There are no fewer than four channels of the Colne here, and the land all round about is flat and waterlogged. The entrance to Colnbrook from London is in fact quite a little Holland in appearance, where streams flow sluggishly beside the road and are spanned by many footbridges that give access to the gardens of the pleasant country cottages on either side. A fine avenue of elms shades the road, and ahead is the cramped street of Colnbrook with its mellowed red-brick houses and bright red-tiled roofs. Colnbrook street is narrow to a degree, and it is surprising how the many coaches that used to come tearing through at all hours of day and night managed to escape accidents. There is reason for this narrowness, for Colnbrook was originally built upon a stone causeway across the marshes of the Colne, and nowhere else were there to be found solid foundations. The original causeway may possibly have been Roman, for this is said to have been the station of _Ad Pontes_, described by Antoninus in his _Itineraries_. Staines, however, is more likely the site of it. [Illustration: THE COUNTY BOUNDARY.] [Sidenote: _THE "OSTRICH"_] Colnbrook is probably the best example of a decayed coaching-town now to be found in the Home Counties. Too remote from London for suburban expansion to have affected it, the quaint street remains much as it was a hundred, nay two hundred years ago. The last coach might have left yester-year, so undisturbed appears to be the place. There are coaching-inns here of vast size, ranging from the solid-looking "George" with "eighteenth century" proclaimed plainly enough on its stolid face, back to the "Ostrich," rambling, gabled, timber-framed, Elizabethan. They would have you believe that this house stands on the site of one of the old guesthouses established in the eleventh, twelfth, and succeeding centuries along the roads by the good Churchmen of those times. The original guesthouse here, however, appears to have been a secular foundation, for it is recorded that in 1106, a certain Milo Crispin gave it--"_quoddam hospitium in viâ Londoniæ apud Colebroc_"--to the Abbot of Abingdon. The sign of the "Ostrich" is therefore a lineal descendant of "_Hospitium_," _viâ_ "Hospice" and "Ospridge;" for, as we have already seen, the letter H has ever been a negligeable quantity.