The Icknield Way

by Edward Thomas

Coombe at Bishopstone.

The deeply worn road from Swinley Down cut across my road, south of the green terrace road, at Idstone, and sent it northwards twenty yards or so, just as Akeman Street cutting across the Upper and Lower Icknield Ways near Tring sent each nearly a mile northwards. After this I could see no trace of the little terrace road, though it was possibly marked by a bank dividing the next fields to the road from those beyond, and then by a mere division between crops to a point above or beyond Bishopstone. Half-way between Idstone and Bishopstone the road entered Wiltshire without ceremony. At the turning just before reaching Bishopstone the road was worn very deep, and above it a steep-walled, bare coombe ran up into the Downs with a track along its edge. More often than not after leaving Wantage the road had been worn thus deep, because it traversed a country of numerous and abrupt undulations; these made fairly steep ascents and descents necessary, and they invariably mean the hollowing out of any unmetalled, i.e. of any ancient and not Roman road. The plough could never do any harm to this road. But the “Port Way” between Wantage and Streatley it could hide from most eyes in a few seasons. The Ickleton Street between Upton and Lockinge Park would almost disappear under a single ploughing, and doubtless often has done so, to reappear in the same or a parallel course when needed.

At Bishopstone the road twisted right and left almost as at Ashbury. This was into a coombe with a little stream in it, and there were some signs that the old way had rather been left and right—that is, sloping down to the ascending bottom of the coombe and up again—as in other coombes. But the coombe and the bare Downs about it were so shaped by nature, by wearing, and apparently by deliberate but inexplicable cutting, that a mere road could not be traced with certainty. The coombe branched as it rose up into the Downs and formed several enormous convexities and concavities of turf. Several of their converging slopes were cut evenly into three or four, or nearly a dozen, green terraces like staircases, all of which, had a company of giants sat there, would have given a view of the spring-head below.

Sheep were strewn over some of these terraces, making arrangements of white dots of a fascinating irregularity. Unless it has become a trick, only a great artist could make similar arrangements of equal beauty. The unknown laws which produce these inevitable accidents are great managers of the beautiful. The succession of bays in an island coast and the general form of the island itself—of course, particularly of islands off our own coast—are beautiful in their way. The shape of England and Wales, the shape of Ireland, of Man, and of the whole flock of the Hebrides please me with their unity, fascinate me with their complexity; a mistaken map of any such known place is as bad æsthetically as geographically. Children are fond of inventing islands with marvellous inlets more romantic than anything on the west coast of Scotland or Scandinavia. But I have never seen one of these invented islands that I could like apart from its creator, or its names, or its sites marked “Buried gold,” and so on. They are incredible and raise no wonder. They are not masters’ work. I do not know if geologists can support me, but Leonardo’s Cave in “The Virgin of the Rocks” always makes me uneasy by what seems to me to be its artificial impossibility. Another great picture which is, I think, faulty in a similar way reminds me of another beauty—the beauty of the scattering and gathering of the stars. I never look at Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” without feeling the constellation in that glorious purple is an unhappy invention. It may be my poor astronomy, but I should be inclined to say that stars never could be spread exactly as they are in that picture. It is not merely that there is (I believe) no such constellation, but that the form is one which, for some reason, they would avoid, though by picking a star here and a star there it might be patched up. Birds always fly and fishing-boats always sail in these just patterns. Some are so just that, like that of the sheep above Bishopstone, I should like to have them copied on paper to look at for their mystical arithmetic.

The village, the mill, and the church were lower down to the right below the spring, on the modern road and its northward branches. Only a cottage, with a thatched roof on a level with my feet, lay near the green coombe track above the water. The road went on again between corn and roots, westwards now, and gradually farther from the Downs, until a cross-road from Bourton cut across it and sent it southwards a quarter-mile by a willowy spring before it turned west again.

This road southward into the Marlborough and Hungerford road may yet be shown to be part of the Icknield Way. For at Totterdown, a mile and a half beyond, it curves round and makes a line with the road to Chisledon under Liddington Hill—the road much resembling the Icknield Way which is called “Ridgeway” on the maps. It rose now, a hedged and elmy road, to five hundred feet, and had a deep, grassy hollow and elm trees below, between it and the cornland of the Downs. It dipped to a spring and a post office at Hinton Parva; it dipped again and rose to a view over the northern vale to the dim, watery wall of the Cotswolds. At this height it crossed Ermine Street just after passing a “Black Horse.” All four ways at the crossing were deeply worn and made a pit with bushy banks and tiny green triangles of waste in the midst.

In a quarter-mile past the crossing of Ermine Street I was at Wanborough. There the road forked at the “Calley Arms.” There is not a scrap of real or pretended documentary evidence for either road, at least until the place-names mentioned in the Saxon charter relating to Wanborough have been identified. The left-hand road had the advantage of keeping near the hills, instead of going clean away west like the right-hand one. This right-hand road may at last be connected with one of those rumoured roads going westwards, under the secondary line of chalk hills, past Holy Cross at Swindon, past Elcombe and Studley to St. Anne’s-in-the-Wood at Brislington, in Somerset, or to Devonshire; and this continuation may at last be shown to be entitled to the name of Icknield Way. I followed the left-hand road because it seemed possible to connect it with one, very much like the Icknield Way and in a similar relation to the Downs, going south-westward through Wroughton and Broad Hinton, and from there either to Avebury or to Yatesbury, and so by Juggler’s Lane to Cherhill on its way to Bath.

Liddington clump, the straight ridge and the “castle” rampart upon it, were clear ahead as I took this turning. Wanborough’s towered and spired church stood at the top of a slope of grass on my right. It was a crooked, hedged road, with a grassy edge and a path on the grass; and the telegraph posts followed it. It passed out of Wanborough parish at a tiny stream that crossed the road in a deep, narrow cleft with willows and willow herbs below on the right, and in the widening cleft a derelict mill, a steep garden plot, and a row of beehives. It rose up narrow, deep, and steep to the “Bell” at Liddington. There I turned to the left into the Swindon road, and almost at once to the left again, leaving the church on my left. This took me past two or three houses of Medbourne, and sharp to the left and right through the hamlet of Badbury, where a great elm stands at the first turning above a deep hollow and a road going northward down it to the right. Then crossing the Roman road from Mildenhall to Wanborough Nythe, I was at Chisledon and another cleft in the land. This cleft is often precipitous, and so narrow that you could almost play cards across it. A streamlet and a single line of railway wind along the bottom. The church stands at the edge where it is gentler, and the village is scattered over the slopes and edges.