The road on leaving Newmarket, at the crest of the High Street, branches in many directions from where a modern clock tower stands, like a policeman, in the parting of the ways. The Clock Tower, which, as a prominent and venerated landmark, and one of the principal features of Newmarket, it behoves us, in all humility, to spell with capital letters, was erected by one “Charley” Blanton, owner of Robert the Devil, in honour of Victoria the Good. The Clock Tower is Blanton’s, but the antithesis is our very own. Beyond this point the roads are reduced to two: that on the left leading direct to Thetford and Norwich; the right-hand fork conducting to Thetford by the loop road through Bury St. Edmunds. We will examine this road in detail before taking the direct route.

This is the “Bury side” of the town mentioned in the Jockey Club notices of the gallops available for exercising the horses, and the triangular stretch of common in the fork of the roads is the place referred to on all such notices as “the Severals,” a name here in direct contradiction to its general meaning, which is an enclosed, as opposed to a common, field.

A busy day on the Severals is a pretty sight, for it is the place where the frisky yearlings are trained to obedience. Here you see them, cantering round and round, at the end of a rope, rejoicing in their youth, young and silly, before they have learnt their business in life, and, with their manes and long flowing tails not yet docked, and their limbs not grown to the lankiness of the full-grown racer, the most beautiful of animals. Their triumphs, and equally the anti-climax of their after-careers as cab-horses, and their final conversion into ha’porths of cats’ meat on skewers, are mercifully hidden from them.

The road to Thetford through Bury is a lonely and, on the whole, a dull route, but it begins in lordly style, with lengthy rows of portentous racing establishments in all the showy glory of long gravelled drives and imposing gates. The later history of domestic architecture is unrolled before you, as you go along the Bury road, in mid-Victorian grey brick and stucco, with gas-globes like unto the lamps of the Metropolitan Railway; in later Victorian white Suffolk brick with string-courses of red brick set angle-wise in a style alleged to be decorative; and in the “Queen Anne” plus Victorian Renaissance composite style of these latter days. The Edwardian style is still to seek. We need not study to tell who lives where, because the merest nonentities invariably live in the most ornate houses, and, with the varying fortunes of the Turf and them that fleet their little day upon it, those who flaunt so bravely this year are the next season gone no man knoweth whither; and few, except their creditors, care.

At last the houses end, and we are upon the open road, with the roadside plantation of firs, called the Long Belt, on the right, and the heaths and downs on the left, stretching away until they are lost in distance and in the harrs of the Fens. This, for the cyclist, is an express route, but we must not, for that reason, forget to pull up at the cross-roads, where a sign-post points in one direction to Chippenham and in the other to Moulton. Halt awhile and notice the great grassy mound beside that sign-post, for it is a spot known to the villages round about, and in Newmarket, as the “Boy’s Grave.” The boy thus handed down to fame was, according to the traditions of the countryside, a shepherd boy who lost a sheep from his flock, and, afraid to go to his employer and acknowledge it, hanged himself here—from the sign-post, say some more credulous than their fellows. A big boy, and even a giant, you, looking at this mound, might think; but its size is due to the care of the road-menders, who not only keep it in order, but bank it up with turf cut from the selvedges of the wayside.

Legends are not rare in this neighbourhood. Indeed, along the by-road in the direction of Moulton one reaches Folly Hill, the crest of the downs can be seen from here, with a fragment of wall and a clump of beech-trees on its summit, and a story of its own in the making. Here, in fact, we are peculiarly fortunate, for on Folly Hill it is possible to note the genesis of a legend and to record it ere time has evolved a story, full-blown and mysterious, out of very matter-of-fact materials. A story of sorts is, indeed, already current in Newmarket, where the enquiring stranger after things in general can obtain some finely inaccurate information as to what he may expect to see on Folly Hill, or “God’s Evil,” as it is alternatively known. With this he is prepared to find a stone pillar in a wood, the sole relic of a house built, at some time unspecified, by “a man almost a millionaire,” unfortunately unnamed, but with the blackest of reputations.

