Of Newton St. Faith, scarce more than a mile down the road, there is little to be said, but its few houses are succeeded by the loveliest two miles of highway in Norfolk. Enclosed fields, trim with their neat hedges and long lines of wheat and barley, or well-ordered in their infinite perspectives of winter furrows, give place suddenly to a land rich in the varied tints of bracken and heather, and wooded, now in dense clumps, or again in isolated trees. These are the fairy-like woods of Stratton Strawless. The peculiar beauty of these ferny glades is chiefly due to the large numbers of silver birch—that airy and graceful “lady of the forest”—intermingled with the dark pines, the grey beeches, and the sturdy oaks that all go to make up the ranks of the Stratton woods, whose picturesque _abandon_ is greatly added to by their being open to the road. For this is common land, and before Robert Marsham planted it in 1797, was a stretch of heath, barren of aught save heather and bracken. It is, in fact, in the existence of this ancient heath that Blomefield, the historian of Norfolk, rightly or wrongly, found the origin of the “Strawless” in the place-name, for he points out that no corn could have been grown here. His finding is probably wrong, for Mr. Walter Rye, eminent in Norfolk archæology, has found it was “Stratton Streles” in the time of Henry III., and that the name almost certainly is Danish, deriving from the village of Stroeden Strelev in Denmark. We need not hasten to acclaim the Marsham who created these woods as a public benefactor, because he did not aim at anything of the kind, and merely wished to improve the outlook from his hideous house, now confronted with these glades, instead of by a monotonous flat. There is no denying the ugliness of that square brick mansion. A benefactor would have hidden it from the public gaze, but it is, instead, rather ostentatiously on view from the road, across a wide, uninterrupted stretch of grassy meadow. The lodges are far more endurable than the mansion, and although built in the same dull brick, in a manner fondly thought classic, the brilliant coat of whitewash given them makes their clumsiness almost picturesque. [Illustration: STRATTON STRAWLESS LODGES.] The village lies nearly a mile away from the road, past the reedy lakes that follow the course of a little stream. In the church may yet be seen the monuments of Marshams, from 1250 onwards; together with a window filled with probably the very worst stained glass on earth. With regret we leave these lovely woods for the cultivated and more prosaic lands towards Hevingham, whose great church, overlooking the road from its knoll, is a mile distant from the village. It is a church with lofty nave, but no aisles, and, restored with more thoroughness than discretion, has been swept clean of any possible interest. But its noble south porch, and the gigantic sweet-chestnut tree in the churchyard, give the spot an air of distinction.