The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway

by Charles G. Harper

"No," rejoined the landlord, "she went by herself."

In this countryman's talk we find a word belonging more especially to Norfolk and Suffolk. This is the word, "bor," a diminutive for neighbour.

XXV

Stanway is approached along a flat stretch, past Mark's Tey, which, without being itself quite on the road, has sent out modern and extremely ugly brick tentacles to line the way. For an incredible distance along the flat the timber tower of Mark's Tey church is visible, amid an inchoate mass of railway signal masts and puffs of smoke. Whistlings, screechings, crashings and rumblings proceed from that direction, for this is a junction of the Great Eastern with the Colne Valley Railway, and the station, by the way, where the lady in Thackeray's Lamentable Ballad of the Foundling of Shoreditch appeared with the baby which she eventually left behind her. It is this busy junction that has caused the hideous outcrop of mean houses along the road to render the village of the old De Marcas something new and strange. Mark's Tey is at a junction of roads as well as of rails, for the road from Braintree and Bishop's Stortford falls in here.

Copford's solitary houses by the way give scarce a hint of the village nearly a mile off, whose little church formerly owned a terrifying relic, in the shape of a human skin nailed on its door; a skin that had been the personal property of some unfortunate straggler from the hordes of marauding Danes that once infested the district, of whom we have already heard legends at Kelvedon and Gore Pit. His Saxon captors must have flayed him with a ferocious delight and nailed up his cuticle with precisely the same satisfaction as that of the gamekeeper who wages war upon stoats and weazels and other vermin, and hangs their bodies on the barn door. But there must have been a bitter day of reckoning for those Saxons when the sea-rovers came this way again and saw in what fashion that doorway was decorated.

Near Mark's Tey.

Copford and its outlying houses lie at the crest of a gentle descent into the valley of a rivulet which finds its way into the Colne. It stands, as its name implies, overlooking some ford which, once important, has, in the gradual draining of the country and the shrinkage of streams, now lost all significance. Stanway adjoins it, and lies along the descent, in the hollow and up the corresponding rise on the other side, where its church stands in a forbidding loneliness. The name of Stanway is sufficient warranty of this being, thus far, the Roman road. It is, however, not so certain that the remaining four miles of the existing highway from this point into Colchester follow the course taken by the Romans; and, indeed, the later researches of archæologists go far to prove that the original way into Roman Colchester avoided the intervening village of Lexden altogether, and, curving eastwards, avoided what may then have been a marsh, to take the higher ground over a portion of Lexden Heath; bending westwards again and crossing the site of the present road between where the grammar school and the hospital now stand. From this point it seems to have crossed by where the Lordsland Nursery grounds stood until recently built over, to the ancient Roman gateway and bastion in the western wall of the town, long known as Colking's, or King Coel's Castle, but originally the Decuman Gate of Roman times. The course followed by this old Roman way is lined on either side with sepulchral remains, and seems to have once been a great cemetery. Wherever the ground is disturbed the relics of some soldier or citizen of Colonia are found, some dating back to the foundation of the colony, nearly nineteen centuries ago. The most remarkable among them are to be seen in the museum at Colchester Castle. There—the most human relic of them all—is the touching monument to M. Favonius, a Centurion of the Twentieth Legion, discovered in 1871 between the hospital and the grammar school, at a depth of 3 feet below the surface, and at a distance of 10 feet from the old Roman road. It is a sculptured stone, 4 feet in height, with the figure of the Centurion himself carved on it, in high relief. It is evidently a portrait of him. He stands in full military costume, his cloak hanging from his shoulders, his sword and dagger by his side. The inscription, almost as sharp as on the day when it was cut, nearly nineteen hundred years ago, tells us that the monument was erected by two of his servants, Verecundus and Novicius. They call him "facilis," the "easy" or "good-natured." It is surely a sweet and touching thing that when all other record of that soldier has perished, we should yet know him to have been a kindly creature.

But to return to Stanway, which keeps, as sole vestige of its heath, a little space of the greenest turf, perhaps half an acre in extent, beside the insignificant stream in the hollow, and opposite the "Swan" Inn. The heath that formerly spread out across the elevated but flat table-land between this village and the succeeding one of Lexden was, in its different parts, variously named after them. On Stanway Heath, in Ogilby's Britannia of 1697, a picture map shows a beacon standing between the forty-seventh and forty-eighth milestones from London, on the right-hand side of the road. It appears to have been a post some 30 feet in height, crowned with a fire-bucket, and climbed by means of slats nailed across. The beacon, thus easily lighted, was provided for the benefit of travellers going to or coming from Colchester across the desolate heath, whose dangers may be guessed from the existence of a "Cut-throat Lane" even in the comparative security of Lexden village. The heath by the highway is a thing of the past, for those portions not brought under cultivation by the farmer have been grabbed by the builder, and the so-called Lexden Heath of to-day is a quite recent row of houses, with a post-office, and shops, and everything complete and modern. At the forty-eighth milestone, amid all this modern upheaval, stands a disused toll-house, and, close by, something much more ancient; the deep, pre-historic hollow, smothered in dense woods and shrubs, known as "King Cole's Kitchen," and now—figure to yourself the shame of it!—overshadowed by a cottage, new built, and named from it "King Cole's Cottage."

Turning off to the right, the curious in things pre-historic may lose themselves in the solitudes of the real Lexden Heath, where the Devil, the Trinobantes, the Romans, or Fairfax, the Parliamentary General—according to varying legends—threw up the entrenchments, and delved the ditches, found there in plenty. The Devil, we say advisedly, for "Gryme," or "Grim," whose name is attached to the dyke across the heath, was none other, in the minds of the Saxons. "Lexden Straight Road" follows for an unconscionable distance a line of Roman entrenchments, and is straight and dull beyond belief. Followed long enough, it leads to "Bottle End," which may originally have been "Battle End," the scene of some traditional legend of Boadicea's defeat at the hands of the Romans. Or, again, it perhaps marks some forgotten connection with St Botolph, whose ruined Abbey stands outside Colchester's walls, and whose honoured name is pronounced "Bottle" by Colcestrians. Anything is possible in a district where Beacon End, the site of the old beacon already mentioned, has become Bacon End.