The Road to Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn
| London (Shoreditch Church) to— | MILES | ||
| Kingsland | 1 | ½ | |
| Stoke Newington | 2 | ½ | |
| Stamford Hill | 3 | ¼ | |
| Tottenham High Cross | 4 | ¼ | |
| Tottenham | 5 | ¼ | |
| Upper Edmonton | 6 | ||
| Lower Edmonton | 6 | ¾ | |
| Ponder’s End | 8 | ½ | |
| Enfield Highway | 9 | ¼ | |
| Enfield Wash | 10 | ||
| Waltham Cross | 11 | ½ | |
| Crossbrook Street | 12 | ||
| Turner’s Hill | 13 | ||
| Cheshunt | 13 | ¼ | |
| Cheshunt Wash | 13 | ¾ | |
| Turnford | 14 | ||
| Wormley (cross New River) | 14 | ¾ | |
| Broxbourne | 15 | ¾ | |
| Hoddesdon | 17 | ||
| Great Amwell (cross New River and the Lea) | 19 | ¼ | |
| Ware | 21 | ||
| Wade’s Mill (cross River Rib) | 23 | ||
| High Cross | 23 | ½ | |
| Collier’s End | 25 | ||
| Puckeridge (cross River Rib) | 26 | ¾ | |
| Braughing | 27 | ¾ | |
| Quinbury | 28 | ¾ | |
| Hare Street | 30 | ¾ | |
| Barkway | 35 | ||
| Barley | 36 | ¾ | |
| Fowlmere | 42 | ||
| Newton | 44 | ¼ | |
| Hauxton (cross River Granta) | 47 | ¾ | |
| Trumpington | 48 | ½ | |
| Cambridge (Market Hill) | 50 | ¾ | |
| To Cambridge, through Royston— | |||
| Puckeridge (cross River Rib) | 26 | ¾ | |
| West Mill | 29 | ¾ | |
| Buntingford | 31 | ||
| Chipping | 32 | ½ | |
| Buckland | 33 | ¾ | |
| Royston | 37 | ¾ | |
| Melbourn | 41 | ¼ | |
| Shepreth | 43 | ¼ | |
| Foxton Station and Level Crossing | 44 | ||
| Harston | 45 | ½ | |
| Hauxton (cross River Granta) | 46 | ½ | |
| Trumpington | 48 | ¾ | |
| Cambridge (Market Hill) | 51 | ||
| Milton | 54 | ||
| Landbeach | 54 | ¾ | |
| Denny Abbey | 58 | ||
| Chittering | 58 | ¾ | |
| Stretham Bridge (cross Great Ouse River) | 61 | ¾ | |
| Stretham | 63 | ¼ | |
| Thetford Level Crossing | 64 | ½ | |
| Ely | 67 | ½ | |
| Chettisham Station and Level Crossing | 69 | ½ | |
| Littleport | 72 | ½ | |
| Littleport Bridge (cross Great Ouse River) | 73 | ½ | |
| Brandon Creek (cross Little Ouse River) | 76 | ¾ | |
| Southery | 78 | ¾ | |
| Modney Bridge (cross Sams Cut Drain) | 80 | ¼ | |
| Hilgay (cross Wissey River) | 81 | ¾ | |
| Fordham | 82 | ¾ | |
| Denver | 84 | ||
| Downham Market | 85 | ¼ | |
| Wimbotsham | 86 | ½ | |
| Stow Bardolph | 87 | ¼ | |
| South Runcton (cross River Nar) | 89 | ¼ | |
| Setchey | 92 | ¼ | |
| West Winch | 93 | ¾ | |
| Hardwick Bridge | 95 | ¼ | |
| King’s Lynn | 97 | ¼ | |
I
“Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?” asks Fatima in the story of Bluebeard. Clio, the Muse of History, shall be my Sister Anne. I hereby set her down in the beginnings of the Cambridge Road, bid her be retrospective, and ask her what she sees.
