NINTH DAY—STREATLEY TO EAST HENDRED, BY UPTON AND HAGBOURNE HILL FARM

When I started from Streatley to see the western half of the Icknield Way it was with several uncertainties. I knew that the Icknield Way was not the Ridgeway, but a lower road which was in several places not more than a mile or two away from it. This lower road, it has been said, was the Wantage-to-Reading turnpike for part at least of its course; one writer’s road clearly lay south of this turnpike; another had expressed a doubt whether it was the turnpike or a road to the south. The decision that the Icknield Way in Berkshire was distinct from the Ridgeway had added this difficulty; that the Ridgeway, supposing it to have come up from the ford at Streatley, must have been a road from beyond the Thames, and what that road was I had not discovered, though it had been suggested that it was the Upper Icknield Way. But if the Icknield Way of Oxfordshire and the Icknield Way of Berkshire were linked, it must have been at Streatley, though it may also have been at other fords.
 
Moulsford Bottom.

The first half-mile of the main road through Streatley to Wantage is the beginning of the Ridgeway’s ascent; but a little past the fork to Wallingford the Ridgeway becomes separate from this main road, and goes westward out of it. There was at first no possibility of an alternative out of Streatley to the west, and I set out on the same road as when I followed the Ridgeway. On my left I saw “Lyndhurst,” “Bellevue,” and “Montefiore,” or their more expensive equivalents. I ignored the first coombe, the turning up it of the Ridgeway, and went on upon the roadside grass bordered[272] with wormwood and traveller’s joy. Almost at once the road crossed the entrance to another coombe running up westward into the Moulsford Downs, and those woods which the Ridgeway skirts on the south. It was a shallow coombe, the sides dappled with thorns, the bottom covered with corn, and in the midst of it a barn called Well Barn. Through the mouth of the coombe which opened towards the river in the east I saw the pale corn, and the dark woods above it, of the Chilterns. Crossing this coombe the road had no hedges, but corn on both sides. It was usually hedgeless, but banked as it went up and down, and dipped into another coombe of the same kind called Moulsford Bottom, where a quarter-mile north of the thirteenth milestone from Wantage a road came in from the South Stoke Ferry, the continuation, perhaps, of a track from the Icknield Way near Ipsden. From Moulsford Bottom the main road went visibly curving uphill, but from the top of Kingstanding Hill, at three hundred feet, it went straight between its low hedges and grassy banks towards Blewburton Hill. It had still corn on both sides in stooks, downs on the left, and on the right the valley of dark trees stretching far away into mist. It was a plain, well-kept road of easy gradients, no corners, and such banks or hedges that anything approaching in front could be seen. It lacked the company of telegraph wires.

The villages of Aston were almost completely hidden on my right, as I passed within a third of a mile of them. That was by the eleventh milestone  from Wantage, and there the road was following along and under one of the low, natural walls of chalk which so often guide a road and are in turn defined by it. My road, Icknield Way or not, went hedgeless under this wall, with oats above and stubble below. The flowers on its narrow green edges were chiefly yellow parsnip and white carrot, both dear for their scents, and succory, that pale blue flower which a strange fate has closely attached to the coarsest and stiffest of dark stems and placed where dust is likely to be most thick.

Here the dust was thick, and I was glad to feel, to hear, to smell and to taste, and to see the rain falling as I passed the “Barley Mow” at Blewbury. According to custom I stood under the broad, overhanging eaves of one of Blewbury’s thatched roofs and watched the rain, but it was better to be in it and to smell the wetted dust which association alone has made pleasant. Any road was good now, though mine was an unadventurous, level, probably commercial, road.

But, rain or no rain, I was looking for an excuse to leave this road at Upton, the next village, which is by the ninth milestone. The map had shown me a road, or an almost continuous line of pieces running from Upton westward to Lockinge Park, and on the east possibly connected with the roads I had already travelled between Little Stoke and Upton by way of Lollingdon Farm, Aston, and Blewbury, but traversing land near Upton which is liable to floods. Either this road or the turnpike was the Icknield Way, because a more northern[274] road would be too low, and no more southern one had left any traces.

