THAT cyclist whose way lies in the eye of the wind along these miles to or from Newmarket is greatly to be pitied, for few sheltering plantations break the force of the howling gales that sweep the stark hillsides. But when the summer sun of a still July afternoon shines mellow upon this country of infinite distances—why, then the way of the pilgrim is made easy, and he can better appreciate a road whose bleakness, when overtaken by rain or night, or struggling against adverse winds, he remembers with horror. Here we pass the Brent Ditch, going solitary across the unfenced, uncultivated grassy downs, and come to the equally solitary Cambridge and Haverhill Railway that runs in single track in a deep cutting across the road. You see Pampisford station down below as you pass by, and a railway inn, and that is all. If you linger on the bridge and await the coming of a train, you will see it stop, and the station-master and one porter, awakened out of their slumber, like Sleeping Beauties, come yawning on to the platform to meet the passengers who do not alight and to assist into the train those who do not put in an appearance. A little way beyond this lonely spot, at the cross-roads by Bourn Bridge, where the Bourn, or Linton River, flows across the highway, there stood a once well-known posting-house and coaching-inn, the “King’s Arms.” It was demolished, for lack of business, many years since, and only a row of cottages on the left hand, once forming part of the stables, now remains, with the embankment of the Deserted Railway, the cause of the inn’s decay, and itself long ago abandoned, at the rear. [Illustration: “MAG’S MOUNT.”] Still lonelier grows the road as we proceed, attaining the height of detachment from the busy world at a point near the forty-eighth mile from London, where the road between Cambridge and Little Abington crosses our route. This is the Roman road known to antiquaries as the _Via Devana_, a name coined by them for it, to describe its course diagonally through England from Colchester to Chester, the _Deva_ of the Romans. It leads on the left hand to Cambridge, six miles away, over the Gog Magog Hills, the Cambridgeshire “mountains,” on whose not remarkably high crest the Roman camp of Vandlebury can still be traced. Ancient roads are the merest commonplaces of this route to Newmarket, and we have gone little more than another mile when another is reached, crossing again at right angles. This is a way, much more ancient than the Romans, known as “Worstead Street,” and thought to have been the “War-stead,” or path, of some ancient people, perhaps the Iceni. This also leads, as a made road, on the left, to Cambridge; but its continuation to the right hand is now nothing more than a grassy track.