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Title: The Old Road
Author: Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953
Language: English
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Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
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Stede Hill, cross-referenced in the Index, does not have an Index
entry.
THE OLD ROAD
[Illustration: WINCHESTER]
THE OLD ROAD
BY
H. BELLOC
ILLUSTRATED BY WILLIAM HYDE
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY
LIMITED
1911
TO
PHILIP KERSHAW
AND
HAROLD BAKER
MY COMPANIONS ON
THIS JOURNEY
CONTENTS
PAGE
ON THE ROAD AND THE FASCINATION OF
ANTIQUITY 3
THE THEORY OF THE OLD ROAD
THAT SUCH AND SUCH CAUSES DETERMINED THE
TRACK OF THE OLD ROAD, AND THAT IT RAN
FROM WINCHESTER TO CANTERBURY 15
THE CAUSES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF WINCHESTER
AND CANTERBURY, AND OF THEIR POSITION AS
TERMINI OF THE OLD ROAD 29
THE CAUSES OF THE PRESERVATION OF THE OLD
ROAD; ITS GENERAL CHARACTER, AND OUR
APPLICATION OF THIS IN OUR METHOD OF RECOVERING
IT 72
THE EXPLORATION OF THE ROAD
WINCHESTER TO ALTON 117
ALTON TO SHALFORD 147
SHALFORD TO DORKING PITS 160
BOXHILL TO TITSEY 188
TITSEY TO WROTHAM 214
WROTHAM TO BOXLEY 231
BOXLEY TO CANTERBURY 256
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
WINCHESTER, _Photogravure frontispiece_
_Facing page_
A ROAD MOST TYPICAL OF ALL THAT ROADS HAVE
BEEN FOR US, 8
THESE PITS WHICH UNCOVER THE CHALK BARE
FOR US, 26
GLIMPSES OF THE ITCHEN AWAY BEHIND US, 60
THE CHURCH OF SHERE, 110
THE HEAD-WATERS WHICH FORM THE ITCHEN, THE
ALRE AND OTHER STREAMS, 128
ROUGH, AND MARKED ONLY BY RUTS IN THE
WINTER SOIL, AND BY ITS RANK OF SECULAR
TREES, 162
THAT CURIOUS PLATFORM WHICH SUPPORTS IN
SUCH AN IMMENSE ANTIQUITY OF CONSECRATION
THE RUINS OF ST. CATHERINE'S CHAPEL, 163
A PLACE OF CLOSE DARK AND VARIOUS TREES,
FULL OF A DAMP AIR, AND GLOOMY WITH
STANDING WATER-RUTS, 174
THAT SPLENDID AVENUE OF LIMES, 176
IT STOOD OUT LIKE A CAPE ALONG OUR COASTING
JOURNEY, OUR NAVIGATION OF THE LINE OF
THE DOWNS, 182
AND BEYOND THE WHOLE OF THE WEALD, 200
THE MOST IMPORTANT OF THE RIVERS IT MEETS
UPON ITS COURSE, THE MEDWAY, 238
ROCHESTER, 252
THE SHEEP IN THE NARROW LANES, OR THE
LEANING CONES OF THE HOP-KILNS AGAINST
THE SKY, 260
THE PLOUGHLANDS UNDER ORCHARDS: ALL THE
KENTISH WEALD, 268
SUCH A MAGIC OF GREAT HEIGHT AND DARKNESS, 278
MAP _at end_
ON THE ROAD AND THE FASCINATION OF ANTIQUITY
ON THE ROAD AND THE FASCINATION OF ANTIQUITY
There are primal things which move us. Fire has the character of a
free companion that has travelled with us from the first exile; only
to see a fire, whether he need it or no, comforts every man. Again, to
hear two voices outside at night after a silence, even in crowded
cities, transforms the mind. A Roof also, large and mothering,
satisfies us here in the north much more than modern necessity can
explain; so we built in beginning: the only way to carry off our rains
and to bear the weight of our winter snows. A Tower far off arrests a
man's eye always: it is more than a break in the sky-line; it is an
enemy's watch or the rallying of a defence to whose aid we are
summoned. Nor are these emotions a memory or a reversion only as one
crude theory might pretend; we craved these things--the camp, the
refuge, the sentinels in the dark, the hearth--before we made them;
they are part of our human manner, and when this civilisation has
perished they will reappear.
Of these primal things the least obvious but the most important is The
Road. It does not strike the sense as do those others I have
mentioned; we are slow to feel its influence. We take it so much for
granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men, indeed, whose
pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own country on foot,
and to whom its every phase of climate is delightful, receive,
somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They feel a meaning in it;
it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it explains its own vagaries,
and it gives a unity to all that has arisen along its way. But for the
mass The Road is silent; it is the humblest and the most subtle, but,
as I have said, the greatest and the most original of the spells which
we inherit from the earliest pioneers of our race. It was the most
imperative and the first of our necessities. It is older than building
and than wells; before we were quite men we knew it, for the animals
still have it to-day; they seek their food and their drinking-places,
and, as I believe, their assemblies, by known tracks which they have
made.
It is easy to re-create in oneself to-day a sense of what the Road
means to living things on land: it is easy to do it even in this
crowded country. Walk, for instance, on the neglected Pennines along
the watershed of England, from Malham Tarn, say, to Ribblehead, or
from Kirkby Stephen up along the crest to Crossfell and so to Alston,
and you will learn at once what follows on an untouched soil from the
absence of a track--of a guide. One ravine out of the many radiating
from a summit will lead to the one valley you seek; take another
stream and you are condemned at last to traverse mountains to repair
the error. In a fog or at night, if one has not such a path, there is
nothing to help one but the lay of the snow or the trend of the
vegetation under the last gale. In climbing, the summit is nearly
always hidden, and nothing but a track will save you from false
journeys. In descent it alone will save you a precipice or an
unfordable stream. It knows upon which side an obstacle can be passed,
where there is firm land in a morass, and where there is the best
going; sand or rock--dry soil. It will find what nothing but long
experiment can find for an individual traveller, the precise point in
a saddle or neck where approach is easiest from either side, and
everywhere the Road, especially the very early Road, is wiser than it
seems to be. It reminds one of those old farmers who do not read, and
whom we think at first unreasoning in their curious and devious ways,
but whom, if we watch closely, we shall find doing all their work just
in that way which infinite time has taught the country-side.
Thus I know an old man in Sussex who never speaks but to say that
everything needs rest. Land, he says, certainly; and also he believes
iron and wood. For this he is still ridiculed, but what else are the
most learned saying now? And I know a path in the Vosges which, to the
annoyance of those who travel by it, is irrational: it turns sharp
northward and follows under a high ridge, instead of directly crossing
it: some therefore leave it and lose all their pains, for, if you
will trust to that path you will find it crosses the ridge at last at
the only place where, on the far side, it is passable at all; all
before and beyond that point is a little ledge of precipice which no
one could go down.
More than rivers and more than mountain chains, roads have moulded the
political groups of men. The Alps with a mule-track across them are
less of a barrier than fifteen miles of forest or rough land
separating one from that track. Religions, which are the principal
formers of mankind, have followed the roads only, leaping from city to
city and leaving the 'Pagani,' in the villages off the road, to a
later influence. Consider the series Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus,
Athens, and the Appian Way: Rome, all the tradition of the Tuscan
highway, the Ligurian coast, Marseilles and Lyons. I have read in some
man's book that the last link of that chain was the river Rhone; but
this man can never have tried to pull a boat upon the Rhone up-stream.
It was the Road that laid the train. The Mass had reached Lyons
before, perhaps, the last disciple of the apostles was dead: in the
Forez, just above, four hundred years later, there were most probably
offerings at night to the pagan gods of those sombre and neglected
hills.
And with religions all that is built on them: letters, customs,
community of language and idea, have followed the Road, because
humanity, which is the matter of religion, must also follow the road
it has made. Architecture follows it, commerce of course, all
information: it is even so with the poor thin philosophies, each in
its little day drifts, for choice, down a road.
The sacredness which everywhere attaches to The Road has its sanction
in all these uses, but especially in that antiquity from which the
quality of things sacred is drawn: and with the mention of the word
'antiquity' I may explain another desire which led me to the study I
have set down in this book: not only did I desire to follow a road
most typical of all that roads have been for us in western Europe, but
also to plunge right into the spirit of the oldest monument of the
life men led on this island: I mean the oldest of which a continuous
record remains.
[Illustration: A ROAD MOST TYPICAL OF ALL THAT ROADS HAVE BEEN FOR US]
To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and
almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to
establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfil a function whose
appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of
the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives which, lived in
the present only, are a film or surface, take on body--are lifted into
one dimension more. The soul is fed. Reverence and knowledge and
security and the love of a good land--all these are increased or given
by the pursuit of this kind of learning. Visions or intimations are
confirmed. It is excellent to see perpetual agony and failure
perpetually breeding the only enduring things; it is excellent to see
the crimes we know ground under the slow wheels whose ponderous
advance we can hardly note during the flash of one human life. One may
say that historical learning grants men glimpses of life completed and
a whole; and such a vision should be the chief solace of whatever is
mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfilment.
Now of all that study the chief charm lies in mere antiquity. No one
truly loves history who is not more exalted according to the greater
age of the new things he finds. Though things are less observable as
they are farther away, yet their appeal is directly increased by such
a distance in a manner which all know though none can define it. It is
not illusion; perhaps an ultimate reality stands out when the details
are obscured. At any rate it is the appeal which increases as we pass
further from the memories of childhood, or from the backward vision of
those groups of mountain which seem to rise higher and more awfully
into the air as we abandon them across the plains. Antiquity of that
degree conveys--I cannot pretend to say how--echoes which are exactly
attuned to whatever is least perishable in us. After the present and
manifold voice of Religion to which these echoes lead, and with which
in a sense they merge, I know of nothing more nobly answering the
perpetual questioning of a man. Nor of all the vulgar follies about us
is any more despicable than that which regards the future with
complacency, and finds nothing but imperfection in that innocent,
creative, and wondering past which the antiquaries and geologists have
revealed to us.
For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints of such
ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the
river-crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed to a shrine
whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue they
suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper soils
for going, something of their much keener life would wake again in the
blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should forget the
vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the better
freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect,
articulate, and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and
the long accumulation of evil. It was perhaps a year ago that I
determined to follow and piously to recover the whole of that doubtful
trail whereby they painfully made their way from one centre of their
common life to the sea, which was at once their chief mystery and
their only passage to the rest of their race--from Hampshire to the
Straits of Dover. Many, I knew, had written about that road; much of
it was known, but much also was lost. No one, to my knowledge, had
explored it in its entirety.
First, therefore, I read what had been written about this most ancient
way, I visited men who were especially learned in geology and in
antiquarian knowledge, I took notes from them, and I carefully studied
the maps of all sorts that could help me in my business. Then, taking
one companion, I set out late in December to recover and map out yard
by yard all that could be recovered and mapped out of The Old Road.
No better task could be put before a man, and the way in which I
accomplished it my readers shall judge in the essay which follows this
introduction, and in the diary of my journey with which the book shall
close.
THE THEORY OF THE OLD ROAD
THAT SUCH AND SUCH CAUSES DETERMINED THE TRACK OF THE OLD
ROAD, AND THAT IT RAN FROM WINCHESTER TO CANTERBURY
[Illustration]
If one looks at a map of England in relief one sees that five great
ridges of high land come, the first from just east of north, the
second from the north-east, the third and fourth from the east, and
the fifth from the south and west, to converge on Wilts and the
Hampshire border.
Roughly speaking, their area of convergence is Salisbury Plain, and it
has been suggested that Avebury and Stonehenge drew the importance of
their sites from this convergence; for these continuous high lands
would present the first natural highways by which a primitive people
could gather from all parts of the island.
The advantages afforded in the matter of travel by such hills (which
are called in great parts of their course the Cotswold, the Chilterns,
the North Downs, the South Downs, and the Dorsetshire Downs) are still
quite plainly apparent if a man will follow them on foot.
He will see from the heights even to-day the remains of the woodland
which made the valleys and the wealds originally far more difficult to
traverse. He will note the greater dryness of these heights, and he
will remark, if he contrast his cross-country going on the hills with
that of the valleys, that the geological formation of these heights,
with their contours, fit them peculiarly for an original means of
communication.
Four out of the five are great dry, turf-covered ridges of chalk,
steep towards the summer sun. The fifth range, the Cotswold, though
oolitic and therefore greasy under foot, is at the summit of its
western escarpment much drier than the valleys; for that escarpment is
steep, and drains off well into the valley of the Severn.
When one has once recognised the importance of these five radiating
lines of hills and of their point of convergence, one will next see
that of the five, one in particular must have had an especial value
perhaps in the very earliest times, and certainly in all the centuries
just preceding the historic period, during which Britain, from
similarities in religion, language, and blood, was closely connected
with the Continent. The passage westward from the Straits of Dover to
the Hampshire centres must have been by far the most important line of
traffic. We know that it has been so continuously in historic times,
and it is easy to prove that long before the opening of our national
history with the Roman invasions, some east-to-west road must have
been the leading road of England.
Few of the following considerations are new, but all are to the
purpose:
1. The Straits of Dover are the natural entry into the country. The
nature of that entry, and its very great effect upon the development
of our island, I will discuss later in connection with the town of
Canterbury. How far the Straits may have a rival lower down the
Channel I will discuss in connection with the town of Winchester. For
the present, the main point is that in the earliest times, whoever
came in and out of the country came in and out most easily by the only
harbours whence the further shore is visible.
2. When the Straits had been crossed and England entered, whither
would the principal road lead? The conformation of Kent forced it
westward, for the Thames estuary forbade a northern, the only
alternative route.
One track of great importance did indeed go north and west, crossing
near London. It was later known as the Watling Street; it was the
artery which drained the Midlands; it became the connection with
sacred Anglesey, ultimately the northern door into Ireland.
But no northern road--whether leading as did the Watling Street to
Chester, or bending round as did the Icknield Way north-east after
passing the ford of the Thames, or taking the island in diagonal as
did the Fosse Way, or leading from London to the Humber as did the
Ermine Street, or up at last to the Wall as did the Maiden Way--none
of these could have a principal importance until the Romans invented
frontiers: frontier garrisons to be fed, and frontier walls to be
defended. Before their time this northern portion of England, split by
the barren Pennines, hardly cultivated, leading nowhere, could not
have been a goal for our principal road. That must have run to the
south of Thames, and must have led from the Straits to the districts
of which I have spoken--Hampshire, the Mendips, the Wiltshire Hills,
Devonshire, and Cornwall.
3. The west of the island contained its principal supplies of mineral.
Lead indeed was found and exploited in the north, but perhaps not
before the Romans, whereas the variety and the amount of the wealth
in the valley of the Severn and the peninsula beyond gave all that
region an economic preponderance over the rest of the island. Tin, an
absolute necessity for the Mediterranean civilisation, was certainly
found in Cornwall, though the identification of the Scilly Islands
with the Cassiterides is doubtful.
The Mendips formed another metallic centre, presumably richer than
even the Devonian peninsula. Lead certainly came in early times
regularly from these hills, and Gloucester remained till the Middle
Ages associated with the tax on iron.
4. There is a fourth aspect of the matter: it is of a sort that
history neglects, but it is one the importance of which will be
recognised with increasing force if the public knowledge of the past
is destined to advance. It is that powers mainly resident in the mind
have moulded society and its implements.
That economic tendency upon which our materialists lay so great a
stress is equally immaterial (did they but know it) with the laws they
profess to ignore, and is but one form of the common power which
human need evokes. A man must not only eat, he must eat according to
his soul: he must live among his own, he must have this to play with,
that to worship, he must rest his eyes upon a suitable landscape, he
must separate himself from men discordant to him, and also combat them
when occasion serves. The south-west of England has had in this region
of ideas from the earliest times a special character and a peculiar
value. It is one in spirit with Brittany, with Ireland, and with
Wales; nor is it by any means certain that this racial sympathy was
the product of the Saxon invasions alone. It is possible that the
slower and heavier men were in Kent before Caesar landed, it must be
remembered that our theory of 'waves of population' perpetually
pressing aborigines westward remains nothing but a theory, while it is
certain that the sheltered vales and the high tors would nourish men
very different from those of the East Anglian flats or the Weald.
Now one of the forces which helps to produce a road is the necessity
of interchange--what physicists call potential--a difference between
opposite poles. Such a force is to be discovered in the permanent
character of the west; its permanent differentiation from our eastern
seaboard. Nor is it fantastic to insist upon the legends which
illumine this corner of the island. Glastonbury was for centuries the
most sacred spot in our country, and it was sacred precisely because
confused memories of an immense antiquity clung round it. The struggle
between the Romano-British princes and the heathen pirates, a struggle
the main effort of which must have taken place much further east, is
yet fixed by legend in that same land of abrupt rocks and isolated
valleys which forms the eastern margin of the Bristol Channel, and
Arthur, who was king if anything of the Logrians, yet has been given
by tradition a castle at Tintagel.
To the west, then, would the main road have gone so far as the mind
could drive it.
5. The eastern and western road would have been the main artery of
southern England, just as the Icknield Way (the north-eastern and
south-western one along the Chilterns) would have been the main artery
from the Midlands and from the men of the Fens, just as the road
along the Cotswold would have been the artery along the Severn valley
and from the bend of this at the Wrekin on up into the Fells and the
Pennines; and just as that along the Dorsetshire Downs would have been
the great means of communication for the Devonian peninsula.
