“Thence to Saxmunday, eight miles more. This is a pretty big market town. The wayes are pretty deep, mostly lanes, very little commons. I passed by several gentlemen’s seats. So to Bathford (she meant Blythburgh), eight miles, where is the remains of the walls of an abbey, and there is still a very fine church, &c. Thence I paused by some woods and little villages of a few scattered houses, and generally the people here are able to give so bad a direction that passengers are at a loss what way to take. They know scarce three miles from their home, and meete them where you will, and enquire how far to such a place, they tell you so farre, which is the distance from their own homes to that place. To Beckle is eight miles more, which, in all, was 36 miles from Ipswich, but exceeding long miles. They do own they are 41 measured miles. This is a little market town, but it is the third biggest town in Suffolk—Ipswich, Berrye, and this. There are no good buildings in the town, being old timber and plaster work, except Sir R. Rich’s, and one or two more. There is a bigg market Kross and a market kept. At the town’s end one posses over the river Waveney, on a wooden bridge railed with timber, and so you enter into Norfolk. Its a low, flat ground all here about, so that at the least rains they are overflowed by the river, and lie under water, as they did when I was there; so that the road lay under water, which is very unsafe for strangers to pass, by reason of the holes and quick-sands and loose bottom.” If the houses in Beccles, and the roads across the marshes were as she describes them in the reign of William and Mary, we may be quite sure that they were no better in the time of her great grandmother. We will imagine a traveller of this still more ancient time arriving at Beccles on his way to Norwich, and who finding the road across the marshes to Gillingham quite impassable from the floods, determined to make a detour and pay a visit to Lowestoft. In travelling from Beccles to Lowestoft, our ancient visitor would have no dangerous marsh roads to travel on. He would ride along on the high ground which skirted the fenlands on the north, on a road or trackway which had been used for hundreds of years before, probably by Britons, Romans, and Saxons, and which was the connecting link between Lothingland and Suffolk; the road that still leads over the narrow ridge or neck between Lake Lothing and Oulton Broad through Oulton to Burgh Castle and Gorleston.