The Dyke may have sheltered the fugitive Duke of Monmouth on his flight in 1685. The reading of that melancholy story of how the handsome and gay Duke of Monmouth, a haggard fugitive from Sedgemoor Fight, accompanied by his friend, Lord Grey, and another, left their wearied horses near this spot, and, disguising themselves as peasants, set out for the safe hiding-places of the New Forest, only to fall prisoners to James’s scouts, paints the road and the downs with an impasto of tragedy. All the countryside was being searched for him, and watchers were stationed on the hills, looking down upon this open country where the movement of a rabbit almost might be noted from afar. So he doubtless skulked along in the shadow of the Dyke from the shelter of Cranborne Chase down to Woodlands, where he was caught, under the shadow of a tree still standing, called Monmouth Ash. Scattered all around are the inevitable barrows. The industry of a byegone generation of antiquaries has explored them all. Pick and shovel have scattered the ashes and the cinerary urns of the Britons or Saxons who were buried here, and the only relics likely to be found by any other ghouls are the discs of lead deposited by Sir Richard Colt Hoare, or W. Cunnington, with the initials ‘R. C. H. 1815,’ or some such date; or, ‘Opened by W. Cunnington 1804’ on them. George the Third always used to change horses at ‘Woodyates Inn’ when journeying to or from Weymouth, and the room built for his use on those occasions is still to be seen, with its outside flight of steps. When the coaches were taken off the road, the inn became for a time the training establishment of William Day. The road near this old inn is the real scene of the Ingoldsby legend of the _Dead Drummer_, and not Salisbury Plain, on ‘one of the rises’ where An old way-post shewed Where the Lavington road Branched off to the left from the one to Devizes. [Illustration: THE EXETER ROAD, NEAR ‘WOODYATES INN.’] [Sidenote: _A HIGHWAY MURDER_]