This road southward into the Marlborough and Hungerford road may yet be shown to be part of the Icknield Way. For at Totterdown, a mile and a half beyond, it curves round and makes a line with the road to Chisledon under Liddington Hill--the road much resembling the Icknield Way which is called “Ridgeway” on the maps. It rose now, a hedged and elmy road, to five hundred feet, and had a deep, grassy hollow and elm trees below, between it and the cornland of the Downs. It dipped to a spring and a post office at Hinton Parva; it dipped again and rose to a view over the northern vale to the dim, watery wall of the Cotswolds. At this height it crossed Ermine Street just after passing a “Black Horse.” All four ways at the crossing were deeply worn and made a pit with bushy banks and tiny green triangles of waste in the midst.
In a quarter-mile past the crossing of Ermine Street I was at Wanborough. There the road forked at the “Calley Arms.” There is not a scrap of real or pretended documentary evidence for either road, at least until the place-names mentioned in the Saxon charter relating to Wanborough have been identified. The left-hand road had the advantage of keeping near the hills, instead of going clean away west like the right-hand one. This right-hand road may at last be connected with one of those rumoured roads going westwards, under the secondary line of chalk hills, past Holy Cross at Swindon, past Elcombe and Studley to St. Anne’s-in-the-Wood at Brislington, in Somerset, or to Devonshire; and this continuation may at last be shown to be entitled to the name of Icknield Way. I followed the left-hand road because it seemed possible to connect it with one, very much like the Icknield Way and in a similar relation to the Downs, going south-westward through Wroughton and Broad Hinton, and from there either to Avebury or to Yatesbury, and so by Juggler’s Lane to Cherhill on its way to Bath.
Liddington clump, the straight ridge and the “castle” rampart upon it, were clear ahead as I took this turning. Wanborough’s towered and spired church stood at the top of a slope of grass on my right. It was a crooked, hedged road, with a grassy edge and a path on the grass; and the telegraph posts followed it. It passed out of Wanborough parish at a tiny stream that crossed the road in a deep, narrow cleft with willows and willow herbs below on the right, and in the widening cleft a derelict mill, a steep garden plot, and a row of beehives. It rose up narrow, deep, and steep to the “Bell” at Liddington. There I turned to the left into the Swindon road, and almost at once to the left again, leaving the church on my left. This took me past two or three houses of Medbourne, and sharp to the left and right through the hamlet of Badbury, where a great elm stands at the first turning above a deep hollow and a road going northward down it to the right. Then crossing the Roman road from Mildenhall to Wanborough Nythe, I was at Chisledon and another cleft in the land. This cleft is often precipitous, and so narrow that you could almost play cards across it. A streamlet and a single line of railway wind along the bottom. The church stands at the edge where it is gentler, and the village is scattered over the slopes and edges.
