticed a little hill on this side of the main ridge very prettily terraced, with thorns on the slopes between the terraces. At Well Head a deep, smooth-sided cleft winds away to Dolittle Mill, with the first waters of the Ouse. A similar cleft a mile or so beyond, at the Cross Waters, close to the entrance into Buckinghamshire, carries water to the mills of Eaton Bray. As I came out of Dunstable I thought there could be nothing there equal to the sweep of the downs before me, ending in the wooded Ivinghoe Hills and the Beacon. But when I had gone more than half-way towards the end of the sweep I looked back and saw that the downs behind me were equal to those I was approaching, and even advanced a little out of the straight like the others, ending also in a promontory above Dunstable. The air was now still and the earth growing dark and already very quiet. But the sky was light and its clouds of utmost whiteness were very wildly and even fiercely shaped, so that it seemed the playground of powerful and wanton spirits knowing nothing of earth. And this dark earth appeared a small though also a kingly and brave place in comparison with the infinite heavens now so joyous and so bright and out of reach. I was glad to be there, but I fell in with a philosopher who seemed to be equally moved yet could not decide whether his condition was to be described as happiness or melancholy. He talked about himself. He was a lean, indefinite man; half his life lay behind him like a corpse, so he said, and half was before him like a ghost. He told me of just such another evening as this and just such another doubt as to whether it was to be put down to the account of happiness or melancholy. He said that he had been digging all day in a heavy soil, often jarring the fork against immovable flints, lifting more often than not a weight of clay only just short of the limit of his strength. He had thought and thought until his brain could do nothing but remain aware of dull misery and the violent shocks of the hard work. But his eyes saw the sun go down with a brief pomp of crimson soon covered up by funereal drifts, and these in their turn give way to a soft blue, full of whitest stars and without one cloud. They saw the far hills once more take on their night look of serene and desolate vastness, and felt the meadows of the valley become dark and uncertain, the woods much duller but distinct. The woods immediately below him on the hill-side thickened and appeared more wild and impossible; the road winding up between them like a long curl of smoke was wholly concealed. Slowly the solid world was whittled away. The lights of the small town half-way across the valley, towards the hills, came out.

Beacon Hill, Ivinghoe.

As an owl in the woods announced the triumph of night with one large, clear note, he straightened himself slowly and painfully among the clods. It would have been easier to continue his toil than to do this, but he did it, and then cleaned the prongs of his upright fork with the toe of his boot, prolonging the action as if he either hoped to arrive now at some significant conclusion with its help or feared the next step that had to be taken. When he could no longer clean the prongs he raised his head and looked out beyond the woods over the valley to the far hills. The quiet, the magnitude of space, the noble lines of the range a little strengthened his spirit. He remained still. The surface of his hands was dry to brittleness; he was stiff and yet unsatisfied with the result of his labour; he felt the dulness of his eyes; and no thing or person in the world or out of it came into his mind with any conscious delight or quickness; yet he still looked along the ridges of the hills from one end to the other, from star to star, without a thought save the sleeping, underlying one that he was growing old.

A motor-car climbed nervously up the invisible hill-road, the lamps of it darting across a hundred little spaces between one tree and another of the vague woods. It left the silence stronger than ever.

The man leaned with his chest upon his hands, which were upon the handle of his fork. Only a few years ago—either three or four—he could not have ascertained by any searching of memory—he had been young, and treated with contempt or with pitiful kindness by those of more years. But now he had come by unknown ways to feel that he differed from mature men, not by anything positive that could be called youth, but only by some undefinable lack which condemned him to a kind of overblown immaturity. Thus when he consciously or unconsciously demanded a concession such as might be due to youth for some act or attitude, he met, in the individual or in society in some corporate form or other, a blankness or positive severity at which he recoiled with open but as yet uncertainly comprehending eyes. Of young men he was now sometimes jealous; of middle-aged men afraid and no longer defiant. Towards the contemporaries with whom he had shared thought and experience for some years he felt jealousy, if he seemed to have outstripped them in the unwilling race; fear, if it was himself that lagged; and towards only one or two a fair and easy freedom, and that only intermittently. Therefore no more destitute and solitary man looked that night on the stars. Yet they were as bright and the hills under them as noble as those we saw to-day on the road from Dunstable.

Suddenly he awakened and thrilled to the sound of a woman’s voice singing alone somewhere away from where he stood. He forgot who and where he was. He was no longer weary and muddied by self-supporting thoughts. His imagination went out of him and grasped each note simply and boldly. Where there had been nothing, there the liquid voice mounted in its beautiful, unseen form amidst the darkness. The singer was among the dark trees, probably in the climbing road to one side of him; the curve of that ascent, always a thing of simplicity and nobleness, was now glorious, romantic as it soared out of the valley to the clear heights.

Either the singer was walking slowly up or she was riding, but no footfall or turn of wheel was to be heard. It was a powerful voice, confident and without care. It leapt up with a wild, indolent flight, for one short verse of indistinguishable words, in a melody exulting in the wildness of love and pride of youth, and then fell upon silence. That silence bore its part also.

But the listener had no sooner lost the first joy over the insurrection of melody, begun to consider—whilst waiting breathless for its return—who she might be, what she was doing now, whether a lover was walking beside her, when she sang again, higher up the road. The first note rose up to the highest stars, clear and fresh and having a power like light over the gloom. Other notes hovered after it at the same height, and then with one swoop as of an eagle fell to the earth and silence before even a verse was finished. A low laugh drawn out very long an instant afterwards confirmed the first impression of the singer’s ease and joyousness. The man could see her neck lifted eagerly and her eyes flashing towards the lover or towards the stars, her lips parted, her breast heaving with deep draughts of the night and passion, her feet pacing with languid strength. He himself stood still as any tree in the ebb of the wind.

Oh, for a horse to ride furiously, for a ship to sail, for the wings of an eagle, for the lance of a warrior or a standard streaming to conquest, for a man’s strength to dare and endure, for a woman’s beauty to surrender, for a singer’s fountain of precious tones, for a poet’s pen!

He trembled and listened. The silence was unbroken; not a footstep or whisper was to be extracted from it by his eager and praying ear. He shivered in the cold. The last dead leaves shook upon the beeches, but the silence out there in that world still remained. She was walking or she was in her lover’s arms, for aught he knew. No sound came up to him where he stood eager and forlorn until he knew that she must be gone away for ever, like his lyric desires, and he went into his house and it was dark and still and inconceivably empty.