England -- Description and travel; Icknield Way (England); Thomas, Edward, 1878-1917
“I look upon this of Staffordshire as the most remarkable of the two,
and so to be that Iknild street, which is usually reckoned to be
one of the four basilical or great ways of England, and not that of
Oxfordshire, this being raised all along and paved at some places, and
very signal almost wherever it goes, whereas that of Oxfordshire is not
so there, whatever it may be in other counties.”
The next evidence is eighteen years later, and comes from the maps by
Robert Morden illustrating Gibson’s edition of Camden’s _Britannia_
(1695). His map of Hertfordshire suddenly introduces us to a road
called the Icknal or Icnal Way, running west from Royston--perhaps even
from Barley, three miles south-east of Royston--through Baldock, then
more and more south-east, over the Lea to the north of Luton, through
Dunstable, and so, leaving on its right hand Toternhoe, Edlesborough,
Ivinghoe, and Marsworth, going out of the map with Wilston on its
right. In the map of Buckinghamshire this road is continued through
Wendover, and passes Princes Risborough and Bledlow. In the map of
Oxfordshire it is called “Icknield Way,” and follows a line like that
in Plot’s map, crossing “Grime’s Dike,” leaving Ipsden and Woodcot
on its left, reaching the Thames on the south of Goring Church. The
Berkshire map does not show any road of this or similar name, or any
one corresponding to it. Nor is the road to be found on the maps of
Essex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, or Norfolk. The extension of it
through Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire may well have come from the
local knowledge of Morden or a collaborator. There must have been
abundant information of the kind used by Plot which escaped antiquaries
who were thinking about a royal road, a majestic basilical or consular
way, running from St. David’s to Southampton, or farther. John Aubrey
(died 1697), the man to tap this local lore, had nothing to say of any
such road in his own county of Wiltshire, but he left some rough notes.
He connects “Iceni” with “Ikenild,” and remarks (on the authority
of Wren) that there were three Itchings on Ikenel Street, including
Itching Stoke in Hampshire, where the Pilgrims’ Way fords the Itchen.
He says also that a Mr. Sherwood told him of “an Ikenil way from
North Yarmouth to Plymouth; the country people will say, ‘Keep along
the Ikenil Way,’ _scilicet_ the Wallington Hills.” Wallington is two
miles south-east of Baldock and south of the Icknield Way, and through
it ran a parallel road (mentioned in _Archæological Journal_, Vol.
XXV) from Barley, by Therfield, Strethall, Sandon, and Wallington to
Clothall; but the term “Wallington Hills” does not exclude the Icnal
Way marked in Morden’s map. The precise _North_ Yarmouth may also have
been accurate, and I should be inclined to believe that at that day men
sometimes went between Plymouth and North Yarmouth by a road or chain
of roads known through perhaps a very large part of its course by some
such name as Ikenil Way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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