Here the dust was thick, and I was glad to feel, to hear, to smell and to taste, and to see the rain falling as I passed the “Barley Mow” at Blewbury. According to custom I stood under the broad, overhanging eaves of one of Blewbury’s thatched roofs and watched the rain, but it was better to be in it and to smell the wetted dust which association alone has made pleasant. Any road was good now, though mine was an unadventurous, level, probably commercial, road. But, rain or no rain, I was looking for an excuse to leave this road at Upton, the next village, which is by the ninth milestone. The map had shown me a road, or an almost continuous line of pieces running from Upton westward to Lockinge Park, and on the east possibly connected with the roads I had already travelled between Little Stoke and Upton by way of Lollingdon Farm, Aston, and Blewbury, but traversing land near Upton which is liable to floods. Either this road or the turnpike was the Icknield Way, because a more northern road would be too low, and no more southern one had left any traces. A hundred yards or so before the road I was on bridged the Didcot, Newbury, and Southampton Railway I noticed the line of a hedge leaving on the left at an acute angle, and forming a triangle with the railway and road for its other sides. As an old road is not likely to form such triangular fields, except with the help of a new branch, it occurred to me that this branching hedge marked an earlier or original line of the same road, or of one coming from Upton village, and there connected with the field roads from Blewbury and Aston. Across the railway another hedge and a depression that might once have been a road continued this line and led naturally into a lane turning out of the main road on the left beyond the bridge and passing Upton Vicarage. I supposed that when the railway cutting was made to have left these crossing roads in their original state would have meant making two bridges or one very broad one necessary. The courses, therefore, were slightly altered, so that, instead of a crossing or “four-went way,” there was a road receiving a branch at one side of the bridge, and a second branch from an opposite direction, the left, at the other side. But on referring to the old six-inch Ordnance Map, made before the railway, I found that I was mistaken. The amended crossing may have been made when the old road was superseded by the turnpike. This left-hand road being the likely-looking road on the map, I followed it, especially as the main road, half a mile beyond, by the “Horse and Harrow,” at West Hagbourne, took a right-angled turn which suggested a piecing together of two older roads, an east-and-west one and a north-and-south one.