218 WAYFARING NOTIONS 



screen, fifteen or more feet high, they make, very 

 charming to the eye, given to much bloom, also 

 bird-food producing, making rare harbour for 

 nesting, and apparently constructed to order for 

 felts' winter operations. Our young and older 

 friends, the overweight riders, did not, I fear, 

 look on them with other than utilitarian eyes, as 

 a species of vegetable curtain hung to keep the 

 wind away, and so negatively promote perspira- 

 tion. 



Not for a long while have I been down along 

 this road, which proceeds through a gap in the 

 Ditch. I can recommend the excursion to 

 strangers — viz., to take this highway, and then 

 when they get to the Ditch, turn up to the right 

 and keep along its ridge as far as they please in 

 the direction of Reach, on Fenland's edge. 

 Somebody, I noted, has put up a notice to the 

 effect that no footpath right-of-way exists. Per- 

 haps it has been legally juggled out of existence ; 

 perhaps it can be asserted or reasserted ; but I 

 should think that Newmarket will not quietly 

 stand this bit of grabbing. So far as I heard old 

 folk talk, this Ditchway was ever the regular 

 walker's route from the fen to Wood Ditton. 

 The section on the east side of the Dullingham 

 road was shut up some time ago, and now the 

 rest will go unless somebody makes a fight. The 

 notice-board did not stop me, but, to begin with, 

 the usually dry grip, or ditch, by the roadside 

 was a rushing torrent on a three-feet-deep-and- 

 twelve-feet-wide scale, and if 1 got across that 

 I couldn't have climbed up the steep bit of the 

 Vallum if you paid me a pound an inch. So I 

 made believe I didn't want to go that way, nor 

 up to Dullingham, where is excellent cool ale 



