England -- Description and travel; Icknield Way (England); Thomas, Edward, 1878-1917
between the trunks, and soon afterwards of an undulating lowland, heath
and corn, and wooded ridges on the right; while on the left the land
fell away and I felt the curve of the earth, the wooded horizon being
lower than the road. Before reaching Tuddenham Corner the bank of
bird’s-foot trefoil was wide enough for a path; only on the left was
there a hedge, on the right was tall barley. Past Tuddenham Corner the
road was narrow and shaded by beech trees of half a century’s growth;
it had hedges and grassy borders, and down the middle two lines of
grass between the ordinary course of the horses’ feet and the wheels.
On both sides were many long, straight plantations of trees, but in
a low, cultivated country where they gave little offence. Presently
the road touched a tumulus on the left, and drew near another on the
right. Then it was crossed by the Great Eastern Railway, and turning
sharper to the right than probably it used to, went due west towards
Kentford. Being now a highway between Newmarket and Bury St. Edmunds,
it was broader, and had also grassy margins of twice its own width, and
beeches in the hedgerows.
[Illustration: Kentford.]
Until this I had met and passed nobody, nor had anyone passed me;
no man of Lackford or Cavenham, or vagrant bound for Norwich or
Newmarket; no long-lost sailor son whom I could tell of his expectant
mother selling roses at Piccadilly Circus. At Kentford motor-cars
tyrannically owned the road. Here were men going into the “Fox and
Bull,” or standing contented by the “Old Cock.” In the shade of the
old flint church tower and the chestnuts of the churchyard someone was
cheerfully clipping grass at evenfall. I looked up and saw a greyhound
as a weather vane, and it was running northward. A ford went through
the Kennett and a new bridge over it, alongside of great fragments
of an old one. Just beyond, at the cool heart of the dusty roadside
shrubberies, a nightingale was singing in oblivion.
From Kentford the road ran straight for four miles into Newmarket,
taking with it the Suffolk and Cambridge boundary now on its right and
now on its left. Telegraph posts and trees accompanied it, and below
them very broad, rough margins, half overgrown by thorns and young
elms, and marked by half a dozen parallel footpaths. The old course of
the road from the third milestone was doubtless the green track on the
right, divided from the new by a broken hedge; for it is this that the
boundary follows. Before the second milestone this track traversed the
new and was continued thenceforward by a beech grove shadowing deep,
narrow horse-paths to the first milestone and the beginning of the
Newmarket red brick. On the right no hedge came between the road and an
open country sloping down to the treeless fenland of Fordham, Wicken,
and Soham, where fifty feet above sea-level makes a hill. Nearest the
road were plains from which tumuli have long been smoothed to make an
exercising ground for horses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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