“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.
This junction of roads is peculiarly impressive, and bites deeply into the imagination. A solitary farmhouse on one side of the cross-roads, an equally solitary cottage on the other, a long length of old malt-houses topping the rise, and the eerie bulk of “Mag’s Mount,” crowned with spindly firs, and with a deep cutting of the Deserted Railway scarring its chalky shoulder: all these combine to fix the spot in the recollection, although no story belongs to it and no one knows who was “Mag” of the Mount that bears his name.
In another two miles the Fleam Dyke, or Balsham Ditch, is reached, almost as perfect now as when first dug, but in places overgrown with trees, especially to the left hand, where a prehistoric tumulus called Matlow Hill commands it. Ahead, along the rising and dipping road, the paltry wayside settlement of Six Mile Bottom comes in sight, distinguished by the very busy and scandalously dangerous level crossing at the railway station, where a frequent service of express trains dashing through at high speed is a menace to life and a hindrance to users of the highway.
Plantations in thick continuous fringes or belts here begin to shield the road from the tempestuous winds, and shut out the empty downs, whose inhospitable nature seems to be reflected in the name of Westley Waterless, a lonely village marked on the map in their midst.
At last, passing by outlying trainers’ establishments, the neighbourhood of Newmarket is heralded by the great grassy bank, some thirty feet in height, which looms before the wayfarer as he climbs a rise. The road, and a road coming from Cambridge, pass through a cleft in this great barrier, and under the lee of the opening nestles an old toll-house. To the left, across a breezy open space stretching away for miles, goes this grassy earthwork, rising and falling with the inequalities of the ground, and with a yawning ditch accompanying it into the dim perspective. A grey church tower is seen in the middle distance, and on the far horizon, gleaming white in occasional sunbursts, or looming blackly under cloud effects, is an architectural Something that dominates the whole scene. We are, in short, come to the Devil’s Ditch and Newmarket Heath. That is Burwell church, showing greyly amid surrounding clumps of trees, three miles away, and that architectural city of dream on the horizon, reflecting through the opalescent haze of the Fens, across the intervening marshes of Wicken and Soham, is St. Etheldreda’s own refuge of Ely, whose giant cathedral, islanded thirteen miles away amid the bogs and meres, shines from afar, like a good deed in a naughty world.
THE DEVIL’S DITCH AND NEWMARKET HEATH, LOOKING TOWARDS ELY.
XIX
The first mention of the Devil’s Ditch is found in the Saxon Chronicle, in the year 905, when this land of the East Angles was described as laid waste by the northmen between the “Dyke” and the Ouse. It was under the Saxons that it was first imputed to the Father of Lies, whose name it still bears, and to whose strenuous labour, in the open-mouthed astonishment of those simple people, amazed at the many such gigantic earthworks they found in the land, they ascribed almost every other such remarkable object. The Normans, in a later age, not so credulous, knew it as St. Edmund’s Dyke; the jurisdiction of the Abbots of St. Edmundsbury extending thus far westward.