Buntingford succeeds to West Mill. A brick bridge crossing a little river, an old red-brick chapel bulking large on the left hand, a long, long street of rustic cottages and shops and buildings of more urban pretensions, and over all a sleepy half-holiday air: that is Buntingford. It is difficult to take Buntingford seriously, even though its street be half a mile in length, for its name recalls that hero of nursery rhyme, that Baby Bunting whose father went a-hunting, and went to buy a rabbit-skin to put the Baby Bunting in. Buntingford, for all the length of its long street and the very considerable age of it, is but a hamlet of Layston, close upon a mile distant. That is why Buntingford has no old parish church, and explains the building of the red-brick chapel aforesaid in 1615, to the end that the ungodly might have no excuse for not attending public worship and the pious might exercise their piety without making unduly long pilgrimage. "Domus Orationis" is inscribed on the gable-wall of the chapel, lest perhaps it might be mistaken for some merely secular building; an easy enough matter. Behind it, stands the little group of eight almshouses built in 1684 by Dr. Seth Ward, "born in yis town," as the tablet over the principal door declares; that Bishop of Salisbury who lent his carriage-horses to King James's troops to drag the ordnance sent against the Monmouth rebels on Sedgemoor. Layston Church stands in a meadow, neglected, and with daylight peering curiously through its roof; and the village itself has long disappeared. The fifteen miles between Wade's Mill and Royston, forming the "Wade's Mill Turnpike Trust," continued subject to toll long after the railway was opened. With the succeeding trusts on through Royston to Kirby's Hut and Caxton, on the Old North Road, and so on to Stilton, it was one of the earliest undertakings under the general Turnpike Act of 1698, and, like them, claimed direct descent from the first turnpike gates erected in England in 1663, under the provisions of the special Act of that year, which, describing this "ancient highway and post-road" to the North as almost impassable, proceeded to give powers for toll-gates to be erected at Stilton and other places. To this particular Trust fell the heavy task of lowering the road over the London Road hill, the highest crest of the Downs; a work completed in 1839, at a cost of £1723, plus £50 compensation paid to a nervous passenger on one of the coaches who jumped off the roof while it was crossing a temporary roadway and broke his leg. The tolls at this time were let for £4350 per annum.