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 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.
