As I had had as much rain as I wanted on my skin, I turned downhill under a long train of Lombardy poplars and very lanky ash trees into East Hendred for the night. It was a thatched village built on the slopes of a little valley, its houses standing snugly or in short rows high above either side of the steep streets. They stood high because the streets were very old and worn into deep hollows, and at the edges of these ran narrow, cobbled paths; but the cottages were still higher up, and four or five stone steps led up from the paths to their doors. At the bottom stood the towered church, telling the hours and the quarters, not with clock-face and hands, but with bells. Rain, however, drowned that sweet noise in a mightier sweetness, heavy and straight rain, and no wind except what itself created. For half an hour everything--trees, mud walls, thatch, old weatherboards, pale-coloured, timbered cottages, the old chapel at a crossing railed off as a sign of private possession--everything was embedded in rain. Every sound was the rain. For example, I thought I heard bacon frying in a room near by, with a noise almost as loud as the pig made when it was stuck; but it was the rain pouring steadily off the inn roof. Then in the dripping quiet afterwards the sunset blazed in little fragments like gorgeous glass and metal betwixt the black garden foliage. Before I went to bed an intelligent, unprejudiced man told me that the field-way I had followed was Ickleton Street or--he said it with some shyness--Ickleton Meer. I had asked no leading questions, so that his name seemed certainly the local though perhaps not invariable one. From his description and map knowledge I felt no doubt that this was the road mentioned in Wise’s _Antiquities of Berkshire_ (1695) as ploughed up in Wantage east field, but visible from Lockinge Park, eastward almost the whole way to Upton, through the parishes of Ardington, East Hendred, Harwell, and West Hagbourne.