Newmarket has been the headquarters of British horse racing since Charles II made it his sporting retreat in the seventeenth century, and the town still lives and breathes thoroughbreds. Around three thousand horses are trained here, and the gallops on the open heath around the town are where they work in the mornings. If you ride through early, you will almost certainly meet strings of racehorses crossing the road on special horse walks, with traffic lights and signs warning drivers to slow down. Give them all the room and quiet they need; a startled racehorse is a very expensive problem.
The town itself is compact and handsome, with a long high street and the National Horseracing Museum housed partly in Palace House, the remnant of Charles II's racing palace. The two racecourses, the Rowley Mile and the July Course, lie on the heath to the west. On race days the roads around town become congested, so it is worth checking the calendar if you want a quiet stop.
East of town, the Devil's Dyke, a huge Anglo-Saxon earthwork, runs for several kilometres across the chalk, and you can walk along its top for wide views over the heath and the fen edge. It is one of the odder monuments in East Anglia, built to control movement across a narrow strip of dry land between the fens and the forests.
For riders, Newmarket is mainly a fuel and coffee stop on the way north to Norfolk. The surrounding roads are a mix of fast A-roads like the A11 and A14 and quieter B-roads crossing the chalk heath and the edges of the fens. The landscape is flat to gently rolling, with big skies and wind that can be strong on the exposed heath. There are fuel stations, supermarkets and cafés in and around town. Once you head north-east into Breckland, with its pine shelterbelts and sandy heaths, the riding becomes more interesting, but watch out for speed cameras on the main roads and for slow-moving farm traffic on the minor ones.