It is a pleasure to see a learned man of the twentieth century thus playing at the invention of a twilight deity as the patroness of an old road, like the Helen or Elen of Wales. Two hundred years ago his invention would have been wholly serious and generations of equally serious and less inventive antiquaries would have followed him. There have been other explanations. Camden, at the same time as Holinshed, accepted the connection with the Iceni, but “what the origin of the name should be,” he says in his _Suffolk_, “as God shall help me, I dare not guess, unless one should derive it from the _wedgy_ figure of the county, and refer to its lying upon the ocean in form of a _wedge_. For the Britons in their language call a wedge Iken....” John Aubrey had it from “Mr. Meredith Lloyd” that “Ychen is upper, as to say the upper country or people,” and that “Ychen” also signifies “oxen.” Wise, in 1738, linked it with the name of Agricola, because of the significant core of Ick, or in the form “Ryknield,” rick. Willis, in 1787, said that the road took its name from the Itchen, believing that it began at Southampton and went parallel to that river to Winchester; and that Iken-eld was the Saxon name for the Old Iken Street. The poet William Barnes, lover of ancient Britons, said that it might come from a word meaning high or upper, either because it was “an upcast way” or because it was the “upper or eastern road,” while Ryknield seemed to him to come from a word meaning a trench, and therefore a “hollow way.” And still nobody knows or believes that anybody else knows. The name, therefore, throws no light at present on the use or history of the road.