Now of all these districts, the first was by far the most important.
Southern and eastern England, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex, south
Berkshire, were the most open and the best cultivated areas, enjoyed
the best climate, and were most in touch with the civilisation of the
Continent. It is true to say that right down to the industrial
revolution the centre of gravity of England lay south of the Thames.
In the actual fighting the south always conquered the north, and
whereas influence monastic and constitutional would spread from either
end of the island, it was the southern which ultimately survived.
There is more. It was along the green-sand ridge of south England that
neolithic man had his principal seat. The getting of iron sprang up
before history on the red stone of the Sussex weald; it remained
there till our grandfathers' time. The oaks that grew from Kent to
Devon, along so many creeks from the Rother to the Tamar, built our
first ships. They remained our resource for this industry till the
Napoleonic wars. The _Victory_ was launched in Beaulieu River, and the
first eye-witness, Caesar, heard that in cultivation the south had
preceded the north.
6. Finally, not only was the district the best in England to develop
an important road, but the platform or site for that road was ready
provided, and invited use much more definitely than did any other way
from the narrow seas up into the island.
* * * * *
With this last point I am led to describe the natural causeway which
seems to call for a traveller landing in Kent to use it if he would go
westward, or for one leaving the inland country to use it as the last
part of his journey eastward towards the sea--I mean those heights
which are called in their entirety the North Downs.
There runs from the neighbourhood of the Straits of Dover right across
south England, in a great bow, a range of hills which for its length,
unchanging pattern and aspect, has no exact parallel in Europe.
A man who should leave the Straits with the object of reaching the
Hampshire centres would find a moderately steep, dry, chalky slope,
always looking full towards the southern sun, bare of trees, cut by
but three river valleys (and but one of these of any width), not often
indented with combes or projecting spurs: this conspicuous range would
lead him by the mere view of it straight on to his destination.
[Illustration]
When you have turned the corner of the valley of the Stour, you can
see for miles and miles the Kentish Downs like a wall pointing on
over the Medway to Wrotham and the villages beyond. When you reach
that projecting shoulder of Wrotham Hill you can still see on for
miles and miles the straight, clean-cut embankment of chalk inviting
you to pursue it westward at such a height as will clear the last
cultivation of the valleys, and as will give you some view of your
further progress. The end of each day's march is clearly apparent from
the beginning of it, and the whole is seen to lie along this
astonishingly homogeneous ridge. You do not lose that advantage for
perhaps four days of going until you reach the valley of the Wey and
the Guildford Gap; and even then for many miles further, though no
longer on the chalk but on the sand, a sharp hillside, still looking
at the sun, is afforded you in the Hog's Back.
You may say that from the Straits of Dover to Farnham, Nature herself
laid down the platform of a perfectly defined ridge, from which a man
going west could hardly deviate, even if there were no path to guide
him.
[Illustration: THESE PITS WHICH UNCOVER THE CHALK BARE FOR US
_See page 191_]
From Farnham to the converging point near Salisbury, where he would
meet the northern, the western, and the south-western roads, no
definite ridge continued; but high rolling downs of chalk gave him
good enough going, and led him along a water-parting which saved him
the crossing of rivers, and afforded for his last two or three days a
dry and firm soil.
Such, we must presume, was the full course of the original Road from
east to west. To put it the other way round, and give from west to
east the primeval track from the centre of south England to the
Straits of Dover, we may say that it would leave Stonehenge to enter
Hampshire near Quarley Hill, leave Bury Hill Camp on the right, pass
near Whitchurch, and so proceeding eastward, following the southern
edge of the watershed, would enter Farnham by the line of 'Farnham
Lane'; it would thence follow the southern side of the range of hills
until it reached the sea above the Portus Lemanis--the inlet which
covered the marshy plain below the present village Lympne.
Such was undoubtedly the earliest form of the Old Road, but upon this
original trajectory two exceptions fell in a time so remote that it
has hardly left a record. The western end of the Road was deflected
and came to spring, not from Stonehenge, but from the site of
Winchester; the eastern portion was cut short: it terminated, not at
some port, but at Canterbury, inland.
Why did Winchester come to absorb the traffic of the west, and to form
the depôt and the political centre of southern England? Why did
Canterbury, an inland town, become the goal of this long journey
towards the narrow seas?
The importance of the one and of the other can be explained. Let me
take them in order, and begin first with Canterbury.
THE CAUSES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF WINCHESTER AND CANTERBURY,
AND OF THEIR POSITION AS TERMINI OF THE OLD ROAD
The Straits of Dover fill the history of this island because they have
afforded our principal gate upon a full life.
All isolated territories--valleys difficult of entry, peninsulas,
islands--have this double quality: they are not sufficient to live a
full life of themselves, but, receiving sufficient material of
civilisation from the larger world outside, they will use it
intensively and bring it to the summit of perfection.
Cut off, they wither. Nowhere does humanity fall more abject and
lethargic than in such defended places, if the defence be too long
maintained. But let them admit from time to time the invasion of
armies or ideas, and nowhere does humanity flourish more densely or
higher. The arts, the fierce air of patriotism, in whose heat alone
the gems of achievement can form, the solution of abstract problems,
the expression of the soul in letters--for all these things seclusion
provides a special opportunity. It protects their origins from the
enemies of seeds, it nurtures their growth with the advantage of a
still air, it gives them a resting-place for their maturity.
The valleys prove my thesis. The abandoned valleys of Savoy and
Piedmont are goitrous, smitten, sterile. They are the places where, in
the Middle Ages, vapid degradations of religion (the Waldensian for
instance) could arise; they are the back-waters of Europe. Contrast
with them the principal and open valleys; the valley of the
Grésivaudan, a trench sown with wealth and vigour, the dale which is
the backbone of strong Dauphiné, or that valley of the Romanche from
which the Revolution sprang, or that of the Ticino which comes down
from the Alps to the Italian plain, rejoicing like a virgin stepping
forward into the ample day of her womanhood, arms open and all
informed with life. Remember the Limagne and the Nemosian vineyard; I
could think that God had made these half-secluded places to prop up
our fading memories of Paradise.
And as the valleys, so the islands also prove it. Consider Crete,
Cyprus, Sicily--for the matter of that our own island--what they can
be when they are linked with neighbouring civilisation, and what when
they are cut off.
The place of landing, therefore, is always capital and sacred for
islands, and with us that place was chiefly the Kentish shore.
It might seem natural that some special haven upon that shore should
absorb our traditions and receive our principal road. It was not so.
Canterbury, and no port, received that road and became the nucleus of
worship in the island. Why?
Canterbury, and not some port, is the terminus of the Old Road, on
account of the effect of the tide in the Straits of Dover. The bastion
of Kent, jutting out into the sharpest current of the narrow seas,
distorts and confuses the violent tides of the Channel. Now complexity
of tides involves a multiplicity of harbours, and many neighbouring
harbours among which seamen choose as necessity may drive them,
involve a common centre inland.
That is the whole of my argument.
We have already seen how necessarily this corner of England will
attract exit and entry. The most powerful emotion connected with that
attraction was the sight of land. There is but one small section of
the continental coast whence England, the sun shining on the chalk
cliffs, can be clearly seen; and it can be so seen but upon certain
days, say one day out of three. The little section lies between
Sangatte and Ambleteuse. Here a great hill, whose seaward projection
is the cape of Gris Nez, affords a good look-out, and hence I say that
at least 120 days out of the year the further shore is visible. On
rarer occasions it may be got beyond Calais on the east, and as far as
the high sandhills near Etaples on the south and west.
[Illustration]
Similarly there is but a small section of the Kentish coast whence the
further shore can be seen. It extends from the South Foreland, you
may say, to the hill above Folkestone; half a day's walk. There are
days when you can see it as far north as Ramsgate Hill, but those days
are rare; further west than Folkestone it is hardly ever seen (for
the country is flat) save under conditions of mirage, such as startled
the people of Hastings at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
There are from the continental side no good starting-points from the
coast immediate to Gris Nez; it is rocky, uncertain, and unprovided
with inlets. Calais, to the east, was probably the earliest port of
departure. Here, at least, is a hole in the land, and there are two
considerations which make it probable that the earliest men would
start from this side of Gris Nez rather than the other. The first is
that they could run as far as possible sheltered from the prevailing
winds--for these come from the west and south-west; with such winds
they would, up to the point of Gris Nez, be in calm water, while if
they started from Boulogne they would have no such advantage. The
second is that they could run with an ebb tide down to Gris Nez, and
then if the wind failed so that they could not cross in one tide, the
flood would be to their advantage when they neared the English coast.
It would take them up again under lee of the land, round the South
Foreland to Sandwich. From Boulogne they would have to start without
shelter, run up on a flood tide, and if they missed that tide they
might have drifted down again under the full force of the prevailing
wind, any distance along the English coast. Boulogne ultimately became
the principal port of exit and entry. It was certainly so used by the
Romans; but Calais must, I think, have been the earliest
starting-point.
From Calais, then, the run would have been made to the English shores.
But when we note the conditions of this corner of England several
things strike us. In the first place, the number of the harbours.
These included originally Winchelsea, Rye, the Portus Lemanis, Dover,
Richborough, Reculvers; in all six harbours in this small stretch of
coast. If we look at the place to-day we find something similar; men
will attempt Rye, they will make Folkestone or Dover for choice;
Sandwich at a pinch in quite small boats. Ramsgate after Dover gives
the best of modern opportunities. There is something more. Most of
these harbours were and are bad; most of them were and are artificial.
It is true that in ancient times the strait which divided the Island
of Thanet from the mainland afforded an excellent shelter at either
end. Reculvers was at one end, and the island of Rutupiae
(Richborough) at the other. If one could not get into Richborough and
was carried round the North Foreland, one could always beat round into
Reculvers; but Dover was not much of a harbour; the Port Lemanis must
have been open to the south wind and was probably very shallow; Rye,
though better than it is now, was never a steep shore, and was always
a difficult place to make. The modern harbours may, without
exaggeration, be described as every one of them artificial. Folkestone
is distinctly so. The old harbour of Dover has silted up centuries
ago, and the gas works of the town are built over its site. Ramsgate
would be of no value but for the two constructed piers.
Now what is the meaning of this multiplicity, and of all this interest
in preserving such a multiplicity even by artificial means? The tide
is the clue to the problem.
Consider a man starting from the continental shore to reach England;
consider him sailing with a fresh breeze, for if the breeze was not
fresh his chances of crossing in a reasonable time and of making any
particular place of landing were small. Consider the fact that if he
crossed in a fresh breeze that breeze would be, three times out of
four, from the south or west. He runs under the lee of Gris Nez, and
when he is beyond that point of rock, he gets into the short, sharp
tumble of the sea which is raised by such a wind against the tide, for
he has started at the ebb. He runs down with the wind abeam perhaps as
far as the end of the Varne (where we now have the Varne Buoy), for
the tide so takes him. He sees the water breaking and boiling at this
shallow place. It settles near the turn of the tide. He holds on
easily, making less westing and pointing well up to the shore. There
opens before him a broad but very shallow lagoon with probably some
central channel which he knows. He enters and has made the most
favourable of the many crossings he knows. It is the Portus
Lemanis--our Lympne.
But there are other chances. The wind might fail him, or the wind
might so increase that he had to run before it. Did it fail him he
would be caught by the flood tide some miles from land. He would drift
up along the English shore, getting a few hundred yards nearer with
every catspaw, and looking impatiently for some place to which he
could steer. The dip in the cliffs at Dover would give him a chance
perhaps. If he missed that he would round the South Foreland; he would
have the advantage of smooth water, and he would make for the island
Rutupiae, which stood at the southern entrance of the strait between
the Isle of Thanet and the mainland. If his bad luck preserved, he
might be swept up in what we now call the Gull Stream round the North
Foreland; but the tide would have been making so long by this time as
to be curling round Longnose, and even without the wind he could trust
to it almost alone to make Reculvers. Similarly if the wind made him
run before it and caused him to miss the Portus Lemanis, he would
have the advantage of a weather shore once he was round the South
Foreland, and could run with smooth water under him into Rutupiae.
With the prevalent winds, then, and the tidal conditions of the
Straits, a multiplicity of harbours was a necessity for this crossing.
In a tideless sea--such as the Mediterranean--one harbour, and one
alone, would have absorbed the trade of Kent. Under our tidal
conditions, a coast most ill-provided was compelled to furnish no less
than six.
I could add, were I not afraid of confusing the reader, many other
examples of this necessity. For instance, when one runs from the
Belgian ports, or Dunkirk, to England, ever so little a change in the
wind may make it necessary to go north above the North Foreland.
Again, there is the barrier of the Goodwins, which, in spite of
legend, is probably prehistoric. If you could not get well south of
that barrier at the first trial you had to go north of it. Everything
has compelled men, so far, to provide as many chances as possible upon
this coast, and at the present day the breakwater at Folkestone, the
desperate attempt which many still make to use the harbour of Rye, to
some extent the great works of Dover, the poor relic of Sandwich, the
continual improvement of Ramsgate, point to the same necessity.
Perhaps some refuge less distant from the sea than the estuary of the
Swale will be made again to replace Reculvers upon the north of the
Kentish coast.
[Illustration]
Now it is this multiplicity of Kentish harbours proceeding from the
conditions of the tide which has created Canterbury.
When an army has to spread out like the fingers of a hand or the
sticks of a fan in order to cover a wide area, it must start from some
point of concentration.
When commerce is in doubt as to whether it will use this, that, or
another out of many gates, it must equally have this point of
concentration.
When defenders are expecting an invasion from many points of a
circumference, their only plan is to make their base some central
point whence radii depart to that circumference.
When the traveller is uncertain which of six places he can choose for
his departure, he will halt at some point more or less central, while
his decision is being made for him by the weather or by other
circumstances.
When a merchant, landing, knows not in which of six towns he shall
land, he must at least be certain that some one town, common as it
were to all the six, can be reached the day after his landing; he must
know that his correspondents can meet him there, and that he may make
that common town his depôt for further transactions inland.
Thus it was that the six Kentish ports and more, standing on the edge
of that rounded county, created Canterbury inland.
* * * * *
The town might have stood, theoretically, at any one of a great number
of points; geometrically perhaps it ought to have been near the
village of Goodnestone, which is the centre of all this circumference
from Reculvers round to Lympne. But there is one governing condition
which forbids us to look for such a centre anywhere save upon one
line, and that condition is the river Stour. It is the only
considerable body of fresh water, and the only easy means of
communication with the interior. On the Stour, then, would the centre
of these ports be.
It might conceivably have been placed as far westward as Wye, for here
the Stour traverses the high ridge of land which provides a good road
from Dover and Folkestone to the north and west, but though this ridge
would have given a reason for the growth of our central town at this
spot, there is a better reason for its having risen six miles down
stream.
The tendency was to build such a place as near as possible to the tide
without losing the advantage of fresh water. In other words,
Canterbury represents on a smaller scale the founding of Exeter, of
Rouen, and of twenty other towns. Quite a short time ago the tide went
up the Stour as far as Fordwych, just below Canterbury, and the
presence of the tide up to a point just below the city, coupled with
the presence of fresh water flowing from above the city, seems to me
to have decided the matter.
The many conjectures upon the primitive state of Canterbury, whether
it were a lake village built upon piles, or what not, I do not presume
to discuss. The certain matter is that this place was the knot of
south-eastern England, and the rallying-point of all the roads from
the coast. Caesar landed at Deal, but Canterbury fort was the place he
had to take; Augustine landed at Richborough, but Canterbury was the
place wherein he fixed the origins of Christianity in England. It was
bound to counterpoise that other city of which I shall next speak,
and to be for the Straits of Dover what Winchester was for the centre
of south English civilisation. It so happened that, of the many
characters it might have assumed, the ecclesiastical attached to it.
It became the great nucleus of English worship, and the origin, under
Rome, of English discipline and unity in the faith for nearly seven
hundred years. At last, influencing as much as influenced by the
event, the murder of its great Archbishop in the later twelfth
century, lent it, for the last three hundred years of its hegemony, a
position unique in Europe. Canterbury during those three hundred years
was almost a sacred city.
Having said so much, then, about the eastern end of the Road, and why
that end was found inland and not upon the sea, let us consider its
western region and determine what forces produced the political
domination of Winchester.
* * * * *
We have seen that the route from the island centre of Stonehenge and
Avebury (the plain where the old roads meet) to the Straits of Dover,
may be regarded as the original of our communications across the south
of the island, from the rich west to the mainland. Such it might have
remained to this day, and such it would certainly have remained
throughout the period preceding the Roman invasion, and throughout the
barbaric centuries which succeeded the withdrawal of the legions, had
not a powerful influence (to repeat what was said above) modified the
original track and substituted, at least for its earlier portion as
far as Farnham, another road. We know that the great way from west to
east which should have had its origin in Salisbury Plain, found it as
a fact in Winchester.
Why was this? Why did the encampment or town upon the Itchen gather
round itself a special character, and become the depôt into which
would stream the lead of the Mendips, the tin of Cornwall, and the
armies of all Britain south of Gloucester and west of the Wiltshire
Avon? To sum up all these questions we may ask in one phrase, as we
asked at Canterbury: What made Winchester?
The answer is again, The Sea: the necessities and the accidents of the
crossing of the Channel; and just as Canterbury was made by the
peculiarity of the Straits, by the bastion of Kent, confusing and
disturbing the rush of the narrow channel, and causing the complexity
of meeting tides, so Winchester was made by the peculiar conditions
under which the Channel can be passed at what I will call, for the
purposes of this essay, the 'Second Crossing': that is, the passage
from the jutting promontory of the Cotentin to the southern cape of
the Isle of Wight, which stands so boldly out into the sea, and
invites adventure from the French shore.
