Ickleton.
Leaving Ickleton by its chief street, Abbey Street, I entered an open country rising on all sides. I took the south-westerly road towards Elmdon, and then a right-hand turning out of that which went in a straight line to Ickleton Granges. This is probably a new country road, with hedges and only the narrowest of green strips beside it: it is not the Icknield Way. The old road possibly ran along the gently rising ploughland half-way up it, past Rectory Farm. There is still a footpath from near Abbey Farm and the Priory remains to Rectory Farm, which may represent the course of the Icknield Way, continued by a broken line of thorns reaching almost to Ickleton Granges fifty or a hundred yards north-west of the present road. Past the Granges I turned sharp to the right along a drove coming through the corn from Littlebury and Saffron Walden. At a turning on the left to Redland’s Hall this road became a county boundary, and I went uphill to the corner of a copse, where it made another bend westward. At the bend there was a triangle of turf upon the right, so that the right-hand bank, which lies beyond this turf, suggested a road coming from the east, that is to say from Rectory Farm and Ickleton Priory. The road was now well up above the land to its right, and I could see the straight ridge near Cambridge which carries the Mare Way. On the other hand were the gentle Anthony Hill and Clay Hill, and in front the high land above Royston and its straight bars of wood. The road was making almost due west for Royston. It went between corn, clover, or new-ploughed land; white bryony grew in its low hedges, and even sprawled over the dusty, rabbity mound by the wayside; and it had grass borders of its own width. At first it was rough, but hard and white. Soon it became practically a green road, and then wholly so, but level and rideable. In one place it was lined by lime trees; in others all was elder flower, wild rose, and lady’s slipper, and the chatter of young birds. Beyond the road to Dottrell Hall and the lovely group of sycamore and hornbeams at the crossing, it was much worn again. It was a farm road used only by waggons and men between field and field, or at most between farm and farm. It might have seemed no more than a series, four miles long, of consecutive cart tracks, rarely with a hedge on both sides, between it and the cultivated land. It gave a sense of privacy and freedom combined. At a cottage, one of two that had once been a single farm, and still had a thatched shed and a weedy yard, I knocked to ask for water.
Approaching Royston.
A huge wheel and windlass and a seven-gallon tub stood above a well in the yard. A wild-looking cat bounded through the window of one of the cottages which seemed to be empty. The other might also have been empty, in spite of its dirty muslin curtain, for I knocked long and no one came. Just as I was turning to get water for myself a human being with black hair and wild eyes looked out of an upper window and hailed me with a kind of scream. As she was not half dressed, I told her to leave me to look after myself. The well seemed bottomless, but I had the seven gallons of dark, bright water up on the edge by the time my hostess appeared with a dirty cup. She was a thin, hawk-faced woman, bare and brown to the breast, and with glittering blue eyes, and in her upper jaw three strong teeth. She was dressed in black rags. She shaded her eyes to look at me, as if I were half a mile away.
“You’re thin, boy,” she said, “like me.”
“Yes.”
A pause.