But this famous line of defence—for such it is—had really a less distinguished authorship. The Iceni, who at the time of the Roman conquest were a very much more civilised people than the Saxons of five hundred years later, constructed it as the rearward and strongest of the several such ramparts and ditches they had thrown across this only easy line of advance of a possible enemy into their country. A popular idea of the Iceni is that they were like the Picts of North Britain, who painted themselves a sky-blue, and considered that full dress. But they were far more advanced than anything so nearly allied to the ideals of the Garden of Eden, and would no more have owned kin even with such earlier inhabitants of their own East Anglia as the neolithic men, than we would stoop to call cousins with the gorillas. They had advanced beyond the condition of patriarchal communities and roving tribes, and had passed the intermediate stage of barter, to enter the more civilised one of a nation with a money currency and coin of its own. Icenian coins, in gold and silver, are well known to numismatists, and although the design on them, said by experts to be intended to represent a horse, is difficult to be recognised, still they are coins.
This figure of a horse occurring so constantly on these coins has sometimes led antiquaries to the ingenious conclusion that the neighbourhood of Newmarket, even thus early, was famous for horses, but that is a long shot, and very much in the dark.
A people of their calibre must have been quite capable of such military works as these dykes. This was their best effort and still speaks well for their energy. The ditch, on the western side, clearly showing that the work was a defence from dangers expected from that quarter, is twenty feet deep, and the bank, reared up in an acute angle, thirty feet above the level of the ground, thus presents a formidable climb, in all, of fifty feet. Add to these difficulties offered to an invader, the strong probability that the crest of the rampart was defended by a timber palisade, and we can clearly perceive that when these defences were manned by a determined people, the invasion of the Icenian country must have been a hazardous enterprise.
For seven miles the Ditch runs, from the waters of the Cam at Reach to the woods on the chalk hills of Wood Ditton. It is possible to walk along the summit of the bank most of the way, for, although rough and uneven pedestrian exercise, it is in general eighteen feet in breadth, and remarkably like an abandoned railway embankment. It is one of the many sites identified as the scene of Boadicea’s defeat by Suetonius Paulinus, but we are sceptical of this particular one, although the ancient tumulus on the outer face of the Ditch, still called the Two Captains, points to some forgotten conflict in which two leaders were slain and buried on the contested field.
Little is now left of this once prominent mound, once important enough to be marked on Ordnance maps, but now ploughed nearly flat. It stands in the third field from the road, on the right hand, a field now under corn, but until forty years ago a wood
XX
Newmarket Heath is a large place. It is easily possible to ramble on it quite away from any sight or sound of the races and the race crowds, and to find a solitude in its midst while eight thousand people are shouting themselves hoarse in cheering a popular winner. While the October meetings are in progress on one side of the Heath, the July Course, on the other, under the shadow of the “Devil’s Ditch,” is a voiceless solitude. You would almost think that the Iceni, who dug the Ditch, had planned the Course, and built the Stand on it as well, so deserted of the world they look.
Nothing can be more dreary than the sight of this simple race-stand. Built to hold a thousand people, here it squats, an emptiness; the only sounds those in the long sombre belt of firs, whose branches sway with a sound of the sea in the airs that sweep the breezy Heath.
Newmarket is first mentioned in 1227, when it seems to have been established in consequence of an epidemic raging at the mother-parish of Exning, about two miles away. This “old market” of Exning, now a village, owes its name, say some, to the Iceni, but it is much more likely to have derived from the Celtic word “Exe,” for water, for the springs there are a feature of the place. That phenomenally pious lady, St. Etheldreda, one of the daughters of King Anna, and foundress of Ely Cathedral, was born at Exning, and there, we are asked to believe, was anciently a great horse-fair, to which Newmarket can trace its origin as Metropolis of the Turf.
But Newmarket did not come into prominence until the reign of James I., who loved its wild surroundings for the sake of the coursing they gave. It was for hunting the hare and the bustard, and for the sport of hawking, rather than for horse-racing, that Newmarket first became favoured. It was not long, however, before the sportsmen who surrounded James discovered that on the elastic turf of the Heath they had an ideal running-ground for horses, far better than that of the several places where matches were already being made, and racing very soon occupied the foremost place. King James was a frequent visitor, and was the first to establish a palace here, and here, in after-years, Charles I. was brought as a prisoner.