The great opportunity of this passage is far less apparent to us
moderns than it was to earlier men. With our artificial methods,
especially our regular service of steam, we are ignorant or forgetful
of the sea, and the true emotions which it arouses have decayed into
the ineptitudes with which we are all familiar. We talk of
'commanding' that element in war; there are even some who write as
though we of the towns were native to it; there are very few who
understand with what divinity it has prompted, allured, and terrified
the past of our race, or under what aspect it may prompt, allure, and
terrify the men of a future decline.
By the map alone no one could discover the character of this Second
Crossing. After the Straits of Dover the 'sleeve' of the Channel
widens so considerably that no clear alternative passage appears to be
provided. From Etaples right away to Ushant one might think a sea so
wide was of much the same peril and adventure to any early sailor.
Physical experience of many passages corrects such an error; a
consideration of the political history of the Continent tends further
to correct it. The Second Crossing was, and has always been, and will,
we may presume, in the future be, second only in importance to that of
the Straits.
[Illustration]
If the narrowing of the sea, due to the northward projection of
Normandy and the southern projection of the Isle of Wight, were alone
our guide, not very much could be made of it. It is more than double,
it is nearly three times the distance between Gris Nez and
Shakespeare's Cliff, though far less than the breadth of the Channel
either above or below. But the narrowing of the sea at this point is
but a small part of its advantage. On either side is the most ample
opportunity for protection. On either side high land will comfort and
guide a sailor almost throughout the passage, and upon the northern
shore is the best conceivable arrangement of chances for his rescue
from a gale or from the chance of a tide. The deep estuary of the
Seine sufficiently cuts off what is west from what is east of it to
make every one upon the western side avoid the difficulty of a journey
to Calais and seek some approach of his own to reach England; and
south-western England is enough of a unity to demand also a secondary
port of its own, whence it may seek the shore of the Continent and
escape upon favourable occasions the long journey eastward to the
Straits.
Let us consider these points in detail.
The estuary of the Seine was not only an obvious outlet, but it gave
an opportunity for the early ships to creep under the protection of a
windward shore. From the very heart of the country, from Rouen, and
even from Pont de l'Arche, sea-going vessels could go down the stream
with a strong tide helping them. They would have calm water as far as
the point of Barfleur so long as the wind was south of west, and no
danger save the reef of Calvados. Moreover, the trend of the land led
them northward in the direction which they knew they had to follow if
they were ultimately to find the English coast.
When this defence and indication failed the early sailor, at the
corner of the Cotentin, where the land turns west again, he could find
the little harbour of Barfleur whence to set out; he was there
protected from the outer sea by reefs, and possessed, what was
important to him, an excellent shore for beaching. He was sheltered
even thus far from the prevailing winds.
Nor was this all. This coast was backed by bold high land, from three
hundred feet near the coast to five hundred further inland, and marks
of that kind, valuable as they still are, were a necessity to the
early navigator. Such land would guide him home if his adventure
failed, and it is worth while noticing, in the case of a man to whom
all this was a great adventure, the sense of security with which the
high hills upon the horizon furnished him in clear weather.
He set out then, and for the first few hours--in theory for close
upon twenty-seven miles, and practically for more than twenty of the
fifty-three he had to traverse--the French coast was still in sight on
such days as could tempt him to cross the sea.
Now, by a happy accident, some of the highest land in the south of
England stands dominating the narrowest part of this approach from
France. Our Downs in Sussex are commonly receded from the sea-coast;
from Brighton westward, their slope up from it is gentle, their
escarpment is on the further side, and they are often veiled by the
reek of the land. All the way from Beachy Head nothing gives a true
mark until you get to this high headland of St. Catherine's Point,
which overlooks the narrowest part of the passage.
One must have sailed across here to know how powerful is that hill. It
stands steep up out of the sea, it is twice as high as Beachy Head,
more than half as high again as Dover Cliff, and though it is but
steep turf and not white chalk, it stands up so against the light
looking southward, that one may see it at not much less than thirty
miles distance as one runs northward so, with the westerly wind just
aft of the beam and making for the land. Even in a haze it will stand
above the mist and indicate the shore with its head so lifted as to
show quite plain in the clearer sky. All this argument will be evident
to those who know what a land-fall means. Even to-day, with the
compass and the chart, it is the method of all our fishermen in the
narrow seas to make some light or foreland, rather than to lay down a
course; the violence and the changes of the channel current make it a
surer method than any reckoning. In the first days a land-fall was
everything. Every memory or relic of primitive navigation shows it a
feeling-out for the high, conspicuous blue cloud, which, when you have
fixed it once above the horizon, stands permanent and constant,
turning at last into no cloud, but an evidence of human things after
the emptiness of the sea.
The high land then, of itself, all but bridged the gap. In pure theory
one might just catch sight of a fire on the top of St. Catherine's
before one had seen the last of a similar flare upon the hills of the
Cotentin, and in actual practice, in clear weather, it is but a very
short run of fifteen miles or so from the last sight of the French
coast to the making of St. Catherine's upon the horizon before one.
These considerations, then, the guide and protection of the Cotentin
coast, the inlet of the Seine, the narrowing of the sea, the high land
upon either side, would of themselves suffice to point this passage
out as a natural way from the Continent to England. Were a man asked
to-day where he would rather cross west of Etaples, he would answer, I
think, 'from Cherbourg to the Wight'; and very many times, before
writing was known or a record kept, men must have run easily through a
long summer day, taking it in two tides, losing the land for but a
quarter of their voyage, and confident that if evening overtook them,
a beacon on St. Catherine's would light the northern horizon, even
though half their journey remained to do.
I say this alone would prove the age of the route, but there is
something which clinches the argument, and that is what we saw to be
so important in the case of Kent--'The Choice of Entry.' How the tides
of the narrow seas and the uncertain winds made imperative a choice of
entries to the land I have already shown in my discussion of the
Straits, and I need not repeat my arguments.
It is enough to remark that in this case of the Second Crossing,
conscious human design could hardly have improved the conditions
afforded by the Wight.
Behind it is a vast sheltered sheet of water, in shape a tripod, one
of the arms of which, five miles in length by nearly one in breadth,
is absolutely landlocked and safe in all weathers, while the other two
are so commonly smooth and so well provided with refuge at Yarmouth,
Lymington, New Town, the Medina, Portsmouth, and the Hamble as to form
a kind of large harbour with subsidiary harbours attached.
To this great refuge two entries are provided, each aided by a strong
tide, each narrow enough to break the outer sea, but not so narrow as
to present grave dangers to small craft.
Supposing a man approaching St. Catherines's Point from the south.
The wind fails him, and he is compelled by the tide to drift to the
east or to the west; at an equal distance from the point either way he
will find an entry into the inland water. Suppose a sudden change in
the direction of the wind or in its intensity makes him run before it,
from any direction but that of the north (which in itself would
provide him with a windward shore) he could make one of the two
entries of which I speak. It is true that a nasty shelf and overfalls
follow a portion of the shore opposite Ventnor, but, like the reefs of
the Cotentin, they do not run so far out as to affect my argument.
There are hardly any conditions under which, after his passage from
the Continent, the early sailor would have found it impossible to make
either the Needles channel or Spithead. It is a perfect harbour, and
though it has but lately recovered its ancient importance, the inland
waters, known as the Solent, Southampton Water, and Spithead were
certainly, after the Straits, the chief landing-places of these
islands. Porchester, Brading, Cowes perhaps, and Bittern certainly,
show what the Romans made of the opportunity. All the recorded
history of England is full of that group of harbours and that little
inland sea, and before history began, to strike the island here was to
be nearest to Salisbury Plain and to find the cross-roads of all the
British communications close at hand; the tracks to the east, to the
west, to the Midlands were all equally accessible.
Finally, it must be noted that the deepest invasion of the land made
here is made by the submerged valley of Southampton Water, and the
continuation of that valley inward is the valley of the Itchen. The
inland town to which the port corresponded (just as we found
Canterbury corresponding to the Kentish harbours) is Winchester.
Thus it was that Winchester grew to be the most important place in
south England. How early we do not know, but certainly deeper than
even tradition or popular song can go it gathered round itself the
first functions of leadership. It was possessed of a sanctity which it
has not wholly lost. It preserves, from its very decay, a full
suggestion of its limitless age. Its trees, its plan, and the accent
of the spoken language in its streets are old. It maintains the
irregularities and accretions in building which are, as it were, the
outer shell of antiquity in a city. Its parallels in Europe can hardly
show so complete a conservation. Rheims is a great and wealthy town.
The Gaulish shrine of 'the Virgin that should bear a Son' still
supports from beneath the ground the high altar of Chartres. The
sacred well of a forgotten heathendom still supports with its roof the
choir of Winchester.[1] But Chartres is alive, the same woman is still
worshipped there; the memory of Winchester is held close in a
rigidity of frost which keeps intact the very details of the time in
which it died. It was yielding to London before the twelfth century
closed, and it is still half barbaric, still Norman in its general
note. The spires of the true Middle Ages never rose in it. The ogive,
though it is present, does not illumine the long low weight of the
great church. It is as though the light of the thirteenth century had
never shone upon or relieved it.
It belongs to the snow, to winter, and to the bare trees of the cold
wherein the rooks still cry 'Cras! cras!' to whatever lingers in the
town. So I saw it when I was to begin the journey of which I write in
these pages.
To return to the origins. The site of Winchester, I say, before ever
our legends arose, had all the characters which kept it vigorous to
within seven hundred years of our own time. It was central, it held
the key to the only good middle passage the Channel afforded, it was
destined to be a capital. From Winchester therefore a road must
necessarily have set out to join what had been, even before the rise
of Winchester, the old eastern and western road; this old road it
would join by a slow approach, and merge with it at last and seek
Canterbury as a goal.
The way by which men leaving Winchester would have made for the
Straits may have been, at first, a direct path leading northwards
towards the point where the old east-and-west road came nearest to
that city. For in the transformation of communication it is always so:
we see it in our modern railway lines, and in the lanes that lead from
new houses to the highways: the first effort is to find the
established road, the 'guide,' as soon as possible.
Later attempts were made at a short cut. Perhaps the second attempt
was to go somewhat eastward, towards what the Romans called Calleva,
and the Roman road from Winchester to Calleva (or Silchester) may have
taken for its basis some such British track. But at any rate, the
gradual experience of travel ended in the shortest cut that could be
found. The tributary road from Winchester went at last well to the
east, and did not join the original track till it reached Farnham.
[Illustration]
This short cut, feeder, or tributary which ultimately formed the
western end of our Road was driven into a channel which attracted it
to Farnham almost as clearly as the chalk hills of which I have spoken
pointed out the remainder of the way: for two river valleys, that of
the Itchen and that of the Wey led straight to that town and to the
beginning of the hill-platform.
[Illustration: GLIMPSES OF THE ITCHEN AWAY BEHIND US
_See page 133_]
It is the universal method of communication between neighbouring
centres on either side of a watershed to follow, if they exist, two
streams; one leading up to and the other down from the watershed. This
method provides food and drink upon the way, it reduces all climbing
to the one clamber over the saddle of the ridge, and, if the
beginning of the path is struck out by doubtful pioneers, then, as
every pioneer in a new country knows, ascending a stream is the best
guide to a pass and descending one on the further side is the best
guide to open spaces, and to the habitations of men.
[Illustration]
This tributary gradually superseded the western end of the trail, and
the Old Road from the west to the east, from the metal mines to the
Straits of Dover, had at last Winchester for an origin and Canterbury
for a goal. The neglected western end from Farnham to Stonehenge
became called 'The Harrow Way,' that is the 'Hoar,' the 'Ancient'
way.[2] It fell into disuse, and is now hardly to be recognised at
all.
The prehistoric road as we know it went then at last in a great flat
curve from Winchester to Canterbury, following the simplest
opportunities nature afforded. It went eastward, first up the vale of
the Itchen to the watershed, then down the vale of the Wey, and
shortly after Farnham struck the range of the North Downs, to which it
continued to cling as far as the valley of the Stour, where a short
addition led it on to Canterbury.
Its general direction, therefore, when it had settled down into its
final form, was something of this sort:--
[Illustration]
When Winchester began to affirm itself as the necessary centre of
south England--that is of open, rich, populated, and cultivated
England--the new tributary road would rapidly grow in importance; and
finally, the main traffic from the western hills and from much of the
sea also, from Spain, from Brittany, and from western Normandy,
probably from all southern Ireland, from the Mendips, the south of
Wales, and the Cornish peninsula, would be canalised through
Winchester. The road from Winchester to Farnham and so to Canterbury
would take an increasing traffic, would become the main artery between
the west and the Straits of Dover, and would leave the most permanent
memorials of its service.
* * * * *
Winchester and Canterbury being thus each formed by the sea, and each
by similar conditions in the action of that sea, the parallel between
them can be drawn to a considerable length, and will prove of the
greatest value when we come to examine the attitude of the Old Road
towards the two cities which it connects. The feature that puzzles us
in the approach to Canterbury may be explained by a reference to
Winchester. An unsolved problem at the Winchester end may be referred
for its solution to Canterbury, and the evidence of the two combined
will be sufficient to convince us that the characters they possess in
common are due to much more than accident.
Of all the sites which might have achieved some special position after
the official machinery of Rome with its arbitrary power of choice had
disappeared, these two rose pre-eminent at the very entry to the Dark
Ages, and retained that dual pre-eminence until the great transition
into the light, the Renaissance of civilisation at the end of the
twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth.
For six or seven hundred years the two towns were the peculiar centres
of English life. Winchester was a capital longer than London has been;
Canterbury ruled the religion of this island for over nine hundred and
forty years.
So much we know for certain, and more may be presumed; but I have
conjectured that these sites were of equal importance before the
advent of Rome, and such a conjecture needs support. I will maintain
that the barbaric centuries which followed the decline of the Empire
reproduced in Britain original conditions, and restored their value to
sites neglected during the period of Roman order.
Rome, in this frontier province, put her capital in the north, at
York, and her principal garrisons in the north also; but even though
she did not at first admit their importance, Canterbury and
Winchester, with London, insensibly preponderated: London, through
which half the roads are marked in the itinerary; Canterbury and
Winchester whence, to this day, great Roman roads may be discovered
radiating like the spokes of a wheel.
That the importance of these sites should have increased with the
increasing barbarism of the Dark Ages is, I repeat, an evidence of
their great antiquity. The arbitrary and official forces of society
had disappeared. An ancient sanctity beyond history, the track of
hunters, the ford, the open hillside, chance opportunities of
defence, soil, food, water, all the primal things which determine the
settlements of savages, were again at work in the fifth century. The
force of merely natural tendencies increased as the consciousness of
civilisation faded, and when after the defeat of the pagans in the
ninth century Christendom had just been saved and the light slowly
began to grow, these forces remained (though with gradually
diminishing power) and moulded Europe until the Angevine and the
Capetian, the reinvigorated Papacy, the adventure of the Crusades, and
the study of the Code, had created once more the fixity of a true
civilisation: a civilisation whose institutions and philosophy are our
own to-day.
What, then, are the common attributes which we can note in Winchester
and Canterbury, which would have drawn savage men to their sites,
which therefore give them their tradition, and from which we can
induce the causes of their rival power?
Each is near the sea, each near a port or ports; in the case of each,
this port, or group of ports, commands one of the two passages to the
Continent, and to the homes of civilised men. In each case the
distance from the sea is that of a day's march for an army with its
baggage. Disembark your men at Southampton or at Dover with the dawn
and you hope that night to rest secure behind the walls of Winchester
or Canterbury.
The reason of this arrangement was as follows: an inland place has
many advantages over a fortified town on the seashore as the
resting-place of an army. It has a better food supply; communication
from it radiates upon all sides, not only from half its circumference
(indeed in many ports there is but one narrow exit along the isthmus
of the peninsula or up the valley which forms its harbour). There is
likely to be more wood, a matter of great importance for fuel and
fortification and sometimes for the construction of engines of war; it
will have more fresh water. It may not be a salient, but it is an
important, fact that in early times the population of an inland place
would be trained for fighting upon land, and its energies would not be
divided by the occupation of sea-faring; and finally, your inland
fortress is liable to but one form of attack. You may have landed
your men after a successful voyage, but, on the other hand, you may
have landed them after a hot pursuit. In the first case it is not a
disadvantage to sleep the night sheltered by walls inland, and in the
second case it is a necessity.
Remembering all these things, it is evident that to have your town of
refuge within a day's march of the landing-place is a condition of its
value to you. It is far preferable to reach fortification within the
daylight than to pass your first halt under the strain of partial and
temporary defence.
Winchester and Canterbury are each, of course, upon rivers. They are
each upon rivers just above the limit to which the tide would help
light-draught, primitive boats, and where yet they could enjoy the
fresh water coming down from above. So Caen, so Norwich, and a hundred
other cities, have been founded upon rivers a day's march inland from
port, and (with the exception of the tide) similar conditions perhaps
produced the greatest of all these examples--Rome.
The similarity of the rivers is also remarkable: each of such a size
that it can be canalised for traffic above the city, and yet used to
turn mills; each supplying industries that depend upon water,
especially brewing and tanning; each divided for such a purpose into a
number of small regular trenches which flow along the lower streets of
the city--an arrangement only possible where a flat site has been
chosen--the Itchen, tumbling along the eastern boundary of Winchester,
and the Stour, on the northern gate of Canterbury, complete a parallel
almost as strong as that of the cities which stand upon them.