“I see,” she says dreamily, like some medium or clairvoyant,—“I see a forest track leading from the marshy valley of the Thames to the still more marshy valley of the Lea. The tribes who inhabit the land are at once fierce and warlike, and greedy for trading with merchants from over the narrow channel that separates Britain from Gaul. They are fair-haired and blue-eyed, they are dressed in the skins of wild animals, and their chieftains wear many ornaments of red gold.” Then she is silent, for Clio, like her eight sisters, is a very ancient personage, and like the aged, although she knows much, cannot recall sights and scenes without a deal of mental fumbling.
“And what else do you see?”
“There comes along the forest track a great concourse of soldiers. Never before were such seen in the land. They form the advance-guard of an invading army, and the tribes presently fly from them, for these are the conquering Romans, whose fame has come before them. There are none who can withstand those soldiers.”
“Many a tall Roman warrior, doubtless, sleeps where he fell, slain by wounds or disease in that advance?”
Clio is indignant and corrective. “The Romans,” she says, “were not a race of tall men. They were undersized, but well built and of a generous chest-development. They are, as I see them, imposing as they march, for they advance in solid phalanx, and their bright armour, their shields and swords, flash like silver in the sun.
“I see next,” she says, “these foreign soldiers as conquerors, settled in the land. They have an armed camp in a clearing of the forest, where a company of them keep watch and ward, while many more toil at the work of making the forest track a broad and firm military way. Among them, chained together like beasts, and kept to their work by the whips and blows of taskmasters, are gangs of natives, who perform the roughest and the most unskilled of the labour.
“And after that I see four hundred years of Roman power and civilisation fade like a dream, and then a dim space of anarchy, lit up by the fitful glare of fire, and stained and running red with blood. Many strange and heathen peoples come and go in this period along the road, once so broad and flat and straight, but now grown neglected. The strange peoples call themselves by many names,—Saxons, Vikings, Picts, and Scots and Danes,—but their aim is alike: to plunder and to slay. Six hundred years pass before they bring back something of that civilisation the Romans planted, and the land obtains a settled Christianity and an approach to rest. And then, when things have come to this pass, there comes a stronger race to make the land its own. It is the coming of the Normans.
“I see the Conqueror, lord of all this land but the Isle of Ely, coming to vanquish the English remnant. I see him, his knights and men-at-arms, his standard-bearers and his bowmen, marching where the Romans marched a thousand years before, and in three years I see the shrunken remains of his army return, victorious, but decimated by those conquered English and their allies, the agues and fevers, the mires and mists of the Fens.”
“And then—what of the Roman Road, the Saxon ‘Ermine Street’? tell me, why does it lie deserted and forgot?”
But Clio is silent. She does not know; it is a question rather for archæology, for which there is no Muse at all. Nor can she tell much of the history of the road, apart from the larger national concerns in which it has a part. She is like a wholesale trader, and deals only in bulk. Let us in these pages seek to recover something from the past to illustrate the description of these many miles.
II
The coach-road to Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn—the modern highway—follows in general direction, and is in places identical with, two distinct Roman roads. From Shoreditch Church, whence it is measured, to Royston, it is on the line of the Ermine Street, the great direct Roman road to Lincoln and the north of England, which, under the names of the “North Road” and the “Old North Road,” goes straight ahead, past Caxton, to Alconbury Hill, sixty-eight miles from London, where it becomes identical with our own Great North Road, as far as Stamford and Casterton.
From Royston to Cambridge there would seem never to have been any direct route, and the Romans apparently reached Cambridge either by pursuing the Ermine Street five miles farther, and thence turning to the right at Arrington Bridge; or else by Colchester, Sudbury, and Linton. Those, at anyrate, are the ways obvious enough on modern maps, or in the Antonine Itinerary, that Roman road-book made about A.D. 200-250. We have, however, only to exercise our own observation to find that the Antonine Itinerary is a very inaccurate piece of work, and that the Romans almost certainly journeyed to Camboricum, their Cambridge, by way of Epping, Bishop’s Stortford, and Great Chesterford, a route taken by several coaches sixty years ago.
