Few houses are glimpsed in these first nine miles of the Watling Street. At a grim crossing of two high roads near Crick station, but with an appearance as solitary as though many miles remote from villages or railways, it suddenly ends, or continues only as a formidably rugged, grass-grown track. Here the explorer either finds himself daunted, or proves his mettle by plunging boldly forward, reckless of what may betide. For one thing, the telegraph-poles are faithful to the track, and where they lead who shall fear to follow? They conduct, in fact, steadily downhill along this green alley, and in a mile and a half, crossing two fields, bring one out to a flat and low-lying country, and to what the country-folk call the “hard road” again. Three miles of this, and a rise, with a cross-road to the right, leads to Dove Bridge, spanning the Warwickshire Avon. All around, here, there, and everywhere—at Lilbourne, Catthorpe, and Cave’s Inn—are speculative sites of the Roman station of _Tripontium_. For the last three miles the Watling Street has formed the boundary between Northants and Warwickshire, and henceforward, for eighteen miles more, it performs the same office for Warwickshire and Leicestershire. On the Leicestershire side, where the ground rises steeply beyond the little river, is a mysterious mound, called by the villagers of Lilbourne “Castle Hill”—an odd, evidently artificial hill, with two beech trees growing on its summit. Whether it be a Roman _speculum_, or look-out hill, or the grave-mound of some tribal king, ancient even when the Romans came, who shall say? “Tripontium” was named from three bridges that then crossed the Avon somewhere here, but they and their sites have vanished. Lilbourne itself lies down the right-hand lane, and is a village on the hither hillside, with a very dilapidated church by the little river, and a great huddled mass of grass-grown mounds in the water-meadows opposite. Within sight is the wayside railway station of Lilbourne, incongruous amid these forlorn relics of the past in this out-of-the-way corner of the country. Let no one think these mounds „to be the remains of a Roman camp: they are the only vestiges now left of the once proud Norman castle of Lilbourne. [Illustration: LILBOURNE.] Uphill, steep and rugged, goes the road to the outlying fringe of Catthorpe, that still continues to be known as “Catthorpe Five Houses,” even though they are now, and have long been, but three. From this hill-top the spires and roofs of Rugby are plainly visible by day, and by night the great junction spreads its station and signal-lights in a gorgeous illumination of white, red, and green.