The Icknield Way: Portraits the English Countryside. Edward Thomas

Hall, west of Weston Colville, West Wratting and Balsham; it is improbable that he did more than fly over them in fancy. He is satisfied that where the parish, and afterwards the county, boundaries coincide with the present road from Newmarket it is the Icknield Way, especially as at Stump Cross the county boundary follows the sudden turn out of the main road along a little-used lane leading over the Cam to Ickleton. From Ickleton to a point near Chrishall Grange and a tumulus—where for a mile the lane is a county boundary—it is uncertain; but from that point to Noon’s Folly he is content with the “nearly disused track,” which near there again becomes a county boundary. Thus he connects Newmarket and Royston by a road of the same character as the well-warranted parts of the Icknield Way without any evidence but probability.

      The Rev. A. C. Yorke (Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1903) prefers the road known as Ashwell Street, which runs for some miles nearly parallel with the supposed Icknield Way and is most clear from Ashwell, north of Baldock, to Melbourn, north-east of Royston. In a lucid and vigorous article he says that “there can be no doubt” that “Ashwell Street is the original Icknield Way.” He is willing to give up the name of one road, take away the name from another road which has borne it since 1695, and in one place since Henry the Third, and give it to the first which has never borne it, so far as he knows. He thinks the so-called Icknield Way from Newmarket to Hitchin, Roman; just as others think his Ashwell Street Roman, Mr. F. Codrington, e.g., holding that Ashwell Street was an alternative course, leaving the Icknield Way at Worsted Lodge and returning at Wilbury Camp.

      Wilbury Camp.

      Mr. W. G. Clarke (Norwich Mercury, Oct. 8, ’04, etc.; Knowledge, II, 99) attempts to connect Newmarket with Norwich and call the road the Icknield Way. He suggests a route over the Kennett at Kentford and the Lark at Lackford; then to Icklingham All Saints, and following the boundary of the hundreds of Blackbourn and Lackford to Thetford, having crossed the road from Newmarket to Thetford at Marmansgrave, and that between Bury and Thetford a few yards north of Thetford Gasworks, where the remains of a British settlement were found in 1870. He crosses the Little Ouse and Thet where the Nuns’ Bridges now are. On the other side “the logical and undoubtedly correct continuation of the Icknield Way” is by Castle Lane and Green Lane. A find of Celtic and Roman pottery at the south end of Green Lane, old thorns in the fields between Green Lane and Roudham Heath, old banks on the heath near Peddars’ Way, “which it crosses about half a mile from where Peddars’ Way is joined by the Drove,” a “Bridgham tradition” of a waggon road over Roudham Heath, and the battle of Ringmore, fought there between Sweyn and Ulfketel, the find of bronze weapons and flint axes at Attleborough, and the supposed British origin of Norwich Castle Hill, take him by these places. From Norwich he goes by Sprowston, Rackheath, Wroxham, Hoveton, Beeston, over the Ant by the “Devil’s Ditch,” or “Roman Camp,” at Wayford to Stalham and to Happisburgh. Except that Stalham is near Hickling, this route has nothing—no local map, no documents—to entitle it to be called the Icknield Way.

      Mr. Beloe (Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, VII) suggests an easterly line beyond Newmarket by a supposed junction with the Ailesway from Newmarket, by Brandon Ferry and Narford to Hunstanton.

      Mr. J. C. Tingey (Norfolk Archæology, XIV) agrees that such a junction may have been used, but prefers a line through Ickburgh and Cockley Cley, crossing the Wissey at Mundford. He also proposes another route from Lackford almost to Thetford, which he avoids, crossing the Ouse on to Snarehill, with its many tumuli, because he thinks an early traveller would have done this. Then, with no trace of a road, he goes over Snare Hill to Shadwell Park, the Harlings, Uphall, Kenninghall to Banham, where a street was once called Tycknald Street (Blomefield’s History of Norfolk); or he could reach Banham from Elvedon, Barnham, and Rushford. After Banham he leaves a gap of twelve miles, hastening to Swainsthorpe, south-east of Norwich, where he has found a Hickling Lane, called “Icklinge Way,” in a seventeenth-century conveyance, where it is said to lead to Kenninghall. He has also found in Blomefield a mention of “the way called Ykeneldsgate,” in that parish, dated 1308.

      The partly lost line of this lane he has made out through Mulbarton; beyond which he is struck by the place-names of Keningham, Kentlow, and Kenninghall, noticing the other similar names on or near the supposed Icknield Way—Kentford, Kennet, Kensworth (once “Ikensworth”), Kennett, in Wiltshire, and, beyond Exeter, Kenn and Kenn Ford. Other documents of 1482 and 1658 relating to the next parish to Swainsthorpe, Stoke Holy Cross, enable him to extend the road with some probability eastward. They also show that the road was known at about the same time as Hickley Lane in one parish, and Stoke Long Lane in another. Most remarkable of all, he has found in Blomefield mention of “the way called Ykeneldsgate” in the same parish of Stoke Holy Cross, in 1306. He suggests reaching Haddiscoe as his “port in Celtic times,” by Framingham Earl, Bergh Apton, Thurton Church, Loddon, and Raveningham. He sternly avoids Norwich as post-Roman, and Bury for the same reason. At the same time he admits the probability of branches to those places when they became important. Thus he shows that he has in his mind one road, with one name, and that something like Icknield Street, going from sea to sea, not only in the Confessor’s time, but before the Romans.

      It is impossible even to outline the multitudinous conjectures at the north-east end of the Icknield Way. At the south-west conjecture has been all but silenced by Stukeley’s invention of the Via Iceniana and Bennet’s substitution of the Ridgeway, both stupefying fictions.

      For two hundred years these conjectures have been multiplied and become venerable by repetition. Plot thinks that the road might go from Norfolk to Devon and Land’s End. Gale fancies Caistor and Burgh Castle at one end, and, as Stukeley did, Exeter at the other. Dr. Beeke “supposes” it went from Streatley towards Silchester, also that it crossed the Thames at Moulsford. Colt Hoare speaks of it as connecting Old Sarum with Dorchester and Winchester. Arthur Taylor takes it for granted that it came from “Cornwall or some extreme point in the south-west of Britain” to Norwich and Hickling. Isaac Taylor says that it went from Norwich to Dorchester and Exeter. Mr. H. M. Scarth conjectures that the road crossing the main street of Silchester, which runs east and west, may have been an extension of the Icknield Way from Wallingford to Winchester. In Social England Col. Cooper King, following Stukeley, takes the road to Exeter, Totnes, and Land’s End; following Bennet, he takes it along the Ridgeway. Elton calls it briefly a road from Norwich through Dunstable and Silchester to Southampton, and to Sarum and the western districts.

      The theorists and conjecturers have done little to ascertain the course of a road which can safely be called the Icknield Way. By far the greater part of the work has been done by men who used chiefly local tradition. Plot in Oxfordshire, Wise in Berkshire, perhaps Robert Morden or an unknown assistant in Hertfordshire. The best of the conjecturers have only linked up the authenticated parts in a probable manner. Most have been too busy with their own views to be anything but benevolent to others. But in 1901 appeared one with no theory and without benevolence, Professor F. Haverfield. In a chapter on “Romano-British Norfolk,” in the Victoria County History of that county, he pronounces that the Icknield Way is not a Roman road; that it has nothing to do with the Iceni or Norfolk or Suffolk; that the name Icknield and the names like Ickleton and Kenninghall of places on the road, or supposed parts of it, cannot, for philological reasons, be connected with the Iceni. At present he is unanswerable, though his mind is of a type which commands more interest when it affirms than when it denies.