We regain the high road at Littlebury, a rural village whose church is said to be built within the lines of a Roman encampment. It may be so, but the Eye of Faith is required to perceive any relics of it, although the natural hillock it stands upon, overlooking the river Cam, must be the “little bury” of the Saxon, once guarding the passage of that stream, and whose title has now crystallised into the place-name. Littlebury was the birthplace of Winstanley, the cocksure and unfortunate designer of the Eddystone Lighthouse, who perished with the destruction of his building. The house where he was born was pulled down many years ago, and it is ill work questing for the site of it. Your ordinary villager is no hero-worshipper, and fails to understand such a search as this. His mind is evenly divided in speculating whether you be a fool or a rogue, and all he has to say is, “I’ve lived here arl me loife, and niver hard tell on’t. Pirraps they knaws him at the Post Orfice.” But they don’t.

The only person whom the present writer met at Littlebury who did know was stone deaf, and questions had to be put by the slow and cumbrous process of writing. The house stood on the right-hand side of the cross-road that goes from the church to the water-mill. Its site is now a little elm-covered mound in a meadow.

Passing from here along the river-bordered road, within sight of Little Chesterford, we leave Essex and come into Cambridgeshire, where the village of Great Chesterford is planted down on the further side of the river Cam. A gaunt fork of the roads here presents itself to the view, with an ugly inn at the parting of the ways, a shattered windmill to the left, on a hillside, and the railway running on to Cambridge through Great Chesterford station, with a forest of tall signal-posts outlined against the sky, and the puffings, snortings, and crashings of trains sounding continually, far into the night.

We do not merely leave the modern county of Essex and enter Cambridgeshire at this point, but change our soil as well, coming at once into a chalk country of bare and inhospitable downs, completely altering the nature of the road and keeping a forbidding solitude, without sign of the habitations of men, and only the occasional dull tinkle of a sheep-bell to hint even of farming interests.

Mark well this road onwards from Great Chesterford, for it is the line of the Icknield Way, and here, at the crossing of the Cam, we enter the one-time Icenian kingdom, the territory of that great people whom CÆsar himself, in the name “Cenimagni” he gave them, called great. This country of the Iceni, comprising (to use that favourite word of the auctioneers) what we now know as Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire, was a country pre-eminently distinguished from other parts of England by its ancient inaccessibility. We hear much in our own times of England’s “splendid isolation,” but within this island of Britain there was then, in this country of the Iceni, an isolation quite as thorough, if not so splendid; the river Stour and the oozy morasses spreading on its either banks dividing it most thoroughly from what we now call Essex, then a part of the nation of Trinobantes; and the whole of the western and north-western Icenian border was divided from the present Northants and Lincolnshire by the Ouse and the wide-spreading meres and morasses of the Fens. Only along the ridges of chalk downs stretching from Haverhill to Linton on the Essex border, or from Great Chesterford on to those other chalk downs of Royston was there any line of advance dryshod, and long lengths of those ridges were in those remote times covered with almost impenetrable woods. Thus the Icknield Way was the readiest, and almost only, route to or from the country of the Iceni, for friend or foe. It led, this “Icen hilde weg,” or Via Iceniana, out of the south-western parts of England, from the neighbourhood of Weymouth to Old Sarum, Marlborough, the Berkshire White Horse, East Ilsley, Dunstable, and Baldock, on to Royston and Ickleton, hard by this village of Great Chesterford we have now reached. It was never a made road, and in places branches out into several routes, but it was always the clearest of trackways, and owes its preservation over many miles to its course lying so greatly out of the way of agricultural operations, along the crests of the chalk hills, where the plough never comes and the faint footsteps of prehistoric man are undisturbed.

The existence of such a continuous track far out of the bounds of the Icenian realm, and the persistence among the peasantry of the different shires and counties of its old name under the transparent disguises of Hickling, Acheling, Hackney Way, and other variants, point not only to a considerable intercourse between the several peoples of this island, but also to the strong personality of the Iceni, who could thus imperishably impress their name on the long route, far from their own frontiers.

They were, however, at pains to protect themselves and that part of the Way which formed the entrance into their own country, and the traveller still sees, as he journeys on to Newmarket, the means they adopted to that end, in the various ditches and ramparts athwart the road. This was the weakest part of their frontier, and thus it is that along these sixteen miles to Newmarket we find the way to have been barred by three strong earthworks, stretching on the one hand to the primeval forests on the hill-tops and on the other to the impassable fens. These are the Brent, or Pampisford Ditch, over two miles in length, between Abington Park and Pampisford; the Fleam, or Balsham Dyke, from the heights of Balsham to Fulbourn Fen and the Cam at Fen Ditton, nine miles long as the crow flies, but from its winding course some two miles longer; and that most famous of them all, the “Devil’s Ditch,” on Newmarket Heath, a seven miles’ barrier stretching from Wood Ditton, or “Ditch End,” to the fens at Reach.

The Icknield Way was thus well defended. It ran from Great Chesterford, partly along the course of the present road, to the neighbourhood of Newmarket, and thence into the heart of Suffolk and Norfolk to Norwich, the Venta Icenorum of the Romans. From Norwich its course is uncertain, but it is thought to have made for Yarmouth. Newmarket had not in those days come into existence, but the village of Exning, two miles from that town, marks the site of an ancient settlement. From Newmarket the Way becomes more difficult to trace, but it seems to have gone by Kentford, and to have crossed the Lark at Lackford. Thence over the high grounds of Icklingham Heath, by Old Elveden Gap, to Thetford, it is readily found, in a green track that may be followed for miles.

Not every East Anglian village whose name begins with Ick or Ix can claim to mark this principal line of communication. There are the twin villages of Icklingham St. James and Icklingham All Saints, and there are Ickworth, near Bury St. Edmunds, with Ixworth, Ixworth Thorpe, and Ickburgh in other parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, but they merely show those people to have been widely settled in the land, and that the Way, although their principal track, was by no means the only one.

Here, at Great Chesterford, where the bare swooping downs fall into the valley of the Cam—here, or at the neighbouring village of Ickleton—the Iceni would seem to have had a frontier town, and when the Romans so masterfully subjugated them, that conquering people established beside this little river their fortified post of Iciani, or, as some antiquaries would have it, Camboritum.

Whichever of those two places it really was, it is quite certain a post was established here. The adjoining fields have, time and again, yielded treasures in Roman coins and articles of bronze, gold, and brass, and skeletons, perhaps those of the owners of these finds, have been unearthed. Great Chesterford, perhaps once really great, is now quite a small place, but keeps its annual July fair, even though its market, dating from some time before Domesday Book, has long since decayed. The only sign of modern life in the village at this day is the new roller flour-mill by the Cam, using the electric light. Along the village street, a large, prominent red-brick house with an imposing portico, now in private occupation, is pointed out as the once important “Crown” coaching-inn and posting-house, and on the opposite side of the road another private house, formerly the “Waggon and Horses,” is shown by the villagers