It is this stretch of 75¼ miles that will now be explored. Bid farewell, traveller who would trace the Roman way, to the company of your fellow-men, for this is no frequented route, and towns and villages are few along its course. It begins by climbing out of Weedon and up to a gate, where those who will may trace it across a field. For those others who will not, an ancient divergence, forming a kind of elbow, preserves the continuity of roadway and brings the route over the Grand Junction Canal to Welford Station and Watford Gap, where the old route of the London and Coventry coach from Northampton to Hillmorton and Coventry, travelled by Dugdale in the seventeenth century, crosses this Roman way. The “New Inn” mentioned by him still stands here, but is now a farmhouse. The name of “Gap,” as applied to cross-roads, is very ancient. Curiously enough, a “Watford Gap” is to be found in Staffordshire, on the Birmingham and Lichfield Road.

Few houses are glimpsed in these first nine miles of the Watling Street. At a grim crossing of two high roads near Crick station, but with an appearance as solitary as though many miles remote from villages or railways, it suddenly ends, or continues only as a formidably rugged, grass-grown track. Here the explorer either finds himself daunted, or proves his mettle by plunging boldly forward, reckless of what may betide. For one thing, the telegraph-poles are faithful to the track, and where they lead who shall fear to follow? They conduct, in fact, steadily downhill along this green alley, and in a mile and a half, crossing two fields, bring one out to a flat and low-lying country, and to what the country-folk call the “hard road” again. Three miles of this, and a rise, with a cross-road to the right, leads to Dove Bridge, spanning the Warwickshire Avon. All around, here, there, and everywhere—at Lilbourne, Catthorpe, and Cave’s Inn—are speculative sites of the Roman station of Tripontium. For the last three miles the Watling Street has formed the boundary between Northants and Warwickshire, and henceforward, for eighteen miles more, it performs the same office for Warwickshire and Leicestershire. On the Leicestershire side, where the ground rises steeply beyond the little river, is a mysterious mound, called by the villagers of Lilbourne “Castle Hill”—an odd, evidently artificial hill, with two beech trees growing on its summit. Whether it be a Roman speculum, or look-out hill, or the grave-mound of some tribal king, ancient even when the Romans came, who shall say? “Tripontium” was named from three bridges that then crossed the Avon somewhere here, but they and their sites have vanished. Lilbourne itself lies down the right-hand lane, and is a village on the hither hillside, with a very dilapidated church by the little river, and a great huddled mass of grass-grown mounds in the water-meadows opposite. Within sight is the wayside railway station of Lilbourne, incongruous amid these forlorn relics of the past in this out-of-the-way corner of the country. Let no one think these mounds „to be the remains of a Roman camp: they are the only vestiges now left of the once proud Norman castle of Lilbourne.

Uphill, steep and rugged, goes the road to the outlying fringe of Catthorpe, that still continues to be known as “Catthorpe Five Houses,” even though they are now, and have long been, but three. From this hill-top the spires and roofs of Rugby are plainly visible by day, and by night the great junction spreads its station and signal-lights in a gorgeous illumination of white, red, and green.

Beyond, in the deep hollow where that latest of great trunk lines, the Great Central Railway, crosses over the road on a blue-brick archway, is “Cave’s Inn,” an inn no longer. “Cave’s Hole” they used to call it in old times, from its situation in this hollow. The lone house was kept in the long ago (that is to say, about 1680) by Edward Cave, grandfather of that Edward who founded the Gentleman’s Magazine, and was the friend of Johnson. His father, Joseph, was a younger son of the inn-keeping Edward, and, the entail of the family estate being cut off, was reduced to plying the cobbler’s trade at Rugby. The literary Edward was born in 1691 at the hamlet of Newton, a short distance off the Watling Street, between this and Catthorpe Five Houses.

It is an obviously Roman way—straight and uncompromising—that leads onward from Cave’s Inn to the cross-roads, at the suggestively lonely spot called “Gibbet,” the site in the “good old days” of a gallows-tree originally set up in 1687 for a certain Loseby who had “barbarously murdered” a man named Bunbury, and, being caught almost red-handed, was promptly executed. Nothing is left of “Loseby’s Gibbet,” as it is marked on old Warwickshire maps. The remains of it, together with the prehistoric tumulus on which it was erected, were swept away when the cross-road from Banbury and Daventry to Lutterworth was made, in 1730. A dense grove of trees at the fork of the roads to Lutterworth and Shawell marks the neighbourhood of the spot.

Beyond this Golgotha, the road dips to the reedy river “Swift”; a lazy little stream and not answerable to its name, as the traveller may see for himself by halting and leaning over Brunsford Bridge. Another solitary stretch conducts to Cross-in-Hand, where there are five roads, two old toll-houses, a modern red-brick cottage, a very fine distant view of Lutterworth church-tower—and not a mortal or immortal body or soul in sight. Ordnance maps mark a “Blackenhall” off to the right, a name that seems to fix the site of the deserted “aula,” or country seat, of some Roman notable, whose notability, in the passing of fifteen centuries, has vanished as though he had never been. “Willey Crossing,” where a branch of the Midland Railway bars the cyclist’s progress, only serves to emphasise the solitude, and the country girl, who in answer to the summons of the bell, opens the gates, stares at the strange spectacle of a wayfarer. Willey lies somewhere off to the left, but, so far as it affects the road, might be non-existent.

Up the steep road that now lies before the explorer, with the little church of Wibtoft peering over a shoulder of the hill on the left, and suddenly you are at High Cross, the famous crossing of the Watling Street and the Fosse Way—the great north-western road of the Romans and their not quite so great way that led out of Somerset through Gloucestershire, the shires of Worcester and Warwick, to Leicestershire and Lincoln.