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....
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.