The theorists and conjecturers have done little to ascertain the course of a road which can safely be called the Icknield Way. By far the greater part of the work has been done by men who used chiefly local tradition. Plot in Oxfordshire, Wise in Berkshire, perhaps Robert Morden or an unknown assistant in Hertfordshire. The best of the conjecturers have only linked up the authenticated parts in a probable manner. Most have been too busy with their own views to be anything but benevolent to others. But in 1901 appeared one with no theory and without benevolence, Professor F. Haverfield. In a chapter on “Romano-British Norfolk,” in the _Victoria County History_ of that county, he pronounces that the Icknield Way is not a Roman road; that it has nothing to do with the Iceni or Norfolk or Suffolk; that the name Icknield and the names like Ickleton and Kenninghall of places on the road, or supposed parts of it, cannot, for philological reasons, be connected with the Iceni. At present he is unanswerable, though his mind is of a type which commands more interest when it affirms than when it denies. [Illustration: Icknield Way, near Ipsden, Oxfordshire.] Since the time of Wise little has been done except to add proofs of the antiquity of the road under the Chilterns and the Berkshire Downs. In his day it was known from Royston to Bishopston. Taylor showed that it touched Newmarket, but no more. Mr. Tingey shows that it went through Stoke Holy Cross in Norfolk, but little or nothing has been done to fill the gap between his fragment of Hickling Lane and Newmarket. Even the road between Newmarket and Royston depends for its title only on its respectability as a county and parish boundary. Reaching the Thames there is no certainty of the principal ford; but Streatley must have been one, and from there to Bishopston the main line of the road is clear enough. A man may follow the whole of this road in a few days, and be upon a beaten track if not a hard road everywhere, except for a few hundred yards near Ipsden, and two or three miles from the east side of Lockinge Park. The two lengths north and south of the Thames make a road of uniform character, keeping almost entirely to the chalk, but below the steepest wall of the hills. From Dunstable westward this wall on the left or south of the road is an unmistakable guide to the traveller; as far as Swyncombe he has only to cling to the foot of the wall and he is on the Icknield Way. Beyond the Thames the Downs make a guiding wall equally clear and continuous. It belongs to what Mr. Harold Peake, in his “Prehistoric Roads of Leicestershire” (_Memorials of Old Leicestershire_), calls the “hill-side” type of road, which “winds along the sides of hills just above the alluvium. Marshes and low-lying ground are avoided, but small streams do not offer so great an obstacle as in the case of the ridge-roads.” He compares it with the Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury, which