Through East Anglia in a Motor Car. James Edmund Vincent

in their sober suits of drab-grey and glossy black, walking about in perfect amity with the pheasants. This bird is a grey mystery. In shape and dimensions he is identical with the carrion crow; carrion crows and hoodies (or Royston crows) will interbreed on occasion; their nests and eggs are of identical situation, structure, colour, and shape. Their common habits include a partiality for young birds and young rabbits as well as for carrion—I have heard a rabbit scream, looked in the direction of the noise, shot a carrion crow which rose, and found it lying within a couple of yards of a half-grown rabbit, quite warm, and with its skull split—and yet nobody knows for certain whether the two species are distinct or not. The black crows may be migrants; the grey crows certainly are. They come over to the East Coast in hordes in the autumn, mostly from Russia, where they also interbreed with the carrion crow. They come inland a little, and I have seen one or two in Berkshire, but west of Berkshire they are certainly very exceptional in England and Wales, though they are quite common and even breed in Scotland and Ireland. In fact, they are birds, of whom one would like to know more, attired in a Quakerish habit according ill with their disposition. Still, when you have no game coverts of your own in the vicinity, it is good to see them circling about over these wide spaces near Royston, and to remember that they used to be called Royston crows. The marshmen call them Danish crows also, and it is a great pity when ornithologists omit to specify these local names of birds. Hoodie, Danish crow, Royston crow are identical, and each of them at least as interesting as Corone cornix. They are all, as Mr. Rowdler Sharpe says, ravens in miniature, but it is open to doubt whether, as pets, they would be equally amusing in their tricks. We saw them in great numbers as we swept along, and, like many wild things, they took no notice of the car. It is strictly irrelevant, of course, but it may be interesting to say that, since these words were written, I have found that even a Highland stag is not afraid of a motor-car, which shows a Highland stag to have far more sense than some reasoning men.

      Newmarket we have seen before, and since this time also it was passed without a halt, whereas on a later visit we stopped for a while, it need not detain us now. Our road, which kept to the high ground to the south-east of Mildenhall Fen, took us first through characteristic environs of Newmarket not seen on the former tour, past endless training grounds, trim houses and carefully-built stables, and later through the wild heaths known as Icklingham and Weather Heath, the latter actually 182 feet above the sea-level. Right well, no doubt, that last-named heath has earned its name, for it is easy to imagine, and much more comfortable to imagine than to feel, how a gale from the north or west would have swept across the fens over that heath. For that matter there is not a single eminence of more than 200 feet between Weather Heath and the gales from the North Sea, so the east wind swept it too. Here the hand of man has wrought a great and beneficial alteration in the features of nature. Mention has been made before of the belts, clearly planted for partridge driving, to be seen in some parts of East Anglia, and they must be noticed more particularly a few miles farther on, when we pass Elvedon. The landowners who planted them, and the pheasant coverts, have improved the scenery and their own shooting at the same time. They cannot, perhaps, be credited with absolute and unalloyed altruism. And soon, on this naturally bleak upland, the road was sheltered on either side by close hedges of fir, trimmed to a height of ten feet or so, such as I never saw before, nor have seen since, out of Norfolk. They cannot be meant for screens to conceal the guns from the driven birds, for the British public has to stand a good deal of shooting in illegal proximity to high roads, but it would hardly tolerate permanent arrangements to that end, even in Norfolk or Suffolk, where game is sacrosanct. There can be nothing of this kind here, nor, if there were, would it have been necessary to plant both sides of the road. No—these hedges, charming because of their quaintness, can have been planted in no other spirit than that of humanity, in the widest sense of the word. They break the monotony of the landscape, and that is something; close and impervious, they must break also the force of the wind and must form an effectual barrier to the slashing rain that the wind sends with terrible force before its breath. They are an unmixed blessing, a wonderful improvement to the conditions of wayfaring, and it only remains to be hoped that there may arise no county surveyor who, using the arbitrary discretion given to him by law, shall decree that these merciful shelters be laid low in the season of the year when his word is law.

