From Dunstable the road enters a deep chalk cutting through the Downs—similar to, but not so great a work as, the chalky gash through Butser Hill, on the Portsmouth Road. In this mile-length of cutting the traveller stews on still summer days, blinded by the chalky glare; or, when it blows great autumnal guns and snow-laden winter gales, whistling and roaring through this exposed gullet with the sound of a railway train, freezes to his very marrow. Before this cutting was made, and the “spoil” from it used in the making of the great embankment that carries the road above the deep succeeding valley, this was a precipitous ascent and descent, and a cruel tax upon horses. Looking backwards, the embankment is impressive, even in these days of great engineering feats, and proves to the eye how vigorously the question of road reform was being grappled with just before the introduction of railways. From this point the famous Dunstable Downs are well seen, rising in bold terraces and swelling hills from the hollow, and receding in fold upon fold of treeless wastes where the prehistoric Icknield Way runs and the stone implements and flint arrows dropped by primitive man for lack of reliable pockets, are found.

The neolithic ancestor seems to have been particularly fond of these windy hillsides, and has left a great earthwork on them, ten acres in extent. Maiden Bower they call it nowadays—as grotesquely unsuitable a corruption of the original “Maghdune-burh” as may well be imagined. Its wind-swept terraces, distinctly seen from this embankment, scarce give the idea of a boudoir. Neolithic man was fond of these hillsides in a purely negative way. He would have preferred the warmer valleys, only in those remote times they were filled with dense and almost impenetrable forests, and abounded in the fiercest and wildest of wild animals, that came at night and preyed upon his family circle when the camp-fires burnt low. And when those wild creatures were not to be dreaded, there were always hostile tribes prowling in the thickets. So, on all counts, the Downs were safest. Where that remote ancestor built his bee-hive huts and banded together with his fellows to raise a fortified post, others—Britons, Romans, and Saxons—came and added more and taller earthworks, so that the tallest of them are sixteen feet high even now.

Shortly after leaving the embankment behind, a sign-post marks a lane to the left, leading to Tilsworth, a dejected village, looking as though agricultural depression had hit it hard. A deserted schoolhouse, by the church, is falling to pieces. Just within the churchyard is a headstone, standing remotely apart from the others. Its isolation invites scrutiny; an attention rewarded by this epitaph:—

That the deed was “brought to light” is obvious enough, but that is not what the author of those lines meant. The perpetrator of the deed was never discovered. Blackgrove Wood, a dark mass in a little hollow, is easily seen from the road. In another two miles Hockliffe is reached.