We do not merely leave the modern county of Essex and enter Cambridgeshire at this point, but change our soil as well, coming at once into a chalk country of bare and inhospitable downs, completely altering the nature of the road and keeping a forbidding solitude, without sign of the habitations of men, and only the occasional dull tinkle of a sheep-bell to hint even of farming interests. Mark well this road onwards from Great Chesterford, for it is the line of the Icknield Way, and here, at the crossing of the Cam, we enter the one-time Icenian kingdom, the territory of that great people whom Cæsar himself, in the name “Cenimagni” he gave them, called great. This country of the Iceni, comprising (to use that favourite word of the auctioneers) what we now know as Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire, was a country pre-eminently distinguished from other parts of England by its ancient inaccessibility. We hear much in our own times of England’s “splendid isolation,” but within this island of Britain there was then, in this country of the Iceni, an isolation quite as thorough, if not so splendid; the river Stour and the oozy morasses spreading on its either banks dividing it most thoroughly from what we now call Essex, then a part of the nation of Trinobantes; and the whole of the western and north-western Icenian border was divided from the present Northants and Lincolnshire by the Ouse and the wide-spreading meres and morasses of the Fens. Only along the ridges of chalk downs stretching from Haverhill to Linton on the Essex border, or from Great Chesterford on to those other chalk downs of Royston was there any line of advance dryshod, and long lengths of those ridges were in those remote times covered with almost impenetrable woods. Thus the Icknield Way was the readiest, and almost only, route to or from the country of the Iceni, for friend or foe. It led, this “Icen hilde weg,” or _Via Iceniana_, out of the south-western parts of England, from the neighbourhood of Weymouth to Old Sarum, Marlborough, the Berkshire White Horse, East Ilsley, Dunstable, and Baldock, on to Royston and Ickleton, hard by this village of Great Chesterford we have now reached. It was never a made road, and in places branches out into several routes, but it was always the clearest of trackways, and owes its preservation over many miles to its course lying so greatly out of the way of agricultural operations, along the crests of the chalk hills, where the plough never comes and the faint footsteps of prehistoric man are undisturbed.