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