The first mention of the Devil’s Ditch is found in the Saxon Chronicle, in the year 905, when this land of the East Angles was described as laid waste by the northmen between the “Dyke” and the Ouse. It was under the Saxons that it was first imputed to the Father of Lies, whose name it still bears, and to whose strenuous labour, in the open-mouthed astonishment of those simple people, amazed at the many such gigantic earthworks they found in the land, they ascribed almost every other such remarkable object. The Normans, in a later age, not so credulous, knew it as St. Edmund’s Dyke; the jurisdiction of the Abbots of St. Edmundsbury extending thus far westward.

But this famous line of defence—for such it is—had really a less distinguished authorship. The Iceni, who at the time of the Roman conquest were a very much more civilised people than the Saxons of five hundred years later, constructed it as the rearward and strongest of the several such ramparts and ditches they had thrown across this only easy line of advance of a possible enemy into their country. A popular idea of the Iceni is that they were like the Picts of North Britain, who painted themselves a sky-blue, and considered that full dress. But they were far more advanced than anything so nearly allied to the ideals of the Garden of Eden, and would no more have owned kin even with such earlier inhabitants of their own East Anglia as the neolithic men, than we would stoop to call cousins with the gorillas. They had advanced beyond the condition of patriarchal communities and roving tribes, and had passed the intermediate stage of barter, to enter the more civilised one of a nation with a money currency and coin of its own. Icenian coins, in gold and silver, are well known to numismatists, and although the design on them, said by experts to be intended to represent a horse, is difficult to be recognised, still they are coins.

This figure of a horse occurring so constantly on these coins has sometimes led antiquaries to the ingenious conclusion that the neighbourhood of Newmarket, even thus early, was famous for horses, but that is a long shot, and very much in the dark.

A people of their calibre must have been quite capable of such military works as these dykes. This was their best effort and still speaks well for their energy. The ditch, on the western side, clearly showing that the work was a defence from dangers expected from that quarter, is twenty feet deep, and the bank, reared up in an acute angle, thirty feet above the level of the ground, thus presents a formidable climb, in all, of fifty feet. Add to these difficulties offered to an invader, the strong probability that the crest of the rampart was defended by a timber palisade, and we can clearly perceive that when these defences were manned by a determined people, the invasion of the Icenian country must have been a hazardous enterprise.

For seven miles the Ditch runs, from the waters of the Cam at Reach to the woods on the chalk hills of Wood Ditton. It is possible to walk along the summit of the bank most of the way, for, although rough and uneven pedestrian exercise, it is in general eighteen feet in breadth, and remarkably like an abandoned railway embankment. It is one of the many sites identified as the scene of Boadicea’s defeat by Suetonius Paulinus, but we are sceptical of this particular one, although the ancient tumulus on the outer face of the Ditch, still called the Two Captains, points to some forgotten conflict in which two leaders were slain and buried on the contested field.

Little is now left of this once prominent mound, once important enough to be marked on Ordnance maps, but now ploughed nearly flat. It stands in the third field from the road, on the right hand, a field now under corn, but until forty years ago a wood