A hundred yards or so before the road I was on bridged the Didcot, Newbury, and Southampton Railway I noticed the line of a hedge leaving on the left at an acute angle, and forming a triangle with the railway and road for its other sides. As an old road is not likely to form such triangular fields, except with the help of a new branch, it occurred to me that this branching hedge marked an earlier or original line of the same road, or of one coming from Upton village, and there connected with the field roads from Blewbury and Aston. Across the railway another hedge and a depression that might once have been a road continued this line and led naturally into a lane turning out of the main road on the left beyond the bridge and passing Upton Vicarage. I supposed that when the railway cutting was made to have left these crossing roads in their original state would have meant making two bridges or one very broad one necessary. The courses, therefore, were slightly altered, so that, instead of a crossing or “four-went way,” there was a road receiving a branch at one side of the bridge, and a second branch from an opposite direction, the left, at the other side. But on referring to the old six-inch Ordnance Map, made before the railway, I found that I was mistaken. The amended crossing may have been made when the old road was superseded by the turnpike. This left-hand road being the likely-looking road on the map, I followed it, especially[275] as the main road, half a mile beyond, by the “Horse and Harrow,” at West Hagbourne, took a right-angled turn which suggested a piecing together of two older roads, an east-and-west one and a north-and-south one.

My conjectural road began as a hedged lane that formed a short cut into the road to East Ilsley and Newbury. Crossing that road it was a cart track—with a disused, parallel course on the right—over Hagbourne Hill, past Hagbourne Hill Farm, which was derelict, but had sunflowers in the garden and ricks in the yard. Less than a furlong south of the farm is a supposed Roman burial-ground. A home-returning carter told me that the first part of the road as far as the crossing was Baits or Bates Lane. It was a cart track, or usually a strip of three or four parallel cart tracks, going parallel with the downs, and almost straight between one road and the next that came from over the downs northward to the villages. It could easily make a straight course, like all the other roads round about, because it was on an almost unbroken plateau of cornland at the foot of the downs: so level was this piece of country that in about four miles the altitudes varied only between three hundred and eighty and four hundred feet. Between me and the downs there were seldom any trees, except such few as stood by Downs Farm, its thatched barns, its old and new ricks. On the right a slight swell in the land often shut out everything but distant Oxfordshire under a blue, bulging threat of storm. The road was for the[276] most part without hedges, and not a parish boundary. It was rarely or never sunken, but in places might have been a little embanked. On one side, shortly before reaching the Newbury road, there were two old thorns. Half a mile farther, after crossing Hungerford Lane—a track from Milton Hill to Farnborough—it had a line of elm trees on its left, which was part of the enclosure of Arfield Farm, close by. I thought Arfield—on the new one-inch Ordnance Maps spelt Aldfield—might be the same as Halvehill. The cottage pronunciation, except that it lacked an aspirate, was not discouraging. Halvehill barn was said to be on the Ickleton Street or Meer, but on inquiry I learnt that it was some way from my road down Hungerford Lane to the north, but on this side of the main road, which was here about a mile distant. This barn is now called Horn Down Barn.

Past Arfield Farm the road had hedges until it came to the tussocky little “Arfield Common,” so called, but perhaps not so in fact. Here there were several forking cartways. Mine seemed to go westward along the northern hedge and its traveller’s joy, but at the west side of the common, where Cow Lane comes in from Hendred, there was a gap of a hundred yards or so before the old line was taken up by a road from the south-east, which led me into the road to East Hendred. This was a little more than three miles from the beginning of the road at Upton.

East Hendred.

As I had had as much rain as I wanted on my skin, I turned downhill under a long train of[277] Lombardy poplars and very lanky ash trees into East Hend............