Then came the crushing rejoinder. “Why, Miss Worthington, you know perfectly well that no Stilton cheese was ever made at Stilton; they’re all made in Leicestershire, and as you say your cheeses are made at Stilton, they cannot be good, and I won’t have one.” The secret was then, of course, exploded. Which of these two inns could it have been to which Mrs. Calderwood of Coltness refers in her diary when, travelling from Scotland to London in the middle of the eighteenth century, she mentions at Stilton a “fine large inn,” where the linen was “as perfit rags as ever I saw: plain linen with fifty holes in each towell.” It would be interesting to know, but it is hopeless now to attempt to identify it. XXI UP-HILL from Stilton, three-quarters of a mile away, but well within sight, stands the Norman Cross inn, where the Peterborough, Louth, Lincoln, and Hull coaches turned off to the right. [Picture: Norman Cross] Norman Cross! how many have been those old-time cyclists who have partaken of the hospitality of the inn here! Not always, though, has it been a place of welcome memories. For years, indeed, during the long struggles between England and France, this was the site of one of the largest of the prisons in which captured French soldiers were incarcerated. Over three thousand were placed here, officers and privates, some remaining captive for more than ten years. Happy those who, through influence or by mere luck, were selected to be exchanged for our soldiers, prisoners in France. It was a weary time for those poor fellows. Many of them died in the great insanitary sheds in which they were confined, and others lost their reason. Desperate men sometimes succeeded in escaping to the coast, where friends were awaiting them. Others, wandering over the lonely flats, perished miserably in the dykes and drains into which they fell when the mists shrouded the countryside. There were, again, those who stabbed the sentries and made off. Such an one was Charles François Marie Bonchew, an officer, who had wounded, but had not killed, a sentry named Alexander Halliday. Being captured, he was sentenced to death at Huntingdon, and was brought back to Norman Cross to be executed, September 1808. All the prisoners were turned out to witness the execution, and the garrison was under arms.