Roudham Heath owes its name to the parish and village of Roudham. The village stood less than half a mile to the right of the road, but has in these latter days wholly disappeared, save for fewer than half a dozen cottages and the gaunt ruins of the great church. Roudham church owes its ruinated condition to the fire that burnt it in 1736, a disaster caused by carelessness on the part of plumbers at work on the leads of the tower. Tradition says funds were collected for the repair of the building, but the treasurer made off with them. Roudham’s local industry was that of malting; but the place is a scene of desolation, punctuated and italicised by the two inhabited cottages that neighbour the ruins and look on to the almost impassable road. The place has now no church, no chapel, no charities, no shop, no pub, no anything; but it was formerly a large and populous village, with two inns—the “Dolphin” and “Three Hoops.” Foundations of vanished buildings are still visible in some of the fields XL LARLINGFORD, a tiny hamlet on the Thet, in a dip of the road, long since became a misnamed place, for the ford is replaced by a bridge, itself of a respectable age. Two miles beyond the old ford there existed in Ogilby’s time, in the second half of the seventeenth century, a beacon on the right-hand side of the road, duly pictured on his road map as a cresset, or fire-basket, mounted on a post and reached by ladders; a contrivance eloquently witnessing to the wild state of the road in those times. [Illustration: LARLINGFORD.] A little way beyond the site of the old beacon, at Hargham—or, as the country folk have it, “Harfham”—cross-roads, stands a time-worn stone shaft, reared on equally shapeless steps. The country folk call this shattered stump of an ancient wayside cross “Cockcrow Stone.” It is only when exploring to right and left of the road, along the byways, that the stranger comes in touch with rural life. The great highway goes lonely, for mile after mile the country seems deserted; but, unknown to him who does not turn aside from the beaten track, villages cluster, like beads upon a string, continuously along the lesser roads. A little way back from these cross-roads of Hargham comes Hargham village, and then the village of Wilby, in whose church, recently restored, has been discovered, under one of the old floor-boards, a lady’s hawking gauntlet some three centuries old. Framed and exhibited on the wall, it forms a trivial yet intimate link with the past.