FROM COLCHESTER WESTWARDS--COGGESHALL, BRAINTREE, WITHAM, INGATESTONE, MARGARETTING, DANBURY HILL, MALDON, TIPTREE, MESSING, AND COLCHESTER Coggeshall--Pleasant site occupied by Romans first and Cistercians later--Braintree--General Wynne as Cunctator--Braintree for motorists having daily work in London--The plan discussed--Middleton Hub makes journeys certain--Routes considered--Witham--Ingatestone--Scene of desolation in 1897--Ingatestone Hall the grange of a Nunnery--How it came to the Petre family--"Murray" shows malice--Courageous farmers--Margaretting--A church tower of wood--Danbury Hill and Camp--Theories concerning--The wolf hypothesis--Edward the Elder "puts a bridle on East Anglia"--Maldon fortified--Battle at Maldon--Tiptree and its jams--Strange crops--Mr. Mechi of _Profitable Farming_--Messing--_Quære_ whether site of Boadicea's defeat--Mr. Jenkins describes position--Compare Jenkins, Merivale and Tacitus--Merivale fanciful--Tacitus merely a literary gentleman at Rome--Battle may have been anywhere, but amusing to localize here--The fight described--Heckford Bridge--Lovely country and bad roads--Good run to Colchester. It has, be it hoped, been made sufficiently clear that Colchester and its immediate environs, Lexden and the Roman river for example, will amply repay many mornings or afternoons spent away from the car, or with the car used as an auxiliary only; and so the next drive suggested is one of some sixty miles only, leaving a morning free. It is a circuitous drive like the last, beginning and ending at the inn yard at Colchester. Our first objective is Coggeshall, by way of Marks Tey, which we reach by taking the left fork at Lexden. It is a straight road and good, but Marks Tey, said to mean Mark's enclosure, does not tempt a halt by its appearance. It is, in fact, a commonplace village, noteworthy only for fine timber in the vicinity. Coggeshall would be a prettier village if it were less prosperous, but it possesses ancient interest as well as some modern prosperity, and it has not lacked its _vates sacer_ in the shape of the Rev. E. L. Cutts, who once discoursed upon it to the Essex Archæological Society. Here, where a farmhouse now stands, was a Cistercian Abbey reached, as the farmhouse is now, by a thirteenth-century brick bridge across the Blackwater. At the top of a hill is a little and very ancient chapel, once desecrated as a barn, but restored during the last century to sacred uses. Nor were the monks the first men possessing discernment enough to see the amenities of Coggeshall as a place of settlement. Situate as it was on the high road between Camulodunum and Verulamium, otherwise Colchester and St. Albans, it was the settlement of Romans, _post_ Claudian Romans no doubt, of whom the customary traces have been found in sufficient abundance to leave no doubt of permanent occupation. In truth, with its