SECOND DAY--NEWMARKET TO ODSEY, BY ICKLETON AND ROYSTON
Next morning I paid two shillings and set out at six o’clock. So far as is known the Icknield Way, which certainly went through Newmarket, is the central street and London road, and along this I mounted out of the town. The road was a straight and dusty one, accompanied by a great multitude of telegraph wires, on which corn buntings were singing their dreary song. On the right was the main stretch of Newmarket Heath, then a few gentle green slopes, with clusters of ricks and squares of corn, rising to a low wooded ridge far off. It was beginning to be hot, though it was windy and the deep blue of the sky was visible only through folds in the hood of grey clouds.
There were dusty tracks for exercising horses on both sides of the road. I like to see fine horses running at full speed. To see this sight, or hounds running on a good scent, or children dancing, is to me the same as music, and therefore, I suppose, as full of mortality and beauty. I sat down for some time watching the horses.
Beyond the second milestone, and just before the turning to the right for Cambridge, the road passed through the Devil’s Ditch, a deep ditch with a high bank on the Newmarket edge of it, stretching several miles on either side of the way from north-west to south-east in a straight line. At the gap made by the road stood what seemed to be old turnpike houses. Beyond the ditch the road was a hedged one, shaded by beeches on both sides, and having borders of deep, dusty grass, in which stood the telegraph posts. The long, narrow copse of beech on the right was not strictly closed, but remained unspoilt and tenanted by doves. Yet it was not long before I began to look out for a cart to carry me over the next six miles of the straight road. Such a road is tiring, because either the eye or the mind’s eye sees long, taunting, or menacing lengths before it, and is brought into conflict with sheer distance, and the mind is continually trying to carry the body over this distance with her own celerity, and being again and again defeated and more and more conscious of defeat, becomes irritated, if not happily numbed, by the importunate monotony.