I crossed Ermine Street at Totterdown and an inn called “Shepherd’s Rest,” and the Ridgeway became a hard road of ordinary width between hedges and ditches. It was more like the Icknield Way than the Ridgeway, and still greater was this likeness when it reached Liddington, but made no effort to climb again to the ridges, or to keep Liddington Camp on its north side. One road does climb the ridge, going south-westward to Liddington Hill, and then south, having turned from this present road to the left at a point marked by the “Ridgeway Bush” in the time of Hoare--three-quarters of the way from Totterdown to the Swindon road. But the Ordnance Map gives the name of Ridgeway to a road going straight across the low land to Barbury, mounting the hill on the north side of that camp, and continuing along the ridge beyond Barbury to near Avebury, up over the downs again to the Avon Valley, up to Salisbury Plain, and across it, perhaps, to the Dorset coast, or skirting it to Warminster and the west. But the site of “Ridgeway Bush” is within a few yards of the westward boundary of Wanborough, and beyond Wanborough there is so far no sufficient evidence for tracing the course of the Icknield Way. The two roads came very near to one another in that parish; they may even have touched before the Ridgeway returned to its own place high up; and it is possible that as the Ridgeway in Berkshire has been mistakenly called the Icknield Way, so the lower part of what is now called the Ridgeway in Wiltshire may be the Icknield Way. CHAPTER XI NINTH DAY--STREATLEY TO EAST HENDRED, BY UPTON AND HAGBOURNE HILL FARM When I started from Streatley to see the western half of the Icknield Way it was with several uncertainties. I knew that the Icknield Way was not the Ridgeway, but a lower road which was in several places not more than a mile or two away from it. This lower road, it has been said, was the Wantage-to-Reading turnpike for part at least of its course; one writer’s road clearly lay south of this turnpike; another had expressed a doubt whether it was the turnpike or a road to the south. The decision that the Icknield Way in Berkshire was distinct from the Ridgeway had added this difficulty; that the Ridgeway, supposing it to have come up from the ford at Streatley, must have been a road from beyond the Thames, and what that road was I had not discovered, though it had been suggested that it was the Upper Icknield Way. But if the Icknield Way of Oxfordshire and the Icknield Way of Berkshire were linked, it must have been at Streatley, though it may also have been at other fords. [Illustration: Moulsford Bottom.]