RETURNING to the high road at Cottenham Corner, and passing the junction of the road from Waterbeach, we come presently, at a point six and a half miles from Cambridge, to a place marked "Dismal Hall" on large-scale Ordnance maps. Whatever this may have been in old days, it is now a small white-brick farmhouse, called by the occupier "The Brambles," and by the landlord "Brookside." The name perhaps derived originally from some ruined Roman villa whose walls rose, roofless and desolate, beside the ancient Akeman Street. It is a name belonging, in all probability, to the same order as the "Caldecotes" and "Coldharbours," met frequently beside, or in the neighbourhood of, Roman ways; places generally conceded to have been ruined houses belonging to that period. The modern representative of "Dismal Hall" stands beside a curiously small and oddly-shaped field, itself called "Dismal"; triangular in form and comprising only two acres. Half a mile beyond this point, a pretty group of cottages marks where the way to Denny Abbey lies to the right across a cow-pasture. A field-gate whose posts are the battered fragments of some Perpendicular Gothic pillars from that ruined monastery, crowned incongruously with a pair of eighteenth-century stone urns, clearly identifies the spot. There has been a religious house of sorts on this spot since eight hundred years ago, and most of the remains are of the Norman period, when a settlement of Black Monks from Ely settled here. In succession to them came the Knights Templars, who made it a preceptory, and when their Order was suppressed and ceased out of the land, in consequence of its corruption and viciousness, the nuns of St. Clare were given a home in these deserted halls. Close upon four hundred years have gone since they, too, were thrust forth, and it has for centuries past been a farmhouse. Indeed, if you regard Denny Abbey, as also many another, in anything else save a conventional light, you will see that it was really always a farm. What else than a farm was the great Abbey of Tintern, and what other than farmers those Cistercian monks who built it and cultivated those lands, the godless, growing fearful and in expiatory mood, had given them? So also with the Benedictines, the Templars, and the Clares who succeeded one another here. You may note the fact in their great barns, and in the fields they reclaimed. To-day, groups of buildings of uncertain age, as regards their outer walls, enclose littered rick-yards, but the dwelling-house, for all the uninteresting look of one side, shows, built into its inner face, the sturdy piers and arches of one of the aisles; and the otherwise commonplace hall and staircase of the interior are informed with a majestic dignity by two columns and a noble arch of the Norman church. A large and striking barn, approached and entered across a pig-haunted yard rich in straw and mud, proves, on entering, to be a beautiful building of the Decorated period, once the refectory.