England -- Description and travel; Icknield Way (England); Thomas, Edward, 1878-1917
This road southward into the Marlborough and Hungerford road may yet
be shown to be part of the Icknield Way. For at Totterdown, a mile
and a half beyond, it curves round and makes a line with the road to
Chisledon under Liddington Hill--the road much resembling the Icknield
Way which is called “Ridgeway” on the maps. It rose now, a hedged and
elmy road, to five hundred feet, and had a deep, grassy hollow and elm
trees below, between it and the cornland of the Downs. It dipped to a
spring and a post office at Hinton Parva; it dipped again and rose to a
view over the northern vale to the dim, watery wall of the Cotswolds.
At this height it crossed Ermine Street just after passing a “Black
Horse.” All four ways at the crossing were deeply worn and made a pit
with bushy banks and tiny green triangles of waste in the midst.
In a quarter-mile past the crossing of Ermine Street I was at
Wanborough. There the road forked at the “Calley Arms.” There is not a
scrap of real or pretended documentary evidence for either road, at
least until the place-names mentioned in the Saxon charter relating to
Wanborough have been identified. The left-hand road had the advantage
of keeping near the hills, instead of going clean away west like the
right-hand one. This right-hand road may at last be connected with one
of those rumoured roads going westwards, under the secondary line of
chalk hills, past Holy Cross at Swindon, past Elcombe and Studley to
St. Anne’s-in-the-Wood at Brislington, in Somerset, or to Devonshire;
and this continuation may at last be shown to be entitled to the name
of Icknield Way. I followed the left-hand road because it seemed
possible to connect it with one, very much like the Icknield Way and in
a similar relation to the Downs, going south-westward through Wroughton
and Broad Hinton, and from there either to Avebury or to Yatesbury, and
so by Juggler’s Lane to Cherhill on its way to Bath.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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