They are of much the same length, depth, rapidity of stream, and
volume of water. They flow very clear--running over the chalk, clean
and potable streams. At a point where each cuts through a range of
hills, a point somewhat below the last ancient ford, and just barely
above the recorded limit of the tide, a point right on the valley
floor where the hills recede somewhat, each bears its city.
Of both towns we are certain that they were prehistoric centres. Not
only have the earliest implements of men been discovered in their
soil, but it is evident that the prehistoric mode of defence in these
islands was used by each--a camp or temporary refuge crowning the hill
above the settlement and defended by great circumvallations of earth.
Canterbury has the camp in Bigberry Wood; Winchester that upon St.
Catherine's Hill. In each town a considerable British population
existed before the Roman invasion. In each the coins of British kings
struck under the influence of Greek commerce, a century to a century
and a half before the Christian era, are to be discovered. The name of
each has a British root when it first appears in British history.
Canterbury, Durovernum, was the town upon the river bank; and
Winchester still preserves the trace of such an origin: the 'Venta' of
the Romans: the Celtic 'Gwent'--an open space.
Each was Roman; each occupied much the same area; from each radiated a
scheme of Roman roads; upon each the history of Roman Britain is
silent; each first appears recorded in the story of the pirate
invasions and of the conversion of England after the dissolution of
the Imperial scheme.
Such were the two towns which answered each other like peaks over the
rich belt of south England. The one the king's town, the other the
primate's; the political and the ecclesiastical capitals of all those
natural and dark centuries. By a division common to the history of our
ancestors in all parts of Europe, one fell naturally to the Court, the
other to the Church. The king in Winchester, the primate in
Canterbury, 'like two strong oxen pulled the plough of England.' And
each, as was necessary to the period, had its great tomb, but not at
the same time. Winchester, the capital, had in the Dark Ages its lamp
of sanctity. In the Middle Ages this focus moved to the east--to
Canterbury. There could be no rivalry. Winchester created its own
saint, St. Swithin, with the murder of à Becket Canterbury put out the
light of Winchester and carried on the tradition of a shrine; from
that time onwards Winchester declines, while Canterbury survives
chiefly as the city of St. Thomas.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The sacredness of wells is commingled all through Christendom with
that of altars. As, for instance, the wells in the cathedrals of
Chartres, of Nimes, of Sangres, and in St. Nicholas of Bari. In Notre
Dame at Poissy, in St. Eutropius at Santes (a Roman well), in the
Augustinian chapel at Avignon (now a barracks). In Notre Dame at
Etampes there are three wells. There is a well in St. Martin of Tours,
in the Abbey of Jobbes, in the Church of Gamache. Our Lady of the
Smithies at Orleans (now pulled down) had a well into which Ebroin
threw St. Leger, the Bishop; and close by at Patay there is one in St.
Sigismund's into which Chlodomir threw some one or other. Old Vendée
is full of such sacred wells. The parish church of Praebecq has one,
of Perique, of Challans (filled up in fourteenth century). At Cheffoi
you can see one in full use, right before the high altar and adorned
with a sculpture of the woman at the well--and this is but a short and
random list.
[2] See upon this abandoned portion Mr. Shore's article in the third
volume of the _Archæological Review_.
THE CAUSES OF THE PRESERVATION OF THE OLD ROAD; ITS GENERAL
CHARACTER, AND OUR APPLICATION OF THIS IN OUR METHOD OF
RECOVERING IT
We can regard Winchester, then, and Canterbury, as the point of
departure and the termination of the Old Road. We can be certain that
it would lie along the upper valleys of the Itchen and the Wey until
it struck the Hog's Back, and that thenceforward it would follow the
southern slope of the North Downs until these are cut by the river
Stour. From that point the last few miles to Canterbury would
naturally run parallel with, and in the valley of, the little Kentish
river.
But the task which is attempted in this book is more definite than
such a general scheme would convey. Many portions of the Old Road have
been preserved, many more have been recovered and mapped by the
researches of antiquarians; the remaining gaps alone was it our care
to explore and settle, until we should, if possible, have
reconstituted the whole ancient way, yard for yard, from the capital
of Hampshire to the capital of Kent. That was our business, and in
order that the reader may follow the more clearly my account of our
journey I shall, before beginning that account, set down here, at the
end of the present essay, the difficulty which the task presented, how
we were aided by certain causes which had conspired to preserve the
Old Road, what those causes were, and finally what method we applied
to the problem that lay before us.
All archæological research must necessarily repose upon evidence less
firm than that of true history, yet a great part of it deals with
things lying right to hand.
A barrow is an unmistakable thing. You open it and you find a tomb.
Whatever may be said of paleolithic man, neolithic man has left the
most enduring and indubitable evidence. He worked in the most
resisting of materials, and he worked well.
A Roman road is a definite thing. Its known dimensions are a guide for
our research: the known rules of the Roman engineers. The strata of
material, often the embankment, remain. Its long alignments have but
to be recovered in a couple of points to establish its direction
through a considerable stretch of country. Did a man but know the
ridge over Gumber Corner and down Bignor Hill, the Billingshurst Road,
the hard foundations through Dorking Churchyard, it would be enough to
make him certain of the Stane Street.
But of all the relics of antiquity the prehistoric road is the most
difficult to establish.
These old tracks, British, and (if the word has any meaning)
pre-British, though they must abound in the island, have become most
difficult to reconstitute.
The wild, half-instinctive trail of men who had but just taken on
humanity: later a known and common track, but a track still in the
hands of savages for countless generations, a road of this kind is
preserved by nothing stronger than habit. No mathematical calculation
presided at its origin, none can therefore be used to reconstruct it
when it has been lost. When (as in the last phase of the road which is
the subject of this book) religion may have prolonged its use into
historic times, that influence is capable indeed of perpetuating a
tradition; but though religion maintains a shrine or a legend it does
not add those consistent records of material works which are the best
guide for the research of posterity.
The Old Road was not paved; it was not embanked. Wherever the plough
has crossed it during the last four hundred years, the mark of it is
lost.
From the clay it has often disappeared: from marshy soil, always. On
the chalk alone has it preserved an unmistakable outline. Nor can it
be doubted that it would have vanished as completely as have so many
similar roads upon the Continent and in our own Midlands, had it not
been for one general, and three particular, influences which, between
them, have preserved a proportion of it sufficient to serve as a basis
for the exploration of the remainder.
The general influence was that political sequence by which England has
developed a peculiar power for retaining the evidences of her remote
past. The three particular influences were, first, the Canterbury
pilgrimage; secondly, the establishment of a system of turnpikes in
the eighteenth century; thirdly, and most important of all, the chalk.
Consider first the general influence: the effect of English society
upon this matter.
This little district of the world is a very museum of such primitive
things as lie at the basis of society: of such immaterial things as
our existing relics of barbaric polity: of such material things as
early systems of defence, the tombs of various forgotten races, the
first instruments of iron, bronze and stone; and of my own subject
here, the primeval track-ways, in what way has our political history
helped to preserve them?
The Empire held this province sufficiently to preserve, but not so
thoroughly as to destroy. The districts bounded but untraversed by the
great military roads which fed the frontier garrisons must have been
left in part autonomous; forbidden indeed to disturb the peace, but
not transformed by an ubiquitous administration.
Flourishing as were the very numerous towns, and large as their
combined populations must have been, they seem to have remained to the
end an archipelago surrounded as it were by a sea of forest and heath,
wherein could be found a thin but permanent population, preserving its
own language and its tribal system, in touch with the unconquered
tribes beyond the Grampians and the Irish Sea, and remaining to the
end but half-impressed with the stamp of Latin government.
The picture is but general; exceptions are numerous. Roman estates
were cultivated peacefully far from the towns, and certainly nothing
dangerous to the ruling man could befall him in the half-conquered
tracts of which I speak; but in the rough the picture is true.
Now such a state of things would have among other results this: that
it would not destroy the habits of the barbarians, it would
crystallise them.
Under such conditions a great activity and wealth accentuated the use
of a hundred pre-Roman things. The prosperity which the barbarians
enjoyed, the markets in the towns which they must have frequented,
would multiply their ancient instruments and would put to a continual
use their native trails; and these, as I have pointed out, were not to
any great extent overlaid by or forgotten in the new civilisation.
Whatever Gaulish track may have led from Paris to Orleans (and it is
historically certain that such a trail did run through the woods to
the south of Lutetia), or whatever old track-way was carried along the
north of the Apennines, both have wholly disappeared. The great
straight causeway of Rome cutting across the Beauce has killed the
one, the Æmilian Way the other. So it is throughout nearly all the
land which Rome developed, with the exception of this province; here
the fragments of a score of British track-ways survive.
When the Empire fell the nature of our decline equally preserved our
past. Alone of the Roman provinces the eastern half of Britain was
really ruined. It had been exposed for two centuries to the attacks
of pirates who came from the unconquered and inexhaustible north.
Remote, an Island, impoverished, the first of the frontiers to be
abandoned, it was at last overwhelmed: to what extent we can only
guess, and in what manner we cannot tell at all, but at any rate with
sufficient completeness to make us alone lose the Faith which is the
chief bond of civilisation.
The interval was short. There is still some glimmering of light in the
middle of the fifth century. In little more than a hundred years
communication was reestablished with the Continent, and before the
sixth century had closed St. Augustine had landed.
The anarchy had covered a gap no greater than the interval which
separates us from the Declaration of Independence, but it had been
sufficient to restore to the island the atmosphere of barbarism. There
was no Palace, nor any such central authority as everywhere else
maintained in the provinces the main traditions of Rome. In the west a
medley of Celtic, in the east a confusion of Teutonic dialects had
drowned the common medium of thought.
Religion itself when it returned was coloured by the simplicity and
folly of the ruin. In the west the unity of Christendom was hardly
comprehended, in the east the town of Rome became for the Anglo-Saxons
the subject of a sort of idolatry. Letters, geography, common history,
glass, and the use of half the metals were forgotten. Not till the
Latin re-conquest in the eleventh century was the evil overcome and an
organisation at last regained.
But this catastrophe, deplorable as it still remains to history, has
proved of the highest value to antiquarians. It produced indeed
fantastic legends, stories of the landing of the Horse and the Mare,
of Cerdic, Port, Cymric and Wightgar, which have disturbed our
national tradition, and which an ignorant bias has credited almost to
our own day: alone, therefore, of Western nations have we suffered a
real gap in our national story. On the other hand, this gap
re-created, as I have pointed out in a former page, those conditions
under which the primitive values of hill, wood, marsh, and river
reappeared.
The sight of such and such a group of ancient habitations, the meaning
to unprotected men of such and such a physical opportunity for
defence, in a word, all the influence which topography could exercise
on the rudest and most remote of our ancestors, grew real again in the
welter and breakdown which we call the Anglo-Saxon period. The
artifice and clear creative power of the Mediterranean races was gone:
it has never wholly returned to these shores; and what this time chose
for the building of cities or the use of roads or of places for
defence, is ever an excellent indication of what men had also done
long before the Romans came.
How our past has further been preserved by the shape and moulding of
the land I shall describe more fully in a further page. There remain
to be mentioned two political forces equally conservative. The first
is that species of lethargy and contempt which has forbidden us, as it
has forbidden every other aristocratic community, to destroy the
vestiges of its past. The second is a power more especial but closely
allied to this, I mean the influence of the few great owners of the
soil.
Whatever results of disorder and of public apathy may proceed from
the constitution of this class, and whatever historical learning may
have suffered from its power over the universities, prehistoric
research has secured from it the greatest advantage, for the landlords
of our villages have maintained the antiquities of their manors with
the force of a religion. The first barrow to be opened in England was
examined by the orders of a great landlord; the fine discoveries of
Titsey Park were directly due to the initiative of its owner, the
inheritor of Gresham's land. Albury preserves and dignifies one of the
critical portions of the Old Road; Eastwell another--and these are but
a few of the many that might be cited from this one track-way alone.
We may sum up and say that the political development of England has,
in a general fashion, preserved antiquity, and that we owe to it very
largely the survival of such relics as the Old Road.
But those particular causes, which have already been mentioned,
exercised a more powerful influence: the first of these was the Great
Pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, which arose
immediately after his murder in 1174.
To appreciate what that pilgrimage did for the preservation of the Old
Road one must grasp the twelfth century.
From just before its opening till a generation after its close, from
the final conquests of the Normans to the reign of St. Louis, from the
organising plan of Gregory VII. to the domination of Innocent III.,
from the first doubts of the barbaric schools to the united system of
the Summa, from the first troubled raising of the round arch in tiers
that attempted the effect of height to the full revelation of Notre
Dame--in that 120 years or more moved a process such as even our own
time has not seen. It was an upheaval like that by which, in the
beginnings of terrestrial life, the huge and dull sea-monsters first
took to the keen air of the land. Everything was in the turmoil which
the few historians who have seen the vision of this thing have called,
some an anarchy, and others a brief interlude of liberty in the
politics of Europe. It was neither one nor the other: it was the
travail of a birth.
When this young life was once started in the boiling energies of the
Crusades:--young Louis VI. the fighter, St. Bernard, the man that
would put all into order, young Abelard, who again, after so many
silent centuries, began to answer the riddle of the sphinx--when this
argosy of youth was launched, the first task of the Church was to
attempt to steer it. We know that the Church succeeded, as she
succeeded in saving all that could be saved of the Mediterranean
civilisation when the Roman Empire bowed, and all that could be saved
of our common moral tradition when, after the terrors of the fifteenth
century, Europe of the sixteenth threatened to fall into dust.
In the twelfth century the Church captured and rode the new energies,
but in that storm of creation a very great deal went down. How much we
do not know. It is probable that Rome was still Roman until the
Normans sacked it at the beginning of this era. It is certain that the
walls surrounding our English cities and those of the northern French
and the western Germans were unchanged since the Pagan time, until
the expansion of the twelfth century came to break them. I say what
relics of primeval learning, what verbal inheritance of primeval
experience, were lost in the new violence of Europe, cannot be known.
It is enough for us that the essence of civilisation was saved; that
if we let go the history of the tribal past with one hand we at least
beat off Asia with the other; that if the Romanesque gave up its last
spark in that gale, at least the Gothic replaced it.
For the purpose of this book one great loss must be noted: most of the
prehistoric roads disappeared.
The unity of Europe, a thing hitherto highly conscious, fully
existent, but inactive like the soul of a man in a reverie, sprang
into expression and permeated outward things. Men travelled.
Inter-communication became within fifty years from a pastime a habit,
and from a habit a necessity. Not only the Crusades had done this, but
something anterior, some passion for new horizons, which of itself had
helped to produce the Crusades. The orders and appeals of a united
Church began to circulate throughout Christendom. The universities
had arisen, and were visited almost as nomads would visit them: the
students crowding now Bologna, now Salerno, now Oxford, and fixing
themselves at last, like a swarm of bees, in Paris. The Benedictines
had already sketched the idea of the representative system--it was
beginning to invade political life. The justice of the central kings
went touring on assize. Some say that the cathedral builders
themselves were like the soul of Europe wandering from place to place.
With all this the cross-roads developed. Every little village was
linked up with every other; the main vague ways, older than history,
which joined not even towns directly, but followed only the dry and
open of the high lands, necessarily decayed. Some few kept their
place. The Watling Street was a necessity; it led from the Straits of
Dover to London, and from London to the corner which is the triple
gate to Ireland, to Wales and to Strathclyde--the only road by which
you can outflank Snowdon if you are going west, the Pennines if you
are going west and north. It is still, on the whole, the line of our
principal railway. But the Fosse Way began to lose its meaning. The
Ermine Street maintained some eminence, for Lincoln was a great town,
but the Icknield Way fell into broader and broader gaps. A man would
with difficulty discover that the Stane Street was still used.
The road of which this book treats would have disappeared more
certainly than any of these.
Winchester was decaying (for England was now quite united, and the
north counted in a way), London was becoming more and more--for with
intercommunication commerce was arising, and with the harsh efforts of
the German against the eastern heathen the Baltic was acquiring a
civilisation; with travel the sea was becoming familiar to others than
to pirates, and with the sea the port was growing in position--London
was becoming more and more, and was already almost the capital of
England. Henry II. was perhaps the last king who thought of Winchester
as his chief town. London was to overawe his son; his great-grandson
was to make Westminster the centre of the constitution.
From Southampton to London the road would remain; the roads from
London to Canterbury and to the ports of Kent would grow in
importance; but our road, the base of that triangle, would necessarily
have decayed: there was less traffic than ever before from west to
east, from the Mendips and Cornwall to the Straits. The metals of the
Devonian peninsula, and of the Severn valley had lost their economic
position, the iron of the Sussex Weald had taken their place. The
expeditions to Ireland and the new Scottish problem had removed to
Chester and to Lancaster the centres of strategical importance; the
same commerce which was giving London its hegemony--I mean the
commerce of the Baltic and the North Sea--was developing Orford and
King's Lynn, and all East Anglia, and, to a lesser degree, the Humber.
The Germanic states had spread so eastward as to draw the life of Gaul
also eastward, and to bleed its western promontory; the crossing of
the sea between the Cornwalls had lost its old political importance:
all combined to kill Winchester, and with Winchester the road from
that old capital to Canterbury, when an accident came to preserve that
way.
