Our road climbs the hill to the gate of Gog-Magog House, and plunges down into woodlands on the other side, in a fashion very unlike the usual Cambridgeshire highway, to meet the infant stream of the Granta[148] on its meandering way to Cambridge. Our further course is amongst the pretty villages along its valley, the best-wooded vale in all the county. First of these comes Babraham (anciently Bradburgham), with a pretty little Saxon-towered church snuggling in the park beside the Hall. Babraham is noted for the epitaph of an old-time swindler, who was enabled to pocket the Peter Pence[149] which he collected under Queen Mary by sharing his spoil with Queen Elizabeth. It runs thus: "Here lies Horatio Palavazene, Who robbed the Pope to lend the Queen." "He was a thiefe." "A thiefe? Thou liest; For why? he robbed but Antichrist. Him Death with besome swept from Babram Into the bosome of old Abram. But then came Hercules with his club, And struck him down to Beelzebub." [Footnote 148: This branch of the Granta is more properly called the Bourne.] [Footnote 149: From the ninth century onwards the Pope could claim, by Royal grant, a penny a year from every house in England. This tribute was known as "Peter Pence." The phrase is now used amongst Roman Catholics for voluntary contributions to the Papal Exchequer.] A curious fresco on the north wall of the church is thought to represent King Edward the Second. A little beyond Babraham we cross the Icknield Street, on its way from Newmarket to Chesterford. Beside it runs, what is almost unknown in England, a deserted railroad, built by the Eastern Counties Railway Company (now the Great Eastern) in 1848, to afford direct communication between Newmarket and London, and abandoned, as a financial failure, in 1852, since which date the trains have gone round by Cambridge. Where this long disused line runs on the level it has melted back again into the adjoining fields, but the old cuttings and embankments and bridges still exist, and a weird sight they are. At the adjoining villages of Great and Little Abington the road makes a picturesque zig-zag through the village street, and passes on, beneath a fine beech avenue, to Hildersham, where a pretty byway leads across the stream to the fourteenth century church. Here there are four good brasses (to members of the Parys[150] family), one of them showing the unique feature of a lance-rest fastened to the cuirass, and another (of 1530) being simply a skeleton. There are also two very striking recumbent effigies representing a crusader and his wife, each carved out of a single block of wood, now black with age. The churchyard here is effectively planted with junipers and fir trees, and the east end of the church is embowered in shrubs of rosemary, said to be the finest in Cambridgeshire. [Footnote 150: The fourteenth century historian, Matthew Paris, is said to have belonged to this family.]