southward to the Workhouse, the open, sandy heath, and ultimately Bury St. Edmunds. On the left was the isolated doorway of a vanished nunnery, and Place Farm standing within a wide, low-walled space. I turned to the right along a road parallel with the river and divided from it by a narrow hedgeless band of grass. This is supposed by Mr. W. G. Clarke to be the Icknield Way, and he has sketched it over the Bury and Thetford road north of the gasworks, near where the remains of a British settlement were found in 1870. But I found nothing to save me from going on to the main road to Mildenhall and Newmarket and then following that for two miles. On the ten miles between Thetford and Mildenhall there is nothing but Elveden Church, motor-cars, milestones, and dust; and Mildenhall is only the half-way village to Newmarket. It is a straight road easily provoked to a fierce whiteness, and it goes through a dry heathy land planted with limes and parallelograms of fir trees. Nevertheless, a nightingale was singing at noon in the blaze of a strong sun close to the left side of the road, not a mile out of Thetford. His voice in the heat was like the milky kernel of a hard, bearded nut. Less than half a mile past the second milestone, and just over the Suffolk border, I took the opportunity of leaving that road by entering a private drive apparently to Elveden Hall. This was at least in the right direction for Lackford, the next ford, near which the Icknield Way is satisfactorily ascertained. In three-quarters of a mile the drive emerged into a road coming from the main road I had left, and going east to Barnham. I turned to the left along this to reach Marmansgrave Wood, which sounded old, and at that point, as I hoped, a cart track, crossing the road from north to south, looked possible. As it fell out, this track was a parish boundary and the boundary between the hundreds of Blackbourn and Lackford; and for more than half its course it was on one side or the other of an oak or fir plantation. I went southward along it, down the east edge of the long fir plantation marked on the map as “New Barnham Slip.” It was a broad and hedgeless track, often riddled by rabbit burrows which were masked by nettles. At its best it was a rough, tussocky sheaf of cartways. Everywhere sand and flints, parallelograms of fir trees, nettles, and more nettles and the smell of nettles. Rarely it passed a square, now, or several years ago, given to corn. I like nettles, especially with elder trees in blossom above them, as at Lackford Road Heath, half-way along. There was also some gorse. The road was not straight, but wound along in a series of straight lines, slightly up and down, but usually on the high level sand with views of nothing else. I had no company but pewit and stone-curlew and wheatear for those seven miles, and neither passed a house nor saw one anywhere. The sun blazed from the sky overhead and