This accident was the murder of Thomas à Becket.
I will not deny that an effect always mingles with its cause; for
things that happen are realities, whereas time is not real at all. Not
only does the saint make the shrine, but the shrine also the saint. A
saint must have come to Canterbury. A primeval site will sooner or
later bring to fruit a primeval sacredness. But a study of this kind
cannot lose itself in such mysteries. It must confine itself to
definite history. In that moment, when the spiritual vision of Europe
was at its keenest, when stone itself was to be moulded like clay by
the intense vision of things beyond the world, when Suger had
conceived the pointed arch at St. Denis, and the gem upon St.
Michael's Hill was being cut into its facets, when the Church was most
determined to fashion the new world, and to give it a philosophy, and
when that task was at its most difficult, from the necessary quarrel
between the Soul and the State: that is, between things eternal,
personal, inward, and things civic, communal--when the world was fully
engaged in such a tangle outward, and the nerves of men, citizens and
Christians, were wrought as are those of antagonists in a wrestling
match, there fell this blow. For the first time in all these centuries
(and at what a time) violence, our modern method, attempted to cut the
knot. At once, and as it always must, fool violence produced the
opposite of what it had desired. All the West suddenly began to stream
to Canterbury, and à Becket's tomb became, after Rome, the chief
shrine of Christendom.
Ireland of the saints, South Wales still tribal, still in a way
unfixed, lending its population to far adventures and to the
attraction of distant places, all the south-western peninsula of
England, Brittany for ever mystic, the mountain masses of the Asturias
which had themselves preserved an original sanctity, the western ports
from Vigo to recently conquered Lisbon--the only ports by which the
Christian enthusiasm of the Spaniards conquering Islam could take to
the newly opened sea and to the north--all these sent their hordes to
converge on Winchester, and thence to find their way to Canterbury.
The whole year came at last to see the passing and re-passing of such
men. It was on the 29th of December that St. Thomas had been struck
down. For fifty years his feast had been kept upon that day, and for
fifty years the damp English winter had grudged its uneasy soil to the
pilgrims: the same weather in which we ourselves traversed it during
the journey of exploration which is the subject of this work.
With the jubilee the body was translated in the flush of early summer,
and the date of this translation (the 7th of July) became the new and
more convenient day upon which Canterbury was most sought. But the
habit of such a journey had now grown so general that every season saw
some example of it. The spring, as we know from Chaucer, the winter as
we know from the traditional dates preserved upon the Continent, the
summer as we know from the date of the chief gatherings: and there
must have been a constant return past the stubble and the new plough
of the autumn.
It was not only the directness of the Old Road between Winchester and
Canterbury that reconstituted its use for the purpose of these
pilgrimages: it was also that peculiar association of antiquity and of
religion which mingles the two ideas almost into one thing.
The pilgrim set out from Winchester: 'You must pass by that well,' he
heard, 'it is sacred.' ... 'You must, of ritual, climb that isolated
hill which you see against the sky. The spirits haunted it and were
banished by the faith, and they say that martyrs died there.' ... 'It
is at the peril of the pilgrimage that you neglect this stone, whose
virtue saved our fathers in the great battle.' ... 'The church you
will next see upon your way is entered from the southern porch sunward
by all truly devout men; such has been the custom here since custom
began.'
From step to step the pilgrims were compelled to take the oldest of
paths. The same force of antique usage and affection which, in a past
beyond all record, had lent their meaning to rocks and springs upon a
public way, re-flourished; and once again, to the great pleasure of
myself who write of it now, and of all my readers who love to see
tradition destroying calculated things, the momentum of generations
overcame.
The pilgrimage saved the road. But once started it developed new
sanctities of its own, as a tree transplanted will strike roots and
take a bend this way or that different from the exact intention of the
gardener. In the main it did nothing but preserve the immemorial
sites: the cliff above the river Wey, the lonely peaked hill of St.
Martha's that answers it from beyond the stream, the cross-roads on
the crest of the Downs above Reigate, the ford of the Medway, the
entry into the valley of the Stour, it transformed and fixed as
Christian things. Our remote ancestry was baptized again, and that
good habit of the faith, whereby it refuses to break with any chain of
human development, marked and retained for history the oldest things.
Upon that rock St. Catherine's was built, upon that hill the Martyrs'
Chapel; twin churches in line pointed to the ford of the Medway, the
old and dim great battle of the valley was dominated not only by the
rude monuments of those who had fallen in it, but by the abbey of
Boxley. Charing worshipped the block on which the Baptist had
suffered, and the church of Chilham rose on the flank of the hills
which had first disputed the invasion of the Romans. What Canterbury
became we know.
But this influence, though it was in the main highly conservative, may
here and there mislead us.
The new civilisation was well settled before the pilgrimage began. The
Normans had governed and ordered for a century; the new taxes, the new
system of justice, the new central kingship, had been well founded for
over a generation.
The pilgrims, therefore, at certain places did not need to follow step
by step the ancient way. They sometimes fail to find us the
prehistoric ford, for many bridges and ferries would exist in their
time. They sometimes bend right out of the original path to visit some
notable shrine, and there is more than one point where another stream
of their fellows, coming from London or from the Channel, joins and
tends to confuse the track. The occasions are but rare,[3] and they
are noted here only to explain certain conclusions which will follow
in the second part of this book. Taking the pilgrimage as a whole it
was the chief factor in the preservation of the Old Road.
Second in the causes of the survival of the Old Road came the
turnpikes. The system of turnpike roads served to perpetuate, and in
many cases to revive, the use of the old way when the pilgrimage
itself was but very vaguely remembered. The tolls chargeable upon
these new and firm roads furnished a very powerful motive for drovers
and pack-riders to use an alternative route where such charges would
not fall upon them. A similar cause was in operation to preserve 'the
Welsh road' in the Midlands, and on this southern way of ours there
are places when it was in operation, not indeed within living memory,
but within the memory of the parents of those now living.
For instance, the road along the summit of the Hog's Back was a better
road than the old track which follows the 300-feet contour upon the
south side of the hill; but the summit road was a turnpike for many
years during which the lower ill-kept lane was free, and hence a track
which, since the Reformation, had served only to link up the little
villages of Seale and Puttenham was used once more as a thoroughfare
between Guildford and Farnham. A new stream had been diverted into the
old channel, and this habit of avoiding the turnpike continued till a
date so close to our own time as easily to bridge a gap which, but for
that diversion, might have proved impassable. It is not without irony
that a system whose whole object was to replace by new and more
excellent roads the old rough tracks, proved, indirectly, one of the
principal sources of their survival.
The chalk, the third cause of that survival, is of such importance,
and that importance is so commonly neglected, that it almost merits an
essay of its own.
Consider the various characters which make of this soil the best
conceivable medium for the preservation of an ancient road.
Like the sandy heaths and rocky uplands through which other primitive
trails would naturally lead, it never paid to cultivate and therefore
invited the wayfarer who was not permitted to trespass upon tilled
land. But unlike other waste soil, it was admirably adapted to retain
the trace of his passage. Long usage will wear into chalk a deep
impression which marshy land will not retain, and which hard rocky
land will never suffer. Compare, for example, the results of
continuous travel along certain of the Yorkshire moors with that which
will be produced along the Chilterns above the Thames valley. In the
first case very marshy land, perpetually changing, alternates with
hard rock. Unless some considerable labour were expended, as in the
making of a causeway, neither of these would retain any record of the
road when once it had fallen into desuetude. But on the chalk some
trace would rapidly form, and with every succeeding year would grow
more obvious.
Chalk is viscous and spongy when it is wet. It is never so marshy as
to lose all impression made upon it. It is never so hard as to resist
the wearing down of feet and of vehicles. Moreover, those who are
acquainted with chalk countries must have noticed how a road is not
only naturally cut into the soil by usage, but forms of itself a kind
of embankment upon a hillside from the plastic nature of the soil. The
platform of the road is pressed outward, and kneaded, so to speak,
into an outer escarpment, which would make such a track, for
generations after it was abandoned, quite plain along the hillside.
Finally, there are, or were until lately, no forces at work to destroy
such a record. The chalk was little built upon; it had no occasion to
be largely traversed by modern roads; it stood up in steep hills
whereon no one would have dreamt of building, until the torture of
our modern cities drove men to contrast.
How these hills invited, and almost compelled, the primitive traveller
to use them has been already described. Once he began to use their
soil, better than any other soil in England, it would retain his
memory.
* * * * *
Now since some considerable portion of the Old Road has been
preserved, a basis for knowledge is afforded. Patches aggregating in
length to just over eighty miles are certain and fixed. It is possible
to work from that known thing to the unknown, and the gaps where the
Road is lost can be recovered by the consistent pursuit of a certain
method; this method when it is described will be seen to lend to a
first vague and tentative examination a greater value than it seemed
to promise. It permitted us to establish by converging lines of proof
so much of what had been lost, that one may now fairly call the full
course of the Road established from the north gate of Winchester,
whence it originates, to the west gate of Canterbury, which is its
goal.
A description of our method is a necessary preliminary to that of the
journey upon which it was put to the test.
The reconstitution of such a road is essentially the filling up of
gaps. The task would be impossible if a very large proportion did not
remain evident to the eye, or recorded by continuous history. The task
would be much more difficult if the gaps in question were of very
great length, succeeded by equally long unbroken pieces of the
existing road. Luckily, the record or preservation of the Pilgrim's
Way has not fallen upon these lines. There is no continuous gap
throughout the whole of these 120 miles of greater length than seven
miles, and we have in what may be called the 'known portions,'
stretches of ten, thirteen, and even fifteen miles, almost unbroken.
Moreover, the proportion of the known to the unknown is considerable:
60 per cent. of the total distance of 120 miles is known to 40 per
cent. unknown, and it must be understood that throughout this book I
speak of those parts as 'known' or 'recognised,' which have been
universally admitted since the study of the subject was approached by
archæologists.
[Illustration]
These two facts, the considerable proportion of the known to the
unknown, and the absence of any very long stretch in which the Road is
lost, facilitate the task in a manner that can be put best graphically
by some such little sketch as the preceding, where the dark line is
the known portion of the Road. It is evident that the filling up of
the gaps is indicated by the general tendency of the rest.
There is a mass of other indications besides the mere direction to
guide one in one's research; and a congeries of these together make
up what I have called the method by which we approached the problem.
That method was to collate all the characteristics which could be
discovered in the known portions of the Road, and to apply these to
the search for traces of the lost portion.
Supporting such a method there are the _a priori_ arguments drawn from
geographical and geological conditions.
There are place-names which point out, though only faintly, the
history of a village site.
There is the analogy of trails as they exist in savage countries at
the present day.
There is the analogy of other portions of prehistoric tracks which
still exist in Britain.
All these confirm or weaken a conclusion, but still the most important
arguments are found in the characteristics which can be discovered in
the known portions of the Road, and which may be presumed, in the
absence of contradictory evidence, to attach to the lost portions
also.
When a gap was reached, it was necessary to form an hypothesis to
guide one in one's next step, and such an hypothesis could best be
formed upon a comparison of all these various kinds of knowledge. The
indication afforded by any one of them would, as a rule, be slight,
but the convergence of a number of such indications would commonly
convey a very strong presumption in favour of some particular track.
It was then our business to seek for some remaining evidences,
apparent to the eye, whereby the track could be recovered. Such
evidences were the well-known fact that a line of very old yews will
often mark such a road where it lies upon the chalk; the alignment of
some short path with a known portion behind, and a known portion
before one; while, of course, the presence of a ridge or platform upon
such an alignment we regarded (in the absence of any other lane) as
the best guide for our search.
Occasionally, the method by which we brought our conjecture to the
test had to be applied to another kind of difficulty, and a choice had
to be made between two alternative tracks, each clear and each with
something in its favour; in one or two short and rare examples, the
Road very plainly went one way, when by every analogy and experience
of its general course it should have gone another. But, take the
problem as a whole, whether applied to the commonest example, that of
forming an hypothesis and then finding whether it could be sustained,
or to the most exceptional (as where we found the Road making straight
for a point in a river where there was no ford), the general method
was always the same: to consider the geographical and geological
conditions, the analogy of existing trails of the same sort, the
characters we had found in the Road itself throughout its length as
our research advanced, and to apply these to the parts where we were
in doubt.
The number of 'habits,' if I may so call them, which the Road
betrayed, was much larger than would at first have appeared probable,
and that we could discover them was in the main the cause of our
success, as the reader will see when I come to the relation of the
various steps by which we reconstituted, as I hope, the whole of the
trail.
The principal characteristics or 'habits' are as follows:--
I. The Road never turns a sharp corner save under such necessity as is
presented by a precipitous rock or a sudden bend in a river.
In this it does precisely what all savage trails do to-day, in the
absence of cultivated land. When you have a vague open space to walk
through at your choice you have no reason for not going straight on.
We found but one apparent exception to this rule in the whole
distance: that at the entry to Puttenham; and this exception is due to
a recent piece of cultivation.[4] This alignment, however, is not
rigid--nothing primitive ever is--the Road was never an absolutely
straight line, as a Roman road will be, but it was always direct.
II. The Road always keeps to the southern slope, where it clings to
the hills, and to the northern bank (_i.e._ the southward slope) of a
stream. The reason of this is obvious; the slope which looks south is
dry.
There are but four exceptions to this rule between Winchester and
Canterbury, and none of the four are so much as a mile in length.[5]
III. The road does not climb higher than it needs to.
It is important to insist upon this point, because there is nothing
commoner than the statement that our prehistoric roads commonly follow
the very tops of the hills. The reason usually given for this
statement is, that the tops of the hills were the safest places. One
could not be ambushed or rushed from above. But the condition of fear
is not the only state of mind in which men live, nor does military
necessity, when it arises, force a laden caravan to the labour of
reaching and following a high crest. The difficulty can be met by a
flanking party following the top of the ridge whose lower slope is the
platform for the regular road. In this way the advantage of security
is combined with the equally obvious advantage of not taking more
trouble than you are compelled to take. There are several excellent
examples of the flanking road on this way to Canterbury, notably the
ridge-way along the Hog's Back,[6] which has become the modern
high-road; but nowhere does the Old Road itself climb to the top of a
hill save when it has one of two very obvious reasons: (_a_) the
avoidance of a slope too steep to bear the traveller with comfort, or
(_b_) the avoidance of the ins and outs presented by a number of
projecting ridges. On this account at Colley Hill, before Reigate, and
later, above Bletchingly, near Redhill, the Road does climb to the
crest: and so it does beyond Boughton Aluph to avoid a very steep
ravine. Once on the crest, it will remain there sometimes for a mile
or so, especially if by so doing it can take advantage of a descending
spur later on: as after Godmersham Park down to Chilham. But, take the
Road as a whole, its habit when a convenient southerly bank of hills
is present, is to go up some part of the slope only, and there to run
along from 50 to 100 feet above the floor of the valley. If it be
asked why the earlier traveller should have been at the pains of
rising even so much as this, it may be noted that the reason was
threefold: it gave the advantage of a view showing what was before
one; it put one on the better drained slope where the land would be
drier; and it lifted one above the margin of cultivation in later
times when men had learned to plough the land. In the particular case
of this Road it had the further advantage that it usually put one on
the porous chalk and avoided the difficult clay of the lower levels.
IV. Wherever the Road goes right up to the site of a church it passes
upon the southern side of that site.
It is necessary to digress here for a moment upon the archæological
importance of these sites. They are but an indication, not a proof, of
prehistoric sanctity. It would be impossible to say in what proportion
the old churches of these islands stand upon spots of immemorial
reverence, but it is certain that a sufficient proportion of them do
so stand (the church of Bishopstoke, for instance, upon the site of a
Druidical circle), as to afford, when a considerable number are in
question, a fair presumption that many of the sites have maintained
their meaning from an age long prior to Christianity. Apart from the
mass of positive evidence upon this matter, we have our general
knowledge upon the methods by which the Faith supplemented, and in
part supplanted, older and worse rituals; and there is an impression,
which no one who has travelled widely in western Europe will deny,
that the church of a place has commonly something about it of the
central, the unique, or the isolated in position; characters which
cannot wholly be accounted for by the subsequent growth of the
community around them.
Now, on its way from Winchester to Canterbury, the Old Road passes,
not in the mere proximity of, but right up against, thirteen existing
or ruined churches. They are, proceeding from west to east, as
follows: King's Worthy, Itchen Stoke, Bishop Sutton, Seale, Puttenham,
St. Martha's, Shere, Merstham, Titsey, Snodland, Burham, Boughton
Aluph, and Chilham.[7] In the case of eight it passes right up against
the south porch; in the case of two (Bishop Sutton and Seale) it is
compelled to miss them by a few yards. One (St. Martha's) is passed on
both sides by a reduplication of the track. One (Chilham) is
conjectural, and the last (Shere) is doubtful.
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF SHERE]
The habit is the more remarkable from the fact that the Road commonly
goes north of a village, and therefore should, unless it had some
purpose, commonly go north of all churches. And, indeed, it does pass
many churches to the north, but it always leaves them (as at
Chevening, Lenham, Charing, and the rest) to one side. It never goes
close to their site.
The importance of this rule will be apparent when we consider, later
on, the spots in which a church stands, or has stood, and where, at
the same time, the track is doubtful and has to be determined.
V. In crossing a river-valley, the Road makes invariably for the point
where spurs of dry ground and rising ground come closest upon either
side, and leave the narrowest gap of marshy land between.
