Very few of the country folk know this as the Icknield Way, and not a great number have ever heard of it as the drove-road, but the cross-roads are known in all the neighbourhood by the little turfy mound called “Marman’s Grave,” traditionally the burial-place of a suicide in those uncharitable old times when the midnight burial without Christian rites, and with a stake driven through the body, was the world’s last act of injustice towards those poor despairing souls whom cruel circumstance had tortured beyond endurance. Who the unhappy “Marman” was, and when or why he gladly left an existence so hateful to him that he could even contemplate with equanimity that _post-mortem_ indignity of a stake through his vitals, we shall never know, and the little stone post cresting his grave tells us nothing, for although it looks like some simple memorial of him, its sole inscription, the letters “B” and “E,” give no clue in his direction, for they only mark the respective bounds of Barnham and Elveden. [Illustration: MARMAN’S GRAVE.] The Way reaches Thetford in another two miles, across the heath. Its course lay athwart the present road from Barnham, into the town, just where the gasworks stand, in the outskirts. But not only those far-off Icenians came this way, where those unromantic gasometers scent the heath and stop up the immemorial track: for this portion of the Way remained the chief, if, indeed, not the only, entrance into Thetford until the close of the seventeenth century, when the river Ouse was first bridged along the line of the main road from Elveden. XXXI [Illustration: AVENUE NEAR NEWMARKET.] HAVING now disposed of the loop road to Thetford through Bury, we are free to take the main route from Newmarket, by Barton Mills and Elveden. It is a wilder and a lonelier, but yet not a dull road, like that just traversed. Once beyond the long line of trainers’ houses and stables, fringing the road as far as the entrance to Chippenham Park, the heaths that surround Newmarket begin again and plunge the explorer once more into unsheltered wilds. It is after a sun-stricken, wind-swept, or rain-beaten course of these that the mile-long elm avenue leading to the Kennett stream, and the Red Lodge beyond it, comes so welcome. There is surely no more beautiful avenue in the kingdom than this, whose trees interlace their branches overhead in the shape of a true Gothic arch, and really form that similitude to a cathedral nave of which we often hear but in avenues so very, very rarely see.