The Icknield Way: Portraits the English Countryside. Edward Thomas
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English country, though landlords say so. The road crosses another to Kilmington and Yarnfield, and at once it is older-looking, hard, but winding slightly among bushy and lush steep banks. You see flowers and ash trees, and a linnet on the tip of one, but nothing distant save white clouds and the blue. Here it is called Long Lane, and among its herbage is an old London milestone. Long Lane is often the title of a lane coming from somewhere afar off: there is one south of Hermitage, giving its name to a village, in Berkshire, and one near Cucklington in Somerset, where there is a Tinker’s Hill also. In another mile Long Lane crosses the Maiden Bradley road by a smithy and a “Red Lion”; its name becomes White Sheet Lane, and it goes straight in sight of the high white quarry and the deep tracks up to White Street Castle. Like Long Lane, it is a parish boundary. Both are without a house: the road has hardly passed a house since Redlynch, save at a crossing, and those living in the houses use the road only for a mile or so on the way to a village on either side. Slanting uphill under the quarry, with a parallel green way hollowed beside it, goes the road’s bolder self. The hedges and banks are low, and the cornland or meadow is open round about. The lane turns to climb White Sheet Hill, and beeches and some whitebeam trees cool the beginning of the ascent; there are myriads of primroses in their season and chaffinches singing. You pass a thatched house and the lime-kiln of “Tom Gatehouse, Lime Burner,” by the quarry, and another milestone showing twenty-three miles to Sarum and a date like 1757—when Blake was born. Looking back, the Knolls are on the right and Alfred’s Tower on the left among the woods. There are tumuli on the right as the road comes clear out on to the hill-top and travels between the wired fences of the downland pasture. Here stand cows who do not often see a pencil sharpened. Pewits wheel over and before and behind; all along the high course of the road the pewits cry and wheel. The road is at first rutted, but is soon a green smooth track on the highest land, skirting the upper ends of coombes dappled dusky gold by gorse, and commanding bare downland on the left and wooded hills on the right, and looking along a great bottom to the church tower of Mere, and Mere’s beautiful “Long Hill,” and the wide-arboured vale stretching away to the long ridge of Dorset. It is a high way and a proud way. After crossing an ancient ditch it is labelled “British Trackway,” and ahead it is seen going between a wire fence and a dark line of tussocks. Then it is divided into three or four parallel terraces grooved by wheels, but with a lark’s nest in the green rut. It crosses the Mere road as two hollow ways side by side, but in a little while is only a green track with single thorns on the left. Here is the twenty-first milestone from Sarum, the ninety-ninth from London, inscribed 1750, and it is called the London Drove Road; it is still in sight of Alfred’s Tower, now protruding above White Sheet ramparts. In one place it is so wide that the milestone stands out in the middle, like a traveller asleep or turned to stone among mole-heaps that have blotted the signs of other travellers. On the left, as far as the main Wincanton road, part of the track is embanked; entering the hard motor road to Amesbury and London, the old way is outlined chiefly by the thorns of Old Willoughby Hedge on the left. The road going hedgeless across the downland is but the thin backbone of the old green way. For a time the line of thorns diverges, and then, soon after the crossing of the Warminster road, they come slanting from the right to meet the road and cross it just before another milestone. Hereby are three milestones on different roads, all close together, which has caused the easy winning of merry wagers to run past three milestones in three minutes. The drove crosses several roads going to Hindon, as a broad green track with or without a hedge, marked by its greater profusion of daisies and its paleness and lack of tussocks. Still there are pewits, and somewhere not far away a Pewit Castle. It is joined again by the main Amesbury road beyond Cold Berwick Hill, but presently deserted, the busier white way going boldly off over the ridge, and down to the Wylye River and up again on to Salisbury Plain by Yarnbury, and so past Stonehenge to Amesbury. The green road winds along the south slope of the ridge. Now two lines of thorns show the course far ahead, or the white weals of an ascent are seen; now gorse encroaches on it, and at a crossway corned-beef tins and grey embers mark an encampment of nomads. It passes thickets of thorn and wayfaring trees burying an old milestone to Sarum. Turf or corn lies on either hand or on both. It keeps along the edge of Groveley Woods and within sound of the nightingales until it bends down to Salisbury; once probably it or a higher parallel course went over a ford to Old Sarum, and evidently it is vastly older than the eighteenth-century milestones, perhaps old enough to have guided the Hampshire men and some of the Wiltshiremen to Alfred, a road such as Cobbett loved for the hammering of horses’ hoofs on flints.
Another fine ox drove, and dignified by that name and by old lettering on the Ordnance Map, ran clear for a long stretch along the high land south of the Ebble River, from a point four miles south of Salisbury and westwards by Winkelbury to the south of Shaftesbury. It may some day be proved that one of the most famous of ancient roads, the Icknield Way itself, was an ox drove. There is said to be a charter mentioning the Icknield Way as “the way the cattle go”; and one writer has boldly derived the very name from the British Yken, or Ychen, meaning oxen. Every district in the chalk country has its tradition of an old road, now surviving in a footpath or in broken vertebræ of lane and footpath to provide walkers with endless theories. At Swindon, for example, it is said[3] that the Holy Well stood on a road coming from the east and going westward past Bradenstoke Abbey into Somerset, and on another used by pilgrims to the shrine of St. Anne’s in the Wood, at Brislington in Somerset, which went by Elcombe, Hay Lane Bridge, Bushton, Clyffe, Calne, Studley, Chippenham, Pewsham Forest, Bradford, Keynsham Abbey, and Whitchurch, to Brislington, which is in the south-east of Bristol and has now a station called St. Ann’s Park. But this is not the place to give way to the fascination of a roll-call of country names.
Except that bridges superannuated fords, the conditions for the travelling of cattle cannot have changed much from Alfred’s time until the day of railway trucks carrying thickets of moaning horns and square blocks of sheep. The turnpike system helped to preserve the old roads because drovers using them could avoid the tolls; their cattle could also feed by the wayside. Canon Jackson,[4] in 1862, said that the Ridgeway of Berkshire and Wiltshire was part of the road used for ages and to this day for driving cattle from Anglesey into Kent. Mr. Walter Money, in a note to Miss Gossett’s Shepherds of Britain, said much the same thing. Unfortunately neither has told us anything of their route. I have no doubt they could have covered most of the distance on grass. I should like to have travelled with them. You will find “Welsh Ways” all over England. Walkers or Workaway Hill, where the Ridgeway descends southward from Wansdyke to the Pewsey Valley, is said to be a corruption of Weala-wege, and to have been called Walcway (or Welshway) by a shepherd not long ago. There is a “Welshway” in Northamptonshire making past Northampton for Wales by way of Banbury and the Cotswolds, and said to have been the route of Welsh drovers. There is a “Welsh Lane” in the Cotswolds turning out of the Gloucester road, three or four miles from Cirencester, and going up the hill by Four Mile Bottom towards Barnsley. I met an old man who remembered helping the Welsh drovers with their black cattle there sixty years ago. They were putting up near by for the night, and they liked the boy because his name was David. In the downland these roads would be practicable for the most part all the year round; but Defoe tells us that the clay roads of the Midlands used to be so bad that graziers sold their stock in September and October: they could then be taken to the neighbourhood of London and kept until mid-winter to be sold at a high price. Cheshire men used to send their cheese to London either all the way by sea or overland to Burton, and so by the river to Hull and thence by sea. Gloucester men sent their goods by land to Lechlade or Cricklade, and then onward by the Thames; but their flocks doubtless could travel by Bath and go along the down ways eastward. But he says that now the roads are good, and mutton comes straight from the country in December, and almost as cheap as in summer.
Under Liddington Hill, Wiltshire.
I have not had the fortune to meet drovers from Wales, but where the Icknield Way through Buckinghamshire rounds the promontory Beacon of the Ivinghoe Hills I have seen men with sheep from Berkshire or Dorset journeying towards Dunstable, Royston, and the farms of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. They have to go much on the hard grit to-day, and I have heard that they are kept off the unfenced Ridgeway lest the flock should eat too much of the pastures in their passage. The sheep dislike the grit as much as Mr. Burroughs loves it and I hate it, and what with the traffic