I note this as a characteristic of the Road, quite apart from the more
obvious considerations; such as, that primitive man would seek a ford;
that he would seek gravel rather than clay; that he would try to pass
as high up a river as possible, and that, other things being equal, he
would keep to the general alignment of his path as much as possible in
crossing a river. All these are self-evident without the test of
experience, but this characteristic of which I speak is one that would
not occur to a traveller who had not tested it with his own
experience. It is so at the crossing of the Itchen, at the crossing
of the Wey, at the crossing of the Mole, at the crossing of the
Darent, and, as we shall see, it is useful in giving us a clue towards
the much more important crossing of the Medway.
VI. Where a hill must be taken, it is taken straight and by the
shortest road to the summit, unless that road be too steep for good
going.
Here one has something to be found all over England where an old, has
been superseded by a modern, way. I have an instance in my mind on the
main road westward from Tavistock into Cornwall. It is exactly
analogous to what the Indian trails in America do to the present day.
It is civilisation or increased opportunities--especially the use of
wheeled traffic on a large scale--which leads men to curve round a
hill or to zig-zag up it. In the course of the Old Road there are not
many examples of this. From the nature of the ground which it
traverses the hills to be surmounted are few; but when they do come,
the knowledge of this habit will lead one always to prefer the
straightest of two ways of reaching the summit.
VII. A similar tendency causes the Road to seek, as immediately as
possible, when it is passing from one valley to another, the saddle of
the watershed, if that watershed be high.
Of this there is but one example in the Old Road, that near Medstead
in Hampshire. It therefore affords us no particular clue in dealing
with this road alone, but as we know that the same phenomenon is
apparent in the remaining prehistoric tracks, and in existing trails
in savage countries throughout the world, it is a valuable clue, as
will be seen later in the particular instance of the saddle between
the valleys of the Itchen and the Wey.
* * * * *
Prepared for such a method; having well marked our maps and read what
there was to read; having made certain that the exact starting-point
was the site of the North Gate at Winchester, and that the first miles
went along the right bank of the Itchen, we two went down from town
before December ended, choosing our day to correspond exactly with
the dates of the first pilgrimage. When noon was long past, we set out
from Winchester without any pack or burden to explore the hundred and
twenty miles before us, not knowing what we might find, and very
eager.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] The points where the pilgrims obviously left the Old Road are
Compton (p. 160) and Burford Bridge (p. 181). They probably left it
after Merstham (p. 205) and perhaps after Chilham (p. 271), while they
certainly confused the record of the passages of the Wey (p. 165), and
perhaps of the Medway (p. 242). As for their supposed excursion into
the plain near Oxted (p. 213), I can find no proof of it. The places
where other tracks coming in impair the Old Road are on either side of
the Mole (p. 181), the Darent (p. 222), and the Medway (p. 237),
where, along such river valleys, such tributaries would naturally
lead.
[4] See note on p. 158.
[5] In the case of three--those of Gatton, Arthur's Seat, and
Godmersham--an excellent reason can at once be discovered. The Road
goes just north of the crest, in order to avoid the long circuit of a
jutting-out spur with its re-entrant curve. For that re-entrant curve,
it must be remembered, would be worse going, and wetter, than even the
short excursion to the north of the crest. In the fourth case,
however, where the Road goes to the north for a few hundred yards
behind Weston Wood, I can offer no explanation of the cause. It is
sufficiently remarkable that in all this great distance there should
be but that one true exception to the rule, and a characteristic so
universal permits me, I think, to take it for certain in one doubtful
place (Chilham) that the Road has followed the sunny side of the
slope.
[6] There is another, less clear, beyond Titsey, another beyond
Chevening, and there are traces of another above Lenham.
[7] The 6-inch Ordnance Map would add Albury (see p. 174).
THE EXPLORATION OF THE ROAD
THE EXPLORATION OF THE ROAD
WINCHESTER TO ALTON
_Eighteen miles and a half_
Winchester differs from most other towns which the Romans reorganised
in that its main streets, the street north and south and the street
east and west, do not divide the city into four equal quarters. The
point where the two ways cross is close to the western wall, and this
peculiar arrangement was probably made by the first conquerors in
order to avoid an exit upon the marshy land beside the Itchen; for
that river flowed just against the eastern wall of the city.
Of the four arms of this cross, the northern, a street always given up
to commerce, became, in the later Middle Ages, the Jewry. By a process
at first perhaps voluntary, but later legal, the Jews were
concentrated into one quarter, a sort of Ghetto. It is to be noticed
that in nearly every case these Jewish quarters were in the very thick
of a city's life, and (as in the Paris of Philippe le Bel) of far
greater value than any other equal area of the city.[8] Something of
the kind was present at Winchester. The whole stream of traffic which
passed out from the capital to the rest of England went through the
lane of the moneylenders, and we may say with certitude that the north
gate, the limit of that lane, was the starting-point of the Old Road.
The north gate has now disappeared. It lay just south of the grounds
now known as North-Gate House. The deflection of the street is
comparatively modern; the original exit was undoubtedly (as at
Chichester and elsewhere) along the straight line of the Roman road.
This passed near the site of the present house, and pointed towards
the isolated tree which marks the northern edge of the garden.
[Illustration]
From this point it has been commonly imagined that the Old Road must
have coincided with the modern Hyde Street, and have followed this
line as far as the smithy at Headbourne Worthy. Thence it has been
supposed to branch off to King's Worthy.
From the church of that village onwards through Martyrs' Worthy and
Itchen Abbas no one questions but that the modern highway is identical
with the Old Road; but I think the original track may be shown to have
proceeded not along the modern street, but by an interior curve,
following up the Monks' Walk, passing under the modern railway
embankment near the arch which is just north of the Itchen bridge, and
making thence straight for King's Worthy church, thus leaving
Headbourne Worthy on the left, and running as the thick line runs in
this sketch-map.
The point evidently demands argument, and I will give the arguments
upon one side and upon the other, so that the conclusion may recommend
itself to my readers.
In favour of the first supposition there is this to be said, that the
line through Headbourne Worthy carries the road all the way above the
levels which may be marshy, avoids the crossing of any stream, and
indicates in the continuity of the place-names (the three Worthies)[9]
a string of similar sites dating from a similar antiquity. To this
consideration may be added that parallel between Canterbury and
Winchester which will be found throughout this essay. For at the other
end of the road the entry into Canterbury is of a similar kind. The
Old Road falls, as we shall see, into Watling Street, a mile before
the city, and enters the ecclesiastical capital by a sharp corner,
comparable to the sharp corner at Headbourne Worthy in the exit from
Winchester.
Against all this one can array the following arguments. The Old Road,
as the reader has already seen, never during its course turns a sharp
corner. It has to do so at Canterbury because it has been following a
course upon the north bank of the Stour, the bank opposite from that
upon which Canterbury grew; no better opportunity could be afforded
for crossing the river than the ferry or bridge which the most
primitive of men would have provided as an entry into their township,
and such a bridge or ferry would necessarily run at right angles to a
path upon the opposite bank.
No such necessity exists in this case of the exit from Winchester. The
town is on the same bank of the river as the road. Had the Old Road
left by the eastern gate, such a corner would have been quite
explicable and even necessary, but as a matter of fact it left by the
northern.
The argument which relies upon the necessity of following the high
land is of more value; but that value may be exaggerated. The shorter
and more natural track, to which we inclined, though it runs indeed at
a lower level, follows the edge of the chalk, and just avoids the
marshy alluvial soil of the valley.
The objection that it compels a crossing of the little stream, the
Bourne, is not so well founded as might be imagined. That stream would
indeed have to be crossed, but it would have been crossed under
primitive conditions in a much easier fashion than under modern. Its
depth and regularity at the present day are the result of artifice,
it runs at an unnatural level embanked in a straight line along the
Monks' Walk, and was perhaps turned, as was nearly every stream that
served a medieval congregation, for the purpose of giving power to the
mill of the Hyde Abbey and of supplying that community with water.
The mention of the stream and of the monastery leads me to two further
considerations in support of the same thesis. This splendid monument
of the early twelfth century and of the new civilisation, the
burial-place of the greatest of our early kings, the shrine which
stood to royal Winchester as St. Germain des Prés did to royal Paris,
and Westminster later to royal London, would, presumably, have had its
gates upon the oldest highway of its time.
It should be remarked also that before its deflection that brook must
have followed the slope and fallen into the Itchen by a much shorter
and smaller channel, reaching the river near where the railway bridge
now stands. A portion of its water still attempts a similar outlet,
and there can be little doubt that before the embankment of eight
hundred years ago the fields we traversed in our search for the path
would have been dry, for they are high enough to escape flood, and
they have a sufficient slope, and their chalky soil is sufficiently
porous to have left the land firm upon either side of the little
stream.
The Roman road also took the same line, at least as far as King's
Worthy; and a Roman road was often based upon a pre-Roman track.[10]
The path so taken not only turns no abrupt corner (in itself an
excellent argument in support of its antiquity), but points directly
to King's Worthy church so as to pass its _south_ porch, and then
curves easily into that modern highway which goes on to Martyrs'
Worthy and Itchen Stoke, and is admittedly coincident with the Old
Road.
The alternative has no such regular development; if one comes through
Headbourne Worthy one is compelled to turn a sharp corner at the
smithy of that village and another just upon King's Worthy church
before one can fall in with the modern road at the point where its
coincidence with the old one ceases to be doubtful.
From all these considerations we determined to follow the lower and
more neglected path as representing the track of the Old Road.
We left Hyde Street by the first opening in the houses of its eastern
side; we halted with regret at the stable door, still carved and of
stone, which is the last relic of Hyde Abbey. We saw the little
red-brick villas, new built and building, that guard the grave where
Alfred lay in majesty for six hundred years.[11]
We went up the Monks' Walk, under the arch, past King's Worthy church,
through King's Worthy village and so on through Martyrs' Worthy to
Itchen Abbas. It is a stretch which needs little comment, for after
King's Worthy the modern high-road certainly corresponds with the
ancient track. We were walking these few miles upon earth beaten (to
quote recorded history alone) by the flight of Saxons from the battle
of Alton, and by the conquering march of Swegen which was the
preliminary to the rule of the Danes over England. We noted the sharp
dip down into the valley[12] (whence Itchen-A-Bas is thought to take
its name), and on reaching the green at Itchen Stoke, six miles from
our starting-point, we determined to explore the first considerable
difficulty which the road would present to us.
That difficulty we had already presupposed to exist from a study of
the map before we undertook our journey, and an examination of the
valley confirmed us in our conjecture.
Thus far the history of the Worthies, and, as we have seen, the
topographical necessities of the valley had determined the way with
some accuracy; the most of it had corresponded to the present
high-road. At Itchen Stoke these conditions disappeared.
The valley of the Itchen here makes a sharp bend northwards round a
low but rather difficult hill, and leads on to the Alresfords. The
modern road follows that valley, passes through New Alresford, and
there joins the main road from Winchester to London.
The Old Road did not follow this course. It crossed the river at
Itchen Stoke, crested the hill, and did not join the London road until
the point marked by the church at Bishop Sutton, one mile from
Alresford. That its track was of this nature can be proved.
We had already noted, upon the earlier maps, that, barely a century
ago, nothing but irregular lanes connected Itchen Stoke with the
Alresfords by the valley of the river. These could not represent the
original trail; where that trail passed we were able to discover. The
word Stoke here, as elsewhere in the South Country, is associated with
the crossing of a stream. It stands for the 'staking' which made
firmer the track down through the marshy valley, and supported on
either side the wattles and faggots by which an approach to a river
was consolidated. Moreover, to this day, a ford exists at Itchen
Stoke, and it is an obvious place for passing the river; not only is
the water shallow, but the bottom is firm, and the banks are not
widely separated, as is so often the case where the depth of a river
is lessened.
This ford, by itself, might not mean much. There are plenty of reasons
for crossing a stream whenever one can, and Itchen Stoke would have
provided a convenient ford for any one living north of the river who
desired to get south of it. But there are a number of other
considerations, which confirm to a point of certitude the crossing of
the river by the Old Road at this point. Just above Itchen Stoke is
the confluence of all the head-waters which form the Itchen: the Alre,
and other streams. Now a confluence of this kind is invariably marshy,
and this marsh could not, in early times, have been avoided (if one
followed the flat right bank) save by a very long bend to the
north: along that bend no trace of a road or of continuous
prehistoric use exists: while, if one crosses at Itchen Stoke to the
other bank, one finds a steep, dry bank on which to continue one's
journey.
[Illustration: THE HEAD-WATERS WHICH FORM THE ITCHEN, THE ALRE AND
OTHER STREAMS]
It might be argued that the traveller would have wished to take on his
way such settlements as the Alresfords; but though it is true that an
ancient track leaves Old Alresford to the north-east, that track does
not point to Farnham, the known junction of the 'short-cut' from
Winchester with the original 'Harrow Way.' Old Alresford is well to
the west, and also too far to the north of the track we had followed
to be touched by it save at the expense of an abrupt and inexplicable
bend. New Alresford is nearer the alignment (though not on it), and it
is to New Alresford that the modern road leads. But the town was not
in existence[13] till the end of the twelfth century, and only grew
up in connection with Bishop Lucy's scheme for rendering the Itchen
navigable. The pond which was the head of that undertaking still
remains, though much diminished, the chief mark of the place.
The ford might have been used, and is still used, for reaching all the
district south of the Itchen, but that district was high, bare,
waterless, unpeopled, and of no great importance until one got to the
Meon valley, and it is significant that the Meon valley was in its
earliest history independently colonised and politically separate from
the valley of the Itchen.
In this absence of any but a modern road up the valley to the
Alresfords, in the presence of the marsh, in the eccentricity of Old
and the modernity of New Alresford, and in the unique purpose
attributable to the ford, we had a series of negative considerations
which forbade the Old Road to follow the river beyond Itchen Stoke.
On the other hand, there are as many positive arguments in favour of
the thesis that the ford was used by the oldest road from Winchester
to Farnham.
Between these two centres, as will be seen in a moment by the
sketch-map on p. 137, a high but narrow watershed had to be crossed.
To approach this watershed by the easiest route must have been the
object of the traveller, and, as the map will show, to cross at this
ford, go straight across the hill to Bishop Sutton, and thence follow
the Ropley valley was to go in a direct line to one's object.
As we talked to the villagers and gathered their traditions, we found
that this ford had been of capital importance. The old church of the
village stood just beside the river, and in such a position that the
road to the ford passed just by its _southern_ porch. It has
disappeared--'in the year of the mobbing,' say the peasants: that is,
I suppose, in 1831; but the consecrated land around it is still
enclosed, and its site must have clustered the whole place about the
riverside. It stood, moreover, close against the ford; and the Old
Road that skirted the churchyard is marked by an alignment of yews
and other trees leading directly to the river.
Finally, when we accepted the hypothesis and crossed the river, we
found a road corresponding to what the old track should be. It has in
the past been somewhat neglected, but it is now a metalled lane; it is
without any abrupt turn or corner, and leads directly over the hill in
the direction of Bishop Sutton, the Ropley valley, and so at last to
the watershed, the surmounting of which was the whole object of the
trail from this point onwards.
The points I have mentioned will be made clearer, perhaps, by a
sketch-map, in which the dark patches and lines represent the
water-ways at this confluence which forms the Itchen. The Old Road I
have indicated by a dotted line, but for its exact course it would be
advisable for readers to refer to an Ordnance map.
All these pieces of evidence supporting one another seemed to us
sufficient to determine the trajectory at this point. The ford, the
position of the church, the number of streams that would have to be
crossed were the valley to be further pursued, the low marshy ground
at the confluence of these streams, the non-existence of any ancient
settlement or trace of a road at the base of Alresford Hill, the fact
that the only village to which such a track could lead is of
comparatively recent creation, the existence of an old track, direct
in its alignment, proceeding straight from the ford, and pointing
without deviation to Bishop Sutton church and the Ropley valley--all
these facts combined settled any doubts upon the way we should go. We
climbed and followed the lane to the top of the hill.
[Illustration]
These two miles of the way gave us (under the evening--for it was the
falling of the light) glimpses of the Itchen westward and away behind
us. The road had the merit of all savage trails, and of all the tracks
a man still takes who is a-foot and free and can make by the shortest
line for his goal: it enjoyed the hills. It carried two clear summits
in its flight, and from each we saw those extended views which to the
first men were not only a delight, but a security and a guide. It was
easy to understand how from these elevations they planned their direct
advance upon the ridge of the watershed which lay far before us,
eastward, under the advancing night. As they also must have done, we
looked backwards, and traced with our eyes the sharp lines of light in
the river we had just abandoned. We so halted and watched till
darkness had completely fallen; then we turned down northward to
Alresford to sleep, and next morning before daybreak, when we had
satisfied the police who had arrested us upon suspicion of I know not
what crime, we took the hill again and rejoined the Old Road.
By daylight we had come down Whitehill Lane, the steep pitch into
Bishop Sutton, and were tramping up that vale which makes for the
watershed, and so leads to the corresponding vale of Alton upon the
further side.
Here, at least as far as the Anchor Inn, and somewhat further, the
modern highway corresponds to the Old Road. It thus follows the lowest
of the valley, but there is no reason at first why it should not do
so. The rise is fairly steady, the ground dry (an insignificant stream
gradually disappears beneath the chalk), and the direction points
straight to the shortest approach for the ridge which cuts off the
basin of the Channel from that of the Thames.