From Cambridge to Ely and King’s Lynn the coach-road follows with more or less exactness the Akeman Street, a Roman way in the nature of an elevated causeway above the fens.
The Ermine Street between London and Lincoln is not noted by the Antonine Itinerary, which takes the traveller to that city by two very indirect routes: the one along the Watling Street as far as High Cross, in Warwickshire, and thence to the right, along the Fosse Way past Leicester; the other by Colchester. The Ermine Street, leading direct to Lincoln, is therefore generally supposed to be a Roman road of much later date.
We are not to suppose that the Romans knew these roads by the names they now bear; names really given by the Saxons. Ermine Street enshrines the name of Eorman, some forgotten hero or divinity of that people; and the Akeman Street, running from the Norfolk coast, in a south-westerly direction through England, to Cirencester and Bath, is generally said to have obtained its name from invalids making pilgrimage to the Bath waters, there to ease them of their aches and pains. But a more reasonable theory is that which finds the origin of that name in a corruption of Aquæ Solis, the name of Bath.
No reasonable explanation has ever been advanced of the abandonment of the Ermine Street between Lower Edmonton and Ware, and the choosing of the present route, running roughly parallel with it at distances ranging from half a mile to a mile, and by a low-lying course much more likely to be flooded than the old Roman highway. The change must have been made at an early period, far beyond the time when history dawns on the road, for it is always by the existing route that travellers are found coming and going.
Few know that the Roman road and the coaching road are distinct; and yet, with the aid of a large-scale Ordnance map, the course of the Ermine Street can be distinctly traced. Not only so, but a day’s exploration of it, as far as its present condition, obstructed and diverted in places, will allow, is of absorbing interest.
It makes eleven miles of, in places, rough walking, and often gives only the satisfaction of being close to the actual site, and not actually on it. A straight line drawn from where the modern road swerves slightly to the right at Northumberland Park, Edmonton, to Ware, gives the direction the ancient road pursued.
The exact spot where the modern road leaves the Roman way is found at Lower Edmonton, where a Congregational Church stands in an open space, and the houses on the left hand are seen curving back to face a lane that branches off at this point. This, bearing the significantly ancient name of “Langhedge Lane,” goes exactly on the line of the Ermine Street; but it cannot be followed for more than about a hundred yards, for it is cut through by railways and modern buildings, and quite obliterated for some distance. Where lanes are found near Edmonton Rectory on the site of the ancient way, names that are eloquent of an antiquity closely allied with Roman times begin to appear. “Bury Hall,” and, half a mile beyond it, “Bury Farm,” neighboured by an ancient moat, are examples. “Bury” is a corruption of a Saxon word meaning anything, from a fortified camp to a settlement, or a hillock; and when found beside a Roman road generally signifies (like that constantly recurring name “Coldharbour”) that the Saxons found deserted Roman villas by the wayside. Beyond Bury Farm the cutting of the New River in the seventeenth century obscured some length of the Ermine Street. A long straight lane from Forty Hill Park, past Bull’s Cross, to Theobalds, represents it pretty accurately, as does the next length, by Bury Green and Cheshunt Great House. Cold Hall and Cold Hall Green mark its passing by, even though, just here, it is utterly diverted or stopped up. “Elbow Lane” is the name of it from the neighbourhood of Hoddesdon to Little Amwell. Beyond that point it plunges into narrower lanes, and thence into pastures and woods, descending steeply therefrom into the valley of the Lea by Ware. In those hillside pastures, and in an occasional wheatfield, a dry summer will disclose, in a long line of dried-up grass or corn, the route of that ancient paved way below the surface. A sepulchral barrow in one of these fields, called by the rustics “Penny loaf Hill,” is probably the last resting-place of some prehistoric traveller along this way. A quarter of a mile from Ware the Ermine Street crossed the Lea to “Bury Field,” now a brickfield, where many Roman coins have been found. Thenceforward it is one with the present highway to Royston.