There is not really (it may at once be said) any such pillar, but the gable-end of a ruined old red-brick house stands up against the sky on the hill-top, and is known to the farmer of Trinity Hall Farm, on which it stands, as “the Pilgrim.” The ploughmen know the beech clump on the hill as “Cobbler’s Bush,” because, according to their tale, “a ole cobbler what used to mend boots lived there. There’s a ole tree there what nobody mustn’t touch, because he planted it.”

“And what is that old building on the hill-top?”

“That’s a ole rewing they calls the Barks. Nobody mustn’t touch it.”

“Not touch it; why not?”

“Because the soldiers come to look at it.”

At that explanation a flood of light is thrown upon the name of “Barks.” It is the local pronunciation of “Barracks,” and that name comes, of course, from the “soldiers” who go to look at it. Who are those soldiers? Merely those who have at some time or other accompanied a surveying party of the Ordnance Survey, for map-making purposes. No doubt a fine gory embattled legend will be built on this some day, probably with Cromwell, that arch-villain of popular imagination, as the moving figure in it.

Passing over the Kennett at Kentford, where the ragged remnants of the old bridge even yet stand in the water, beside the new, and where the unusually good Flamboyant-traceried Gothic windows of the church, looking down from a roadside knoll, gladden the heart of the ecclesiologist, the character of the road becomes, like the life of a saint on earth—flat, featureless, dull, and uninteresting. Just as the follies and vices of the hardened sinner make the most readable biography, so do those scenic accidents that give steep hills and difficult roads make interest for the amateur of the picturesque. Higham station, with the spire of Barrow church peering over distant trees, is not of itself either remarkable or romantic, and in so far that it does not look its real age, the toll-house standing at the cross-roads is like those modern grandmothers whose jimp waists and springtide tresses are the wonder of their grandchildren.

Few signs of life vary the monotony of the flat fields, and when the roadside inn known as “Saxham White Horse,” and inappropriately endued with a coating of red wash, opens out ahead in one of the long perspectives, it is as though one had found an unexpected habitation in an empty land. Risby village shows some indications, off to the left hand, and, for so unpromising a district, is remarkably picturesque, with rugged dingles and ridges, and a round-towered old church in a tree-embowered lane looking as though it had been designed by Morland. It is an Early English church, without aisles, but with a lofty chancel arch on whose either side are elaborate stone tabernacles. A slip of brass on the chancel floor records that

Returning to the road, a detour made on the other side of it, to Little Saxham church, reveals another, and finer, tower. A great deal of mystery has been made of the round-towered churches of East Anglia, and antiquaries of a bygone age expended much unnecessary ingenuity in seeking some out-of-the-way reason of ritual or defence for their existence; but the reason of their being is simple enough. They are found, almost exclusively in England, in these eastern counties, where building-stone does not exist. Norfolk has no fewer than 125 of these round towers, and Suffolk 40. Essex has 7, and Cambridgeshire only 2. The greatest number are found where flint is plentiful, for they are constructed chiefly of that material, and the circular walls have that shape because it is thus possible to dispense with the stone quoins necessary for binding the angles of square buildings. In a word, the round towers are round for the same reason that compels a man to wear a silver watch when he would like a gold chronometer—they were less expensive.

Here, at Little Saxham, we have a particularly fine example, of Norman date. It is probable that in this case a desire existed, for some reason now lost to us, to make a greater show than customary, for the tower here is taller than most. Its lower stages are in severely plain flint-work, but the upper storey is quite elaborate and wholly faced with stone.

An elaborate monument to Lord Crofts fills one side of a chapel in Little Saxham church. He was one of Charles II.’s merry companions, but here is made to look sufficiently unhappy. The effigies of himself and his wife are shown in painful semi-reclining attitudes, as though they would very much like to get up, but could not. My lord’s expression, underneath his Baron’s coronet, is particularly agonised.

The uneventful road on to Bury St. Edmunds is brought to a conclusion by the barracks, the first harbinger of the town, at the outer end of the long wide street called Risby Gate