England -- Description and travel; Icknield Way (England); Thomas, Edward, 1878-1917
The partly lost line of this lane he has made out through Mulbarton;
beyond which he is struck by the place-names of Keningham, Kentlow,
and Kenninghall, noticing the other similar names on or near the
supposed Icknield Way--Kentford, Kennet, Kensworth (once “Ikensworth”),
Kennett, in Wiltshire, and, beyond Exeter, Kenn and Kenn Ford. Other
documents of 1482 and 1658 relating to the next parish to Swainsthorpe,
Stoke Holy Cross, enable him to extend the road with some probability
eastward. They also show that the road was known at about the same
time as Hickley Lane in one parish, and Stoke Long Lane in another.
Most remarkable of all, he has found in Blomefield mention of “the
way called Ykeneldsgate” in the same parish of Stoke Holy Cross, in
1306. He suggests reaching Haddiscoe as his “port in Celtic times,” by
Framingham Earl, Bergh Apton, Thurton Church, Loddon, and Raveningham.
He sternly avoids Norwich as post-Roman, and Bury for the same reason.
At the same time he admits the probability of branches to those places
when they became important. Thus he shows that he has in his mind one
road, with one name, and that something like Icknield Street, going
from sea to sea, not only in the Confessor’s time, but before the
Romans.
It is impossible even to outline the multitudinous conjectures at the
north-east end of the Icknield Way. At the south-west conjecture has
been all but silenced by Stukeley’s invention of the Via Iceniana and
Bennet’s substitution of the Ridgeway, both stupefying fictions.
For two hundred years these conjectures have been multiplied and
become venerable by repetition. Plot thinks that the road might go
from Norfolk to Devon and Land’s End. Gale fancies Caistor and Burgh
Castle at one end, and, as Stukeley did, Exeter at the other. Dr. Beeke
“supposes” it went from Streatley towards Silchester, also that it
crossed the Thames at Moulsford. Colt Hoare speaks of it as connecting
Old Sarum with Dorchester and Winchester. Arthur Taylor takes it for
granted that it came from “Cornwall or some extreme point in the
south-west of Britain” to Norwich and Hickling. Isaac Taylor says
that it went from Norwich to Dorchester and Exeter. Mr. H. M. Scarth
conjectures that the road crossing the main street of Silchester,
which runs east and west, may have been an extension of the Icknield
Way from Wallingford to Winchester. In _Social England_ Col. Cooper
King, following Stukeley, takes the road to Exeter, Totnes, and Land’s
End; following Bennet, he takes it along the Ridgeway. Elton calls
it briefly a road from Norwich through Dunstable and Silchester to
Southampton, and to Sarum and the western districts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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