The ditchwater-dull town of Bury comes to an end with Northgate Street and its continuation of “Out-Northgate”; past the curious railway station built in the Jacobean style, and presenting an odd likeness to some ancient mansion of the Hatfield House type, through whose centre a railway has been driven, leaving only the wings standing. Everything is on the largest scale: broad roads, with few people in them; great brick railway bridge over them; tall cupola’d towers of the station looking down upon them, and roomy houses facing them. Resultant emptiness and chilly vastness, infinitely uncomfortable and unhomely.

At the end of Out-Northgate, looking upon the footpath, are the shattered remains of St. Saviour’s Hospital, very small and unobtrusive. It is possible to stand here the livelong day and challenge the passers-by with questions about this old ruin, and to find when day is done that a monumental ignorance prevails upon the subject. Yet it is an historic place, for it was here that, according to tradition, the good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester was found strangled in 1446.

At the “Toll-house” inn the road forks, continuing on the right to Fornham St. Martin and Thetford along the dullest of roads. Away to the left hand is Fornham St. GeneviÈve, the scene of the obscure Battle of Fornham, fought in 1173. That was a short-lived rebellion crushed here in that year at the passage of the little river Lark. The aggrieved Earl of Leicester, striving against Henry II. and flying the country, had returned with an army of Flamand mercenaries, and, marching across country, made for St. Edmundsbury. He had come thus far when he was met by a strong force opposing any further advance, and completely routed near the church. It remained for modern times to discover the bodies of the many slain on this occasion. A hoary and decayed ash-tree that from time immemorial had grown at the crest of a great mound was being demolished, when at its roots the awe-struck countrymen uncovered a number of skeletons neatly arranged in a circle, one above the other; and somewhere about the same time a gold ring of antique design, thought to have belonged to the Countess of Leicester, was fished up from the river-bed, together with relics of the pots and pans of that overwhelmed host, and some Henry II. pennies that those slaughtered men-at-arms had doubtless hoped to expend in long drinks at Bury, after the hoped-for victory was won. The ancient church of Fornham St. GeneviÈve was burned down, June 24th, 1782, through the extraordinary accident of a man shooting at jackdaws and firing into the thatched roof. The ruins stand in Fornham Park, and fill the humble office of helping to support a water-tank.

Ingham church, beside the road on to Thetford, is highly uninteresting, and the few wayside cottages commonplace. Away to the left, out of sight, is Culford Park, seat of Earl Cadogan, exploiter of Chelsea in these days and recipient of fabulous sums of “unearned increment” in the shape of ground-rents. Two miles onward from Ingham, the dozen cottages of the hamlet called Seven Hills dot the lonely road at short intervals, and behind them is the long line of the seven prehistoric sepulchral mounds that stand sponsors for this modern settlement. At Rymer Point, a little distance onward, we touch upon the broad acres of the Duke of Grafton’s estate of Euston, and presently come into the village of Barnham. Beyond the village the battered remains of the old “Franchise Cross,” which once marked the boundary of the Liberty of St. Edmund, stand by the way, and still mark the limits of Thetford and Barnham parishes. None is sufficiently humble to do that cross reverence nowadays, but in the old times, when it was protected by a specific proclamation by the Abbot of Bury, that all who injured it would be anathematised and cursed with the fires of Hell, this old landmark was dealt gently with.

It is from here at Barnham that the Icknield Way can with little difficulty be reached and traced into Thetford. To find it, we must turn to the left in Barnham Street, and, passing the little railway station, pursue the cross-road that leads for a mile along open commons to where the boundary of the Elveden estate is marked by one of Lord Iveagh’s new lodges. Just short of this lodge is the Icknield Way, a green track crossing the road at right angles on the skirts of a dark wood of fir-trees. Here the boundaries of the two parishes of Barnham and Elveden march together, the Way itself the dividing line. It is still a very noticeable grassy track, but has for centuries been disused as a public road. It was used by the cattle-drovers, who to the last favoured the prehistoric tracks of the country, and thus avoided the payment of tolls levied along the turnpikes. Their flocks and herds were great features of old wayside life, until the cattle-trucks of quick railway transport in modern times destroyed the drovers’ business.

Very few of the country folk know this as the Icknield Way, and not a great number have ever heard of it as the drove-road, but the cross-roads are known in all the neighbourhood by the little turfy mound called “Marman’s Grave,” traditionally the burial-place of a suicide in those uncharitable old times when the midnight burial without Christian rites, and with a stake driven through the body, was the world’s last act of injustice towards those poor despairing souls whom cruel circumstance had tortured beyond endurance. Who the unhappy “Marman” was, and when or why he gladly left an existence so hateful to him that he could even contemplate with equanimity that post-mortem indignity of a stake through his vitals, we shall never know, and the little stone post cresting his grave tells us nothing, for although it looks like some simple memorial of him, its sole inscription, the letters “B” and “E,” give no clue in his direction, for they only mark the respective bounds of Barnham and Elveden.

The Way reaches Thetford in another two miles, across the heath. Its course lay athwart the present road from Barnham, into the town, just where the gasworks stand, in the outskirts. But not only those far-off Icenians came this way, where those unromantic gasometers scent the heath and stop up the immemorial track: for this portion of the Way remained the chief, if, indeed, not the only, entrance into Thetford until the close of the seventeenth century, when the river Ouse was first bridged along the line of the main road from Elveden.