Beyond, in the deep hollow where that latest of great trunk lines, the Great Central Railway, crosses over the road on a blue-brick archway, is “Cave’s Inn,” an inn no longer. “Cave’s Hole” they used to call it in old times, from its situation in this hollow. The lone house was kept in the long ago (that is to say, about 1680) by Edward Cave, grandfather of that Edward who founded the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, and was the friend of Johnson. His father, Joseph, was a younger son of the inn-keeping Edward, and, the entail of the family estate being cut off, was reduced to plying the cobbler’s trade at Rugby. The literary Edward was born in 1691 at the hamlet of Newton, a short distance off the Watling Street, between this and Catthorpe Five Houses. It is an obviously Roman way—straight and uncompromising—that leads onward from Cave’s Inn to the cross-roads, at the suggestively lonely spot called “Gibbet,” the site in the “good old days” of a gallows-tree originally set up in 1687 for a certain Loseby who had “barbarously murdered” a man named Bunbury, and, being caught almost red-handed, was promptly executed. Nothing is left of “Loseby’s Gibbet,” as it is marked on old Warwickshire maps. The remains of it, together with the prehistoric tumulus on which it was erected, were swept away when the cross-road from Banbury and Daventry to Lutterworth was made, in 1730. A dense grove of trees at the fork of the roads to Lutterworth and Shawell marks the neighbourhood of the spot. Beyond this Golgotha, the road dips to the reedy river “Swift”; a lazy little stream and not answerable to its name, as the traveller may see for himself by halting and leaning over Brunsford Bridge. Another solitary stretch conducts to Cross-in-Hand, where there are five roads, two old toll-houses, a modern red-brick cottage, a very fine distant view of Lutterworth church-tower—and not a mortal or immortal body or soul in sight. Ordnance maps mark a “Blackenhall” off to the right, a name that seems to fix the site of the deserted “aula,” or country seat, of some Roman notable, whose notability, in the passing of fifteen centuries, has vanished as though he had never been. “Willey Crossing,” where a branch of the Midland Railway bars the cyclist’s progress, only serves to emphasise the solitude, and the country girl, who in answer to the summons of the bell, opens the gates, stares at the strange spectacle of a wayfarer. Willey lies somewhere off to the left, but, so far as it affects the road, might be non-existent. [Illustration: CROSS-IN-HAND.] Up the steep road that now lies before the explorer, with the little church of Wibtoft peering over a shoulder of the hill on the left, and suddenly you are at High Cross, the famous crossing of the Watling Street and the Fosse Way—the great north-western road of the Romans and their not quite so great way that led out of Somerset through Gloucestershire, the shires of Worcester and Warwick, to Leicestershire and Lincoln.