This direction, does not, however, long continue. The valley curves
somewhat to the north, and it might be presumed that the original way,
making more directly for the saddle of the watershed, would gradually
climb the southern hillside. By so doing it would find two advantages:
it would take a shorter cut, and it would conquer at one stretch, and
rapidly, the main part of the 360 feet between the Anchor Inn and the
summit.
It was but a guess that the Old Road would probably take a straight
line upwards. The curve of the modern road does not carry it more
than half a mile from the direct alignment. The Old Road might quite
well have suffered such a deviation, and we were in some doubt when we
proceeded to gather our evidence. That evidence, however, proved
fairly conclusive.
There is a tradition, which Mrs. Adie has justly recognised, that the
pilgrims of the Middle Ages passed through Ropley.[14] What is more
important to our purpose, Ropley has provided a discovery of British
antiquities, Celtic torques, near the track which the more direct line
to the watershed would presuppose.
We had further the place-name 'Street' to guide us: it is a word
almost invariably found in connection with a roadway more or less
ancient; later on we found many examples of it upon this same
road.[15] Here the hamlet of Gilbert Street lay to the south of our
hypothetical alignment, and another, named North Street, just to the
north of it.
[Illustration]
We further noted upon our map that a very considerable portion of the
exact alignment drawn from the main road at the Anchor Inn to the
saddle of the watershed would coincide precisely with a lane, which,
when we came to examine it, gave every evidence of high antiquity.
Possessed of such evidence, it was our business to see whether
investigation upon the spot would confirm the conclusion to which
they pointed. There was enough discovered so to confirm it, though the
Old Road at this point has disappeared in several places under the
plough.
The course of our discovery will be best followed with the aid of this
rough map, whereon are sketched the contour-lines, the trace of the
Old Road, and the watershed.
About half a mile from the 'Anchor' at the end of the avenue of trees
which here dignifies the turnpike and just after the cross-roads,[16]
in a meadow which lay to the right of the road, my companion noticed
an embankment, perfectly straight, slightly diverging southward from
the main road as the line we were seeking should diverge, and (as we
found by standing upon it and taking its direction) pointing directly
at the saddle of the watershed. Whether it was continued through the
garden of the Chequers Inn (a very few yards) I would not trespass to
inquire: in the three fields beyond, it had entirely disappeared.[17]
After this gap, however, there is a boundary, with an old hedge
running along it and a path or cartway of a sort.[18] These carry us
exactly the same direction down a short slope, across a lane called
Cow Lane, and on to the Manor Farm at North Street. During this
stretch of a mile there was nothing more to guide us. The division
between fields and properties very often follows the line of some
common way: one could not say more.
But the significant fact which, as we believe, permitted us to bridge
the gap was this: that the embankment we had first discovered, and the
hedge and path (which proceeded in the same line after the loss of the
road over the two fields) each pointed directly towards the lane
(Brisland Lane) which we entered close to the Manor Farm,[19] which
presented, as we found, such marks of antiquity, which takes the hill
steeply, and which, on the plateau above, continues to aim straight at
the saddle of the watershed.
It is difficult to express in a written description the sentiment of
conviction which the actual view of such an alignment conveyed. When
we had followed the lane up the steep hill and stood by Brisland
farmhouse, looking back from that height we could see the lane we had
been following, the hedge, the corner of the garden of the 'Chequers,'
the embankment beyond, all in one, stretched out like parti-coloured
sections of one string, and the two gaps did but emphasise the
exactitude of the line.
Turning again in the direction which we were to follow, the evidence
of ancient usage grew clearer.
We were upon one of those abandoned grassy roads, which are found here
and there in all parts of England; it ran clear away before us for a
couple of miles.
It was very broad--twenty yards perhaps. The hedges stood upon either
side, guarding land that had been no man's land since public
protection first secured the rude communications of the country. No
one who had seen portions of the Icknield Way upon the Chilterns, or
of this same Old Road where it has decayed upon the Kentish hills,
could doubt the nature of what we saw. Long fallen into disuse, it had
yet escaped the marauding landlords during three centuries of
encroachment. They had not even narrowed it. So much of its common
character remained: it was treeless, wide, and the most of it
neglected; never metalled during all the one hundred and fifty years
which have transformed English highways. It was the most desolate, as
it was the most convincing, fragment of the Old Road we had set out to
find.
It had an abominable surface; we had to pick our way from one dry
place to another over the enormous ruts which recent carts had made.
For generations the lane had been untenanted; but there is a place
where, in the last few years, an extraordinary little town of
bungalows and wooden cottages had arisen upon either side of the
lane.
Not satisfied with the map, we asked of a man who was carrying milk
what local name was given to this venerable street. He told us that
the part in which we were walking was called Blackberry Lane, but that
it had various names at different parts: and as he could tell us
nothing more, we left him.
At the very summit this way joined a modern, well-made lane, called
Farringdon Lane, turned to the left and north, and immediately fell
into the main London road, which had been climbing from the valley
below and was here at the thirteenth milestone. The Old Road,
suffering no deviation, plunged into a wood, and reappeared just at
the summit of the pass, perhaps a quarter of a mile further. It is the
point where the Ordnance map marks a height of 683 feet, and where one
finally leaves the valley of the Itchen to enter that of the Wey.
The complexity of this corner is best understood in the sketch-map on
the following page.
At the point where the Old Road leaves the wood, it merges again into
the London turnpike, which turns its direction (as the map shows) so
as to correspond with the direction of the Old Road. This identity
between the prehistoric and the modern is maintained nearly as far as
Alton, and, if we except a short gap before that town, the coincidence
of the Old Road and some existing highway may be said to continue
right on to Puttenham, a distance of seventeen miles.
[Illustration]
The valley which now opened eastward under the dull morning light
reminded me of one of those noble dales which diversify the long slope
of the Chiltern Hills. Like them it had the round sweep of the Chalk;
beeches, the trees of the Chalk, adorned it; its direction was the
same, its dryness, its neat turf; but it lacked the distant horizons.
For two miles the road, magnificent in surface and in breadth, one of
the finest in England, followed the bottom of the valley, falling in
that distance some 300 feet; and in all this part it was most
evidently the oldest of ways across these hills. There could be
repeated of it what has been said above with regard to the road
between Bishop Sutton and Ropley, and what will appear further on in
the valley of the Wey: that any track, ancient or modern, was bound to
follow the same course. For the dry and porous soil permitted a
journey even under the earliest conditions along the lowest points,
and, so permitted, such a journey had the advantage of descending by
the easiest gradient. Had it taken to the hillside it would have
fallen at last upon Alton by way of a steep spur. Moreover, the bottom
of the valley is here constant in direction, not curving as we had
found it on the far side of the watershed, and this direction deviates
little from the straight line to Alton.
These characters do not attach to the London turnpike after the
fifteenth milestone is passed; it turns somewhat sharply to the right
(or southward) and falls by a corner into the road from the Meon
valley at the entry of Chawton village. Such a course one may be
certain was not followed by the Old Road. It could not but have
preserved the alignment which the valley had already given it, and
which corresponds, moreover, with the High Street of Alton itself. For
these seven furlongs there can be no doubt that it continued straight
along the dip of the valley, and entered Alton on the northern
side[20] of the triangular common called 'The Butts,' by which one
approaches the town from the south-west.
We were unable to prove this by direct examination; the main line of
railway has here obliterated much by an embankment, and to this has
been added all the new work of the Meon valley line, and the junction.
The ground has therefore lost all its original character, and its
oldest marks have disappeared. We made no attempt to follow the
direct path for this short mile. We descended the high-road round by
Chawton to Alton, and the first division of our task, the division in
which a greater proportion of uncertainty would exist than in any
other, was accomplished.
Comforted by such a thought, we drank mild ale at the 'Three Tuns' for
about half an hour.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] The prosperity of the Jews in the early Middle Ages was
remarkable. They have been said to have accumulated 46 per cent. of
the total personalty of England in little more than the first century
of their operations. This is an error, due to overlooking the fact
that for the Saladin Tithe the Jew was taxed one fourth and not
one-tenth of his goods. The true figure should be about 25½ per cent.
But even that is astonishing for perhaps one per cent. of the
population. It supposes an average Jewish fortune twenty-five times
larger than the average English one.
[9] This is a strong argument, because Headbourne Worthy, the point in
dispute, was precisely the most important of these villages. It is
given in Domesday (Ordie) as the holding of Mortemer, while King's
Worthy was but a hamlet, and Martyrs' Worthy is not mentioned.
[10] Mr. Haverfield in the _Victoria History of Hampshire_ (vol. i.
287) gives the Roman Road as going straight from the North Gate to the
King's Worthy church. See also his general map and his description on
p. 321. This is surely preferable to the conjecture of the 6-inch
Ordnance (Hampshire, XLI.) that it followed the line of Hyde Street
and proceeded to Headbourne Worthy.
[11] One would naturally expect Alfred's bones to have been scattered
with the rest in the Reformation; they seem to have been spared. It
was most probably Alfred's leaden coffin that was dug up unopened in
the building of the now vanished prison, and sold in 1788. It fetched
two pounds.
[12] Leaving upon our left the first of the archæological discoveries
which mark the whole of the Road:--the Roman villa unearthed or
explored by Mr. Collier in 1878.
[13] The balance of evidence is certainly against it. In favour of the
antiquity of New Alresford we have the phrase _restored_ applied to
Bishop Lucy's market, and the three churches attached to Alresford in
Domesday, and supposed to show that more than one village was attached
to the manor. Against, we have the immediate presence of the
artificial head of water established by the Bishop; the name, and the
fact that the medieval road from Alton went not to New but to Old
Alresford. Again, while there is no special mention of New Alresford
in Domesday, there is mention of Sutton, close by, and a Bishop's
palace stood there for some centuries.
[14] Their passage is an excellent example of the Reversion of the
Pilgrimage to an ancient road. The regular road in the thirteenth
century was presumably that by Chawton Wood and Bighton, mentioned by
Duthie, who finds it in a charter of Henry III.'s. (This charter, it
is only fair to add, was never discovered by his executors.)
[15] Thus West Street and Broad Street near Lenham, Dun Street at the
edge of Eastwell, the old name for Albury (Weston Street), etc.
[16] The point where the line leaves the modern road is east of Bury
Lane, just past a farm called Dean Farm. The ridge is first noticeable
in the field marked 134 in the 1/2500 inch Ordnance Map for Hampshire
[XLII. 7, Old Series, 1870, Ropley Parish].
[17] These fields are marked 191, 192, and 194 on 1/2500 inch Ordnance
Map, Hampshire, Old Series, 1870, XLII. 8.
[18] The boundary between the fields marked 201, and 202-3 in map
cited above. The track is again lost for a short distance in crossing
the field marked 205.
[19] The last few yards of the alignment follow the boundary between
plots marked 219 and 216 in map already quoted.
[20] Moreover, from this same point the medieval road to Old Alresford
mentioned above left Alton.
ALTON TO SHALFORD
_Twenty-one miles_
At Alton, with the green by which one enters the town from the west,
begins a stretch of the Old Road, which stands by itself.
It may be roughly called the division between Alton and Farnham, but
it stretches for a mile or two beyond Farnham to the pond at
Whiteways, where the main road climbs the summit of the Hog's Back,
and leaves the Pilgrim's Way a few hundred yards to the south.
This section, just over thirteen miles in length, has several
peculiarities which distinguish it from the rest of the Road.
_First_--It follows the river Wey for miles, not as it followed the
river Itchen, on a dry ledge above the stream, but right along the low
land of the waterside. This is a feature in the Old Road not to be
discovered in any other part of its course. It takes care to be within
easy reach of water for men and horses, but it avoids the low level of
a stream, and thick cover and danger of floods which such a level
usually threaten. We had not found it (save for a very few yards) in
immediate touch with the Itchen, nor should we find it later on
running by the Mole, the Darent, or the Medway. Even the Stour, whose
valley it is compelled to follow, it regards from heights well above
the river.
_Secondly_--It runs for a part of this division upon clay, a soil
which elsewhere it carefully avoids as being about the worst
conceivable for a primitive and unmetalled road. Elsewhere (after
Wrotham, for instance), it will make a detour rather than attempt any
considerable stretch of gault; but here, for several miles along this
valley of the Wey, it faces the danger.
_Thirdly_--In every other portion of its long journey it passes along
the _edge_ of habitations and tilled land; it was brought to do so by
the same economic tendency which makes our railways to-day pass by
the edges, not the centre of most towns; but here it must often have
run right through whatever cultivation existed; at Alton, at Farnham,
and in one village between, Bentley, it forms the high street of the
place. A track which carefully just avoids Guildford, Dorking,
Reigate, Westerham, Wrotham, Charing, and a dozen smaller places here
touches and occasionally passes through the earliest groups of houses,
the earliest pastures and ploughed fields.
Finally, there is a correspondence between it and the modern high-road
for the _whole_ of this considerable distance of over thirteen miles.
In this character, again, the division we were now entering is unique.
We have indeed already found it identical with a modern road. The
modern high-road also corresponds with the old way for something like
a mile at Otford over the Darent, and for two or three miles beyond;
it is a modern road for more than half a mile before you reach the
ferry at Snodland, and there is a road in construction which follows
its track for some hundreds of yards on Gravelly Hill, near Caterham.
For many miles of its course it is identical if not with high-roads
at least with metalled lanes, as we had already found between Itchen
Stoke and Bishop Sutton, and very commonly with unmetalled tracks or
paths. But in all these cases it is broken: there are stretches of it
unused. Modern advantages and modern necessities have left the Old
Road continually to one side. Here for this very considerable distance
it is identical with the great turnpike, and so remains identical up
to and beyond its point of junction with the older 'Harrow Way' at
Farnham.
Can we discover any explanation for this coincidence of a prehistoric
track with the high-road of our own time, which is almost indifferent
to soil? for the crossing of the clay? for the neighbourhood of the
river?
A little consideration will enable us to do so. The hills which
everywhere else afford so even a platform for the prehistoric road are
here of a contour which forbids their use. To-day, as a thousand years
ago, any road down this valley must have run upon this lowest line.
The contour-lines, of which a rough sketch is here appended, are
enough to prove it.
[Illustration]
There is a deep combe at Holybourne Down, two more on either side of
Froyle, a fourth beyond Bentley, a fifth--smaller--before Farnham. All
these gullies cut up into a hopeless tangle what in Surrey and Kent
will become one unbroken bank of chalk. Any path attempting these
hillsides would either have doubled its length in avoiding the
hollows, or would--had it remained direct--have been a succession of
steep ascents and falls; all the dry slopes which bound the vale to
the north are a succession of steep and isolated projections, thrust
out from the distant main chain of the chalk; many of them are
crowned with separated summits. The road is therefore compelled to
follow the valley floor with all the consequences I have noted.
As far as Froyle, two and a half miles from Alton, it never leaves the
river by more than a quarter of a mile, but the valley is here dry,
the soil gravelly and sandy, the height considerable (above three
hundred feet), and there is no reason why it should go further from
the stream than it did in the valley of the Itchen. After Froyle you
get the clay, and then right on through Bentley the road does attempt
to get away northward from the stream, avoiding the marshy levels and
keeping to the 300-feet contour-line. It does not approach the river
again till firmer ground is found near the Bull Inn. Thence to within
two miles of Farnham it has to negotiate a good deal of clay, but it
picks out such patches of gravel as it can find,[21] and it must be
remembered that the valley of the Wey, in this early part, drains more
rapidly, and has a less supply of water than that of the Itchen. Near
Farnham, somewhat beyond Runwick House, it finds the sand again, and
can follow along the low level without difficulty.
The Old Road keeps throughout this passage to the sunny northern bank
of the river, so that, while it is compelled to keep to the bottom of
the valley, it attempts at least to get the driest part of it.
Farnham, at the mouth of this valley, the point of junction between
the Old Road and its still older predecessor from Salisbury Plain, was
always a place of capital importance, especially in war. The Roman
entrenchment, two miles up the valley, the Roman dwellings to the
south, tell us only a little of its antiquity; and though our
knowledge of the castle extends no further than the eleventh century,
the fact that it was the meeting-place of the roads that came from
Salisbury Plain, from the Channel, from London, and from the Straits
of Dover, necessarily made it a key to southern England.
We have seen how the western roads converge there, first the Harrow
Way, then our own road from Southampton Water and Winchester (a road
which probably received the traffic of all the south beyond
Dorsetshire), then the road from Portsmouth and the Meons, which came
in at Chawton.
The accident of the Surrey hills made all men who wished to get to the
south-western ports from the Thames valley and the east pass through
Farnham. Travellers going west and north from the Weald were equally
compelled, if they would avoid the ridge, to pass through Farnham. The
former had to come down north of the Hog's Back, the latter from the
south of it, and it was ever at Farnham that they met.
At Farnham, therefore, the first political division of our road may be
said to end; and after Farnham the western tracks, now all in one,
proceed to the Straits of Dover, or rather to Canterbury, which is
the rallying-point of the several Kentish ports.
Just outside the town the road begins to rise: it is an indication
that the road is about to take the flank of the hills, a position
which it holds uninterruptedly (save for four short gaps occasioned by
four river valleys) from this point until the Camp above Canterbury.
Hitherto, for reasons which I have explained, the road has had no
opportunity of this kind. The hills of the Itchen valley were not
sufficiently conspicuous, those of the upper Wey too tortuous, for the
trail to take advantage of a dry, even, and well-drained slope. The
height to which it rises between Ropley and Alton is not a height
chosen for its own purpose, but a height which had to be overcome of
necessity to cross the watershed. Henceforward, until we were within a
few miles of Canterbury, there stretched before us, on and on, day
after day, the long line of the northern heights, whose escarpment
presented everything the Old Road needed for its foundation, and of
which I have written at such length in the earlier portion of this
book.