      On we glided with supreme ease—the whole distance from Newmarket to Thetford being eighteen miles, but the "going so good," as foxhunters would say, that distance counts for little—and the evidence of the cult of St. Pheasant was more and more conspicuous. Were we not drawing near to Elvedon Hall—an Italian house built in 1876 for the Maharajah Dhuleep Singh, now the property of Lord Iveagh—and have not fabulous "bags" been long a tradition of Elvedon Hall estate? Let it not be supposed for a moment that this fact is mentioned by way of pandering to the prejudice of protesting Radicals, or of joining in the chorus of ignorant invective against game-preservation, now happily seldom heard in the land. Looking at this bleak upland, having regard to the recent and the probable future history of British agriculture, and, if a personal allusion be permissible, to the well-known character of the present owner of Elvedon Hall, it is plain that this ground could not be better employed than as a game preserve, that as such it probably produces more food and gives more employment than if it were in the hands of farmers, and that, if this were not so, Lord Iveagh would not be the man to preserve game. There is no East Anglian grievance here, and East Anglia certainly feels none. If there be any grievance at all it is that some of the money primarily made on the banks of the Liffey is spent in East Anglia; but, no doubt, much of it comes indirectly from East Anglia also, and there is no sort of doubt that Lord Iveagh does his duty, and much more than his duty, by Ireland as well as by England, more completely than most men.

      Leaving Elvedon behind we sped to Thetford, passing, a mile or so beyond the gates of Elvedon, across the county boundary and out of Suffolk into Norfolk. The character of the scenery remained unchanged. We were in a land of heaths, barren and pleasing, and of rabbit warrens, some of them very ancient and famed for the quality of the skins and fur of the rabbits reared among them. Arthur Young found this country from Northwold to Thetford, and again from Thetford to Ingham, "an uncultivated sheep-walk," and as he made no suggestion for its improvement generally (in spite of the success achieved in the neighbourhood by "one of the best farmers in England [Mr. Wright]," through the use of marl, which was not even "the fat soapy kind)," it may be taken that the case is a fairly hopeless one. The rabbits probably pay as well as anything else would, and we have to thank them, and the sterility of the soil, for the preservation of a fine tract of wild and open land, and for the sense of freedom in passing through it.

      As for Thetford, its motto certainly ought to be "Ichabod." There are few places in England, possessed in their time of a substantial reputation, whose glory has departed more completely. It was the scene of a fierce battle between Dane and Saxon; it was the second city in Norfolk in point of importance; it had a mint so late as the days of Henry II; its priory was founded by Roger Bigod, but is now an uninteresting ruin; it had twenty churches, five market-places, and twenty-four main streets in the time of Edward III; it was the diocesan centre of East Anglia for nineteen glorious years, from 1075 to 1094. Also it has always had its vast earthwork, commonly known as the "mound," commonly believed also to be of enormous antiquity, Roman at the latest, and by virtue of it Thetford has been identified with the Roman Sitomagus. It is a little hard that, when all the rest of the glory of Thetford is gone, even the Mound, which without excavation is totally devoid of interest, should have the glamour taken away from it and that investigators on scientific principles have exploded the Sitomagus bubble. Mr. Rye says:—

      "It has been guessed to be Sitomagus, and certainly many signs of Roman occupation have been found here. But the great 'Castle Mound,' steep and high, with its grass-grown sides, so difficult even in times of peace to climb up, is the chief object of interest in the town. There are no traces of buildings on it, and the platform at the top is so small that the generally received theory that it was thrown up as a refuge against the Danes is obviously untenable. The labour and energy necessary to create such a mound would have been enormous, and surely would have been expended in comparatively recent times, such as those in which the Pirate Danes harried our country, to more practical use. That the mound is mainly artificial I have little doubt; but whether it was a burial mound or not cannot now be discovered without deeper excavations than are likely to be allowed."

      Considering that the earthwork is a hundred feet high and a thousand