It would be a stretch of imagination--in fact, it would be what the late Sir William Harcourt once called "a good thumping lie"--to say that the exit from Cambridge to the eastward has any features of interest, or that the dead level of the Newmarket road for the first few miles is attractive on a cold and dull day, when Ely, dominating the low-lying plain in decent weather, is not visible to the naked eye. This Fen Country has its charm of appearance no less than of history. Its history, indeed, is an engineering epic, to which it will be possible to allude, hardly to do justice, at a later point. January 24, 1906, was not a day calculated to make the motorist feel in a romantic mood concerning the Fens. The road, straight, level, muddy where it was not metalled, metalled where it was not muddy, was lost in grey vapour to the front of us. The prospect on either side was of flat ploughed land, and of land on which the steaming plough-horses were even then at work; there was no distant view at all. Some five or six miles out of Cambridge the undergraduates alighted to walk home through the mud, and we left them behind with many shoutings of farewell, reflecting to ourselves the while that one of them, who, with the true carelessness of a twentieth-century undergraduate of Cambridge (or for that matter of Oxford), was wearing tennis shoes, would find walking in the mud to be one of those carnal pleasures whereof satiety cometh soon rather than late. Soon we passed a church close to the road on the left, a striking structure of brick and stone, and said to be the finest example of Decorated architecture in East Anglia. How that can be, having regard to the existence of Ely and the rhapsodies that are penned concerning its Decorated portion, it is not for me to say. At any rate Bottisham church, commanding the landscape as it can only be commanded in a plain, is a stately and beautiful structure, leaving an abiding impression on the memory. It is, in fact, essentially a motorist's church--that is to say, one of which a passing view gives sincere pleasure. The afternoon had advanced more than was desirable. I did not like to ask my kindly charioteer to make a detour for Swaffham, which I then believed to lie on our left. Instead of that I regaled him with memories of Swaffham, which have their proper place in another chapter. The conversation helped to pass the time; at any rate it did no harm, and it was only a month or two later, in the "Maid's Head" at Norwich, that I learned where the real Swaffham was, and that this detour, if it had been made, would have shown us nothing but the relics of two churches at Swaffham Prior and another church at Swaffham Bulbeck.