The rise continued gently until the inn at Rumbold was passed, and the
fork at Whiteways was reached. Here the old flanking road went up
along the ridge of the Hog's Back in the shape of the modern turnpike,
while our track was left to continue its eastward way, two hundred
feet below, upon the side of the hill.
Its soil was here a thin strip of the green-sand which continued to
support us, until next day we crossed the Tillingbourne, just above
Shere. It runs, therefore, firmly and evenly upon a dry soil, and the
villages and the churches mark its ancient progress.
The afternoon was misty, even the telegraph poles, which at first
marked the ridge of the Hog's Back above us, disappeared in the first
half mile. We went unhappily and in the fog regretting the baker's
cart which had taken us along many miles of road so swiftly and so
well: a cart of which I have not spoken any more than I have of the
good taverns we sat in, or of the curious people we met (as for
instance, the warrior at Farnham), because they are not germane to
such an historical essay as is this.
We went, I say, regretting the baker's cart, and came to the wonderful
church of Seale standing on its little mound. We noted that the track
passed to southward of it, not right against its southern porch, but
as near as it could get, given the steep accident of the soil just
beyond. We noted this (but dully, for we were very tired), and we
plodded on to Shoelands.
We were in the thick of the memories which are the last to hang round
the Old Road, I mean the memories of those pilgrims, who, after so
many thousand years of its existence, had luckily preserved the use
and trace of the way.
Seale was built at the expense of Waverley, right in the enthusiasm
that followed the first pilgrimages, just after 1200. The names also
of the hamlets have been held to record the pilgrimage. How Seale (a
name found elsewhere just off the Old Road) may do so I cannot tell.
'Shoelands' has been connected with 'Shooling'--almsgiving. Compton
church itself was famous. Even little Puttenham had its pilgrim's
market, and Shalford its great fair, called Becket's fair. We left
Seale then, and at last, two miles on and very weary, we approached
Puttenham, where, for the first time since Alton, something of
exploration awaited us.
There was, indeed, just before reaching Puttenham, a small difficulty,
but it is not of this that I am writing. The Old Road, which had for
miles coincided with the lane, turned a sharp corner, and this, as I
have already remarked, is so much against its nature in every known
part of it, that I could only ascribe it to a cultivated field[22]
which has turned the road. Once tillage had begun, the road would be
led round this field, and the old track, crossing it diagonally, would
disappear under the plough; the original way must have run much as is
suggested at the point marked X upon the map, and the suggestion has
the greater force from the presence of a footpath following this line.
But the point is of little importance and is easily settled. In
Puttenham itself lay the more interesting problem, to elucidate which
this sketch was drawn.
[Illustration]
It arises, just before the church is reached, and affords a very
interesting example of how the Old Road has been lost and may be
recovered.
The present road goes round to the north of the church, outside a high
wall, which there forbids any passage. It turns sharp round a corner,
and then proceeds due south to the village of Compton. When it has
passed through this village, it turns north again, and so reaches St.
Catherine's chapel, near which point it is agreed that the passage of
the Wey was made.
Not only does the modern road take this circuitous course, but the
pilgrims of the later Middle Ages probably followed a direction not
very different. Compton church perhaps attracted them.
It is not the only place in which we shall find their leisurely piety
misleading our research.
The Pilgrimage and the modern road both tend to make us miss the
original track. That track, as a group of independent facts
sufficiently show, passed south of Puttenham church, continuing the
direction which it had hitherto followed from Seale; it went past the
inn miscalled 'The Jolly Farmer,' and so on in a straight line over
Puttenham Heath, where it is still marked by a rough cart-track kind
of way.
One must here repeat an argument which continually recurs in these
pages. Short of a physical obstacle, there is no reason but private
property, and property long established and well defined, to give rise
to such an unnatural halt in a path as is here made by a sudden turn
of a right angle.
We know that the enclosure of this church within the wall was
comparatively recent.
We know that in every case where the Old Road passes directly past a
village church, it passes to the south. From the south, as we have
already seen, the entry of the traveller was made; for, to repeat the
matter, a custom presumably much older than our religion, gave
approach to sacred places from the side of the sun.
The face of the Inn, the road before it (ending now abruptly and
without meaning at the wall), and the road through Puttenham village
are all in the same alignment.
It is an alignment that makes for the passage of the Wey (for
Shalford, that is), much in the direction the Old Road has held since
Seale.
The alignment is continued on through Puttenham Heath by an existing
track, and in all this continuous chain there is no break, save the
comparatively modern wall round the church.
Finally, Puttenham Heath had furnished antiquities of every sort,
especially of the Neolithic period and of the Bronze: all within a
small area, and all in the immediate neighbourhood of this Way.
So many indications were sufficient to make us follow the right-of-way
across Puttenham Heath, and our conjecture was confirmed by our
finding at the further edge of the heath, a conspicuous embankment
marked by an exact line of three very aged trees, which everywhere
indicate the track.
Though it was hardly a road, rough and marked only by ruts in the
winter soil and by its rank of secular trees, it was most evidently
the Old Road. We were glad to have found it.
When we had passed through the hollow to the north of a few cottages,
direct evidence of the road disappeared at the boundary of Monk's
Hatch Park, but it was not lost for long. 350 yards further on, laid
on the same line, a slightly sunken way reappeared; it ran a few yards
below the recently made Ash Path, and led directly by the lane along
the south of Brixbury Wood, across the Compton Road, and so by a lane
called 'Sandy Lane,' beyond, over the crest of the hill, till, as the
descent began, it became metalled, grew wider, and merged at last into
the regular highway which makes straight for St. Catherine's Hill and
the ferry and ford below it.
[Illustration: ROUGH, AND MARKED ONLY BY RUTS IN THE WINTER SOIL, AND
BY ITS RANK OF SECULAR TREES]
The Old Road having thus coincided once more with a regular road, we
went at a greater pace, observing little of our surroundings
(since nothing needed to be discovered), and hoped to make before it
was quite dark the passage of the river.
[Illustration: THAT CURIOUS PLATFORM WHICH SUPPORTS IN SUCH AN IMMENSE
ANTIQUITY OF CONSECRATION THE RUINS OF ST. CATHERINE'S CHAPEL]
Arrived, however, at that curious platform which supports in such an
immense antiquity of consecration the ruins of St. Catherine's chapel,
we saw that the exact spot at which the river was crossed was not
easily to be determined. The doubt does not concern any considerable
space. It hesitates between two points on the river, and leaves
unmapped about 800 yards of the road; but that gap is, it must be
confessed, unsolved so far as our investigation could be carried.
It is certain that the prehistoric road begins again by the
north-western corner of the Chantries Wood. Tradition and the unbroken
trail hence to St. Martha's hill-top confirm it. The arguments I have
used in the last few pages show equally that the road led, on this
side of the way, up to the point below St. Catherine's chapel where we
were now standing.
It is, moreover, extremely probable that the platform of St.
Catherine's was the look-out from which the first users of this track
surveyed their opportunities for passing the river, and near to it
undoubtedly their successors must have beaten down the road.
The precipitous face towards the stream, the isolation of the summit
and its position, commanding a view up and down the valley, render it
just such a place as would, by its value for their journeys and their
wars, have made it sacred to a tribe: its sanctity during the Middle
Ages gives the guess a further credential. But in framing an
hypothesis as to how the valley was taken from the descent of St.
Catherine's to the rise at the Chantries beyond the stream, one is met
by two sets of facts irreconcilable with one another, and supporting
arguments each, unfortunately, of equal weight. These facts are few,
simple, and urgent; they are as follows:--
Primitive man we must imagine chose, if he could, a ford, and kept to
such a passage rather than to any form of ferry. The ford exists. It
has given its name 'The Shallow Ford' to the village which grew up
near it. The church stands close by. So far it would seem that the
road certainly passed over the crest of St. Catherine's, came down to
the south of that hill, crossed at Shalford, and reached the Chantries
by that passage.
On the other hand a sunken way of great antiquity leads directly from
St. Catherine's Hill down to the river. It follows the only
practicable descent of the bank. It is in line with the previous trend
of the Old Road; at its foot is a ferry which has had a continuous
history at least as old as the pilgrimage, and beyond this ferry, the
path over the field, and the avenue beyond the main road, lead
immediately and without any diversion to that point at the foot of the
Chantries Hill where, as I have said, the Old Road is again evident.
From Shalford no such track is apparent, nor could it be possible for
a passage by Shalford to be made, save at the expense of a detour much
sharper than the Old Road executes in any other part of its course.
In the face of these alternatives no certain decision could be arrived
at. The medieval route was here no guide, for it had already left the
road to visit Compton, and was free to use Shalford ford, the ferry,
or even Guildford Bridge--all three of which the pilgrims doubtless
passed indifferently, for all three were far older than the
pilgrimage.
It may be that the ferry stands for an old ford, now deepened. It may
be that the passage at Shalford was used first, and soon replaced by
that of the ferry. We knew of no discoveries in that immediate
neighbourhood which might have helped us to decide; we were compelled,
though disappointed, to leave the point open.
It was now quite dark. My companion and I clambered down the hill,
stole a boat which lay moored to the bank, and with a walking-stick
for an oar painfully traversed the river Wey. When we had landed, we
heard, from the further bank, a woman, the owner of the boat,
protesting with great violence.
We pleaded our grave necessity; put money in the boat, and then,
turning, we followed the marshy path across the field to the highway,
and when we reached it, abandoned the Old Road in order to find an
inn.
[Illustration]
We slept that night at Guildford, whence the next morning, before
daylight, we returned up the highway to the spot where we had left the
Old Road, and proceeded through the gate and up the avenue to follow
and discover that section of the road between the Wey and the Mole
which is by far the richest in evidences of prehistoric habitation--a
stretch of the Old Road which, partly from its proximity to London,
partly from its singular beauty, partly from its accidental
association with letters, but mainly from the presence of rich and
leisured men, has been hitherto more fully studied than any other,
and which yet provides in its sixteen miles more matter for debate
than any other similar division between Winchester and Canterbury.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] Though the valley is full of clay the road avoids it with
remarkable success. Of the eight miles between Alton and Farnham the
first three have chosen a narrow strip of good gravel, the next one
and a half miles are on green-sand. At the entry to Bentley village
the clay is unavoidable, but after a mile of it the road takes
advantage of a patch of gravel as far as the Bull Inn. It has then to
cross a quarter-mile belt of gault, but beyond this it uses a long,
irregular, and narrow patch of gravel, and at the end of this, just
east of the county boundary, it finds the narrow belt of sand which it
keeps to all the way to Farnham. The whole is an example of how a
primitive track will avoid bad soil.
[22] This field is marked 37 in the 1/2500-inch Ordnance Map for
Surrey, l. xxxi.
SHALFORD TO DORKING PITS
_Eleven miles_
The Old Road leaves the Guildford and Shalford highway on the left, or
east, in a line with the path which has reached it from the ferry. We
passed through a gate and entered an avenue of trees, at the end of
which the newer road which has been built along it turns off to the
left, while the Old Road itself, in the shape of a vague lane, begins
to climb the hill. The light was just breaking, and we could follow it
well.
At this point, and for some distance further, it is known to
historians and antiquaries, and preserves, moreover, many indications
of that use whereby the medieval pilgrimage revived and confirmed its
course. It skirts by the side of, and finally passes through, woods
which still bear the name of the 'Chantries,' and climbs to that
isolated summit where stands the chapel of St. Thomas: 'the Martyr's'
chapel, which, in the decay of religion and corruption of tradition,
came to be called 'St. Martha's.'
This spot, for all its proximity to London and to the villas of the
rich, preserves a singular air of loneliness. It has a dignity and an
appeal which I had thought impossible in land of which every newspaper
is full; and that morning, before men were stirring, with the mist all
about us and the little noises of animals in the woods, we recovered
its past. The hill responded to the ancient camps, just southward and
above us. It responded to its twin height of St. Catherine's: the
whole landscape had forgotten modern time, and we caught its spirit
the more easily that it relieved us of our fears lest in this belt
near London the Old Road should lose its power over us.
It has been conjectured, upon such slight evidence as archæology
possesses, that the summit was a place of sacrifice. Certainly great
rings of earth stood here before the beginning of history; certainly
it was the sacred crown for the refugees of Farley Heath, of
Holmbury, of Anstie Bury, and of whatever other stations of war may
have crowned these defiant hills.
If it saw rites which the Catholic Church at last subdued, we know
nothing of them; we possess only that thread of tradition which has so
rarely been broken in western Europe: the avenue, whereby, until the
sixteenth century, all our race could look back into the very origins
of their blood.
The hill was an isolated peak peculiar and observable. Such separate
heights have called up worship always wherever they were found: the
Middle Ages gave this place what they gave to the great outstanding
rocks of the sea, the 'St. Michaels': to the dominating or brooding
capitols of cities, Montmartre or Our Lady of Lyons; perhaps Arthur's
Seat had a shrine. The Middle Ages gave it what they had inherited,
for they revered the past only, they sought in the past their ideals,
and hated whatever might destroy the common memory of the soil and the
common observances of men--as modern men hate pain or poverty.
Remembering all this we rested at the chapel on the hill-top, and
considered it wearily. We regretted its restoration to new worship,
and recollected (falsely, as it turned out) famous graves within it.
The air was too hazy to distinguish the further view to the south. The
Weald westward was quite hidden, and even the height of Hirst Wood
above and beyond us eastward was hardly to be seen.
When we had spent half an hour at this place we prepared to go down
the further side, but first we looked to see whether the Old Road
passed clearly to one side or the other of the summit, for we thought
that matter would be of importance to us as a guide for its direction
in similar places later on. But we could decide nothing. Certainly the
track makes northward of the church until it is near the top of the
hill, but, as it gets near, it points right at it (as we might
expect), is lost, and is only recovered some twenty or fifty yards
beyond the platform of the summit, coming apparently neither from the
south nor from the north of the church; the direction is a little
obscured, moreover, by a modern plantation which confuses the
beginning of the descent. Soon it grew clear enough, and we followed
it at a race, down the hill perhaps half a mile. It was plainer and
plainer as we went onward, till it struck the road which leads from
Guildford to Albury.
Here there rises a difficulty unique in the whole course of the way.
It is a difficulty we cannot pretend to have solved. The trail for
once goes to the damp and northward side of a hill: the hill on which
stands Weston Wood. It is an exception to an otherwise universal rule,
and an exception for which no modern conditions can account.
There is apparently no reason why it should not have followed its
otherwise invariable rule of taking the southerly slope, and it could
have chosen the dry clean air of the heath and kept all the way near
the fresh water of the Tillingbourne. On the other hand, there is no
doubt whatever of its direction. Tradition, the existence of modern
tracks, and more important still, the direction of the road after it
leaves St. 'Martha's' chapel, all point to the same conclusion. The
Pilgrim's Way crosses diagonally the field beyond the main road, goes
just behind the little cottage at its corner,[23] and then makes for
Albury Park by way of a wretched and difficult sunken lane to the
north of Weston Wood. We entered this neglected and marshy way. It was
a place of close, dark, and various trees, full of a damp air, and
gloomy with standing water in the ruts: the whole an accident
differing in tone from all that we knew of the road, before and after.
It was not long in passing. We left the undergrowth for the open of a
field, and found the trace of the road pointing to the wall of Albury
Park. It entered just north of the new church, and then followed a
clearly marked ridge upon which, here and there, stood the yews.
[Illustration: A PLACE OF CLOSE DARK AND VARIOUS TREES, FULL OF A DAMP
AIR, AND GLOOMY WITH STANDING WATER-RUTS]
After the Old Road enters Albury Park there is a doubtful section of
about a mile and a half. The 25-inch Ordnance for Surrey (revised
eight years ago) carries the track southward at a sharp angle, round
the old church of SS. Peter and Paul and then along the south of Shere
till it stops suddenly at a farm called 'Gravel Pits Farm.' It
seemed to us as we overlooked the valley from the north, that the Old
Road followed a course now included in the garden of Albury, and
corresponding, perhaps, to the Yew Walk which Cobbett has rendered
famous, and so reached the ford which crosses the Tillingbourne at the
limits of the park--a ford still called 'Chantry' ford, and evidently
the primitive crossing-place of the stream.
Thence it probably proceeded, as we did, along that splendid avenue of
limes which is the mark of the village of Shere. But from the end of
this there are some three hundred yards of which one cannot be very
certain. It comes so very near to the church that one may presume,
without too much conjecture, that it passed beside the southern porch.
If it did so, it should have crossed the stream again near where the
smithy stands to-day, and this double crossing of the stream may be
accounted for by the presence of a shrine and of habitation in the
oldest times. But if the bridge be taken as an indication (which
bridges often are) of the original place where the stream was
re-crossed, then the track would have left the church on the right,
and would have curved round to become the present high-road to
Gomshall. Nothing certain can be made of its passage here, except that
the track marked upon the Ordnance map will not fit in with the
character of the road. The Ordnance map loses it at Gomshall, finds it
again much further on, having turned nearly a right angle and going
(for no possible reason) right up to and over the crest of the hills:
across Ranmore Common and so to Burford Bridge. The first part of this
cannot but be a confusion with the Old Drove Road to London. As for
the crossing of the Mole at Burford Bridge we shall see in a moment
that the medieval pilgrimage passed the river at this point, