XXXI [Illustration: HIGH CROSS MONUMENT.] High Cross is among the oddest and most perplexing of places. A multiplicity of roads and sign-posts are gathered together on the hill-top and the traveller, bedevilled with their number, and the shrubberies and the farmyards that mask them, is fain to halt and unravel the tangled skein. The Watling Street here slightly changes direction, so that its continuation to Atherstone, ten miles distant, is hidden round an angle. Other roads all round the compass lead, according to the testimony of the sign-posts, to Rugby, 10 miles; Coventry, 12; Daventry, 18; Lutterworth, 6; and lastly, Leicester, 13 miles. The road to Leicester—the Roman city of _Ratæ_—lies along the Fosse Way, and _that_ is now not a road at all, but a meadow, with meadows beyond it; traces of the old way only discoverable by the diligent antiquary. Moreover, the field-gate, padlocked and bristling with the most barbaric of barbed wire, emphasises “no road” and gives the sign-post the lie. High Cross is no misnomer, so far as the adjective goes. It _is_ high: very high. Illimitable vales, shading off from green foreground to indigo distance, are unfolded below. Fifty-seven churches are said to be visible from this vantage-point, and goodness only knows how many counties. Fifty-seven churches! Say a hundred and fifty-seven, or more, _if you knew on what particular pin-points in that view to look_. There is a monument at High Cross, erected in 1712, both to direct travellers in the way they should go and to mark this supposed site of the Roman station of _Vennonæ_. Nowadays the pillar is so completely screened by a little groove of hollies, sycamores, firs, beeches, and laburnums that, although it stands at an angle of the junction, none but those who know exactly where to look are likely to find it. A little wicket-gate leads up to it, in the centre of the grove—a nondescript pile of moulded stones and red-brick, surmounted with what look like fragments of Roman columns. The whole structure bears the appearance of having been built of architectural fragments retrieved from some early eighteenth-century rubbish heap. It is not improved, nor its Latin inscriptions rendered any clearer, by the countless pocket-knives that have been set to work upon it. High Cross is a lonely place, but its loneliness is belied by this multitude of names and initials, some dating back to 1733.