Travellers coming south could have a choice of routes to London from Alconbury Hill, as the elaborate old milestone still standing at the parting of the ways indicates, showing sixty-four miles by way of Huntingdon, Royston, and Ware, and four miles longer by the way we have come. This monumental milestone, now somewhat dilapidated, railed round, and with some forlorn-looking wall-flowers growing inside the enclosure, is a striking object, situated at a peculiarly impressive spot, where the left-hand route by Huntingdon is seen going off on the level to a vanishing-point lost in the distant haze, rather than by any dip or curve of the road to right or left; the right-hand road diving down the hill to Alconbury Weston and Alconbury at its foot. [Picture: Alconbury Hill Junction] The descent, going north, is known as Stangate Hill, and leads past the lonely churchyard of Sawtry St. Andrews, whose church has disappeared as utterly as Sawtry Abbey, which, less wealthy than the great abbeys of Ramsey, Thorney, Crowland, or Peterborough, stood beside the road, and was besieged by mediæval tramps: “Sawtry-by-the-Way, that old Abbaye, Gave more alms in one day than all they.” Thus ran the old rhyme. To-day, the only vestiges of that vanished religious house are in the names of Monk’s Wood, to the right of the road, descending the hill, and of the Abbey Farm. The foot of Stangate Hill is no doubt the place called by Thoresby and others “Stangate Hole,” where highwaymen were confidently to be expected. De Foe, writing about 1720 of this road, says: “Some Parts are still paved with stone, which strengthens the conjecture that the Name Stangate was given it from thence. It traverses great woods between the Two Saltries.” In his spelling of “Sawtry,” in that last line, although he does not follow the invariable form, he has hit upon the original. For “Sawtry” was in the beginning “Salt Reeth.” Salt marshes and creeks crept inland even as far as this, past Ely and Ramsey. Stilton lies some three miles ahead, and, two miles before reaching it, the old “Crown and Woolpack,” a very large red-brick posting-house, part of it still occupied as an inn, the rest used as cottages, while the stables are given over to spiders and lumber. Passing this, the road presently begins to rise gently, and then, level again, widens out to almost treble its usual width, where a long street of mingled old houses and cottages, a medley of stone, brick, and plaster, stands, strangely silent. This is Stilton, dreaming of bygone busy times. Had the railway touched here, things would have worn a very different aspect at Stilton to-day. Let us, therefore, thank the shades of that Marquis of Exeter, and of the others who resisted the railway, and by causing it to describe a wide loop instead of hugging the road, unwittingly contributed to the preservation in a glass case, as it were, of this old coaching centre.