High Cross is among the oddest and most perplexing of places. A multiplicity of roads and sign-posts are gathered together on the hill-top and the traveller, bedevilled with their number, and the shrubberies and the farmyards that mask them, is fain to halt and unravel the tangled skein. The Watling Street here slightly changes direction, so that its continuation to Atherstone, ten miles distant, is hidden round an angle. Other roads all round the compass lead, according to the testimony of the sign-posts, to Rugby, 10 miles; Coventry, 12; Daventry, 18; Lutterworth, 6; and lastly, Leicester, 13 miles. The road to Leicester—the Roman city of RatÆ—lies along the Fosse Way, and that is now not a road at all, but a meadow, with meadows beyond it; traces of the old way only discoverable by the diligent antiquary. Moreover, the field-gate, padlocked and bristling with the most barbaric of barbed wire, emphasises “no road” and gives the sign-post the lie.

High Cross is no misnomer, so far as the adjective goes. It is high: very high. Illimitable vales, shading off from green foreground to indigo distance, are unfolded below. Fifty-seven churches are said to be visible from this vantage-point, and goodness only knows how many counties. Fifty-seven churches! Say a hundred and fifty-seven, or more, if you knew on what particular pin-points in that view to look.

There is a monument at High Cross, erected in 1712, both to direct travellers in the way they should go and to mark this supposed site of the Roman station of VennonÆ. Nowadays the pillar is so completely screened by a little groove of hollies, sycamores, firs, beeches, and laburnums that, although it stands at an angle of the junction, none but those who know exactly where to look are likely to find it. A little wicket-gate leads up to it, in the centre of the grove—a nondescript pile of moulded stones and red-brick, surmounted with what look like fragments of Roman columns. The whole structure bears the appearance of having been built of architectural fragments retrieved from some early eighteenth-century rubbish heap. It is not improved, nor its Latin inscriptions rendered any clearer, by the countless pocket-knives that have been set to work upon it. High Cross is a lonely place, but its loneliness is belied by this multitude of names and initials, some dating back to 1733.

The story of how this pillar came to be erected here is told in the Proceedings of the Warwickshire justices in the Easter Sessions of 1711. As the Watling Street divides that county and Leicestershire, a conference of the justices of the two shires was called, when it was resolved to “build something memorable in stone” on this site, not only to mark the whereabouts of VennonÆ and to direct travellers, but “also for that it was esteemed the centre of England.” The cost of this “something memorable” was £83, contributed in equal shares by the two shires. The inscriptions were composed by a Mr. Greenway, a schoolmaster of Coventry. Englished, the principal one runs:—

Traveller, if you seek the footsteps of the ancient Romans, here you may find them. Hence their most famous military ways, crossing one another, proceed to the utmost limits of Britain. Here the Vennones had their settlement, and at the first mile hence along the street, Claudius, the commander of a cohort, had his camp, and at the same distance along the Fosse, his tomb.

“Cleycester” the Saxons named the deserted Roman camp of VennonÆ, that stretched along the road towards Wibtoft. Even yet the whistling ploughman occasionally turns up relics of it, in the form of broken pottery and defaced coins. The tomb of Claudius remained, until quite modern times, along the Fosse Way. It was a tumulus, overgrown with brambles, and known as “Cloudsley Bush.” No traces of it are now left.

Ahead, rather more than a mile off the road, the smoky chimneys of Hinckley and Burbage make inky and fantastical wreaths in the sky. Smockington is the name of a hamlet in a bottom, with some reminiscences of a coaching age. Beyond is the “Three Pots” public-house; and again, beyond that, a deserted Primitive Methodist Chapel, standing woe-begone by a canal. Caldecote lies off to the left in another few miles, opposite to the “Royal Red Gate” inn; its name inviting an exploration of the place, for there are those who explain the frequently recurring name of “Caldecote” along the line of Roman roads to mean “cold cot”—a variant of “Coldharbour,” that equally common place-name in such situations. The cold cots and the cold harbours had once been, according to this theory, ruined and deserted Roman villas, in whose rootless and chilly recesses the first people who dared to travel after Roman Britain was ravaged by savage tribes took such cold comfort as they might; not daring to light a warming fire, lest its blaze should bring lurking bandits and murderers to their cheerless refuge.

From this point of view Caldecote is disappointing, for nothing Roman is visible there. It is just a tiny village, with a modernised Hall, and in the Park, less than a stone’s throw from the house, the little church. But it is a place with a story; for it was here, on August 28th, 1642, that an attack was made upon the Hall, then the residence of Colonel Purefoy, a noted Republican. The Colonel was at Coventry, and the house in charge of his wife, Dame Joan, and his son-in-law, Master George Abbott, when a raiding-party, said to have been under the command of Prince Rupert, appeared and demanded its surrender. Fortunately the inmates had warning of their approach, and when they would have forced an entrance, the soldiers found doors and windows barred. In the affray that followed, Dame Joan fired first, bringing down her man, and the garrison of men and women servants, headed by Master George, gave so good an account of themselves that the Royalists drew off with a loss of three officers and fifteen soldiers killed. Caldecote Hall was not molested again. Memorials of Dame Joan and Master George still remain in the little church.