The Way reaches Thetford in another two miles, across the heath. Its course lay athwart the present road from Barnham, into the town, just where the gasworks stand, in the outskirts. But not only those far-off Icenians came this way, where those unromantic gasometers scent the heath and stop up the immemorial track: for this portion of the Way remained the chief, if, indeed, not the only, entrance into Thetford until the close of the seventeenth century, when the river Ouse was first bridged along the line of the main road from Elveden.
XXXI
AVENUE NEAR NEWMARKET.
Having now disposed of the loop road to Thetford through Bury, we are free to take the main route from Newmarket, by Barton Mills and Elveden. It is a wilder and a lonelier, but yet not a dull road, like that just traversed.
Once beyond the long line of trainers’ houses and stables, fringing the road as far as the entrance to Chippenham Park, the heaths that surround Newmarket begin again and plunge the explorer once more into unsheltered wilds. It is after a sun-stricken, wind-swept, or rain-beaten course of these that the mile-long elm avenue leading to the Kennett stream, and the Red Lodge beyond it, comes so welcome. There is surely no more beautiful avenue in the kingdom than this, whose trees interlace their branches overhead in the shape of a true Gothic arch, and really form that similitude to a cathedral nave of which we often hear but in avenues so very, very rarely see.
At the crossing of the little Kennett we finally leave Cambridgeshire and come into Suffolk. On the Suffolk side stands the “Red Lodge” inn, a solitary old house on the heaths that again resume, and continue until the chalk is changed for a gravelly soil at the summit of the rise called Chalk Hill. It is a lonelier road now than ever it had been in all the centuries between the Middle Ages and the dawn of the railway era. Railways at one blow took not only the passenger traffic, but the carriage of goods and minerals; and the cattle and sheep once driven in hundreds of thousands along the highways and byways began to be despatched in cattle-trucks.
We cannot fully realise this olden state of the roads, but we can make an effort towards it: can project ourselves into the seventeenth century, and see and hear the droves of turkeys, five hundred in each, come gobbling and bubbling, in the manner peculiar to turkeys, all the way from the farmyards to the London markets. Can also watch in imagination the waddling march of the thousands of geese bred on these commons, and sent hissing and snapping down this long course of a hundred miles to celebrate the September feast of St. Michael on many a metropolitan dinner-table. Alas, poor Michaelmas geese! Alas, too, for the Christmas geese! but they went more gloriously to martyrdom, being carried all the way instead of driven. The reason for this was that the muddy roads of late autumn and early winter were too soft and sticky for their feet, and so they rode to town in the “goose-cart,” a four-storeyed conveyance as Defoe tells us, “with two horses abreast, like a coach, so quartering the road for the ease of the gentry that thus ride.”
A neglected item of information, from a local newspaper of the time, helps the imagination in later, but still forgotten, things. Thus we read of a village on the Ipswich route from London to Norwich: “In the last droving season, 1845, the landlord of the ‘Bird in Hand,’ Tasburgh, housed 9,300 beasts. He purchased for their consumption and for horses, etc., fifty tons of hay; but in the following year, owing to the opening of the Norfolk Railway, only twelve beasts were taken in, and only 8½ cwt. of hay was wanted.”
Flat lands, under cultivation, bring us from this point to the river Lark, at Barton Mills, whose church tower, with that of Mildenhall, a mile away, now begins to puzzle the stranger. The village of Barton Mills, lying directly on the road, is a kind of preface to, or outpost of, Mildenhall, a town placed on an out-of-the-way loop road, and never seen by those who make straight for Thetford. But we, at any rate, will see it, coming to this backwater of life along a flat road that doubles on itself and winds artfully amid a maze of lazy rills and brimming ditches, covered with an unbroken surface of duckweed. The name of Mildenhall suggests mildew, and although there be nothing in its origin to indicate anything of the kind, it is indeed set down in a fine damp situation, on the very edge of the sodden Fens. Mildenhall’s characteristic trees are the black poplar and the willow, both water-loving species. Mildenhall suffices to itself, and it is well it can so compass a full-orbed life, for if this solitary little town were dependent in any way upon outside existence for protection against ennui, that would be a maimed existence its burgesses would lead. It stands at the end of a branch line from Cambridge, and on the Lark Navigation, and has an air of enduring the railway as an interloping enterprise, while regarding the canal with a benevolent interest. The busy flour-mills, the gas-works, and the oil-cake stores that cluster round the canal wharf support this self-sufficing aspect, and the grave majesty of the old houses in and near the market place, overlooked by the noble tower of the cathedral-like parish church, supply the last touch of satisfied independence. But the town takes a kindly interest in the chance stranger whom good roads and a bicycle do occasionally bring, in summer-time; and the artist who sits down on the pavement to sketch the picturesque grouping of the curious old wooden market cross with the church tower is sure of the courteous offer of a chair from some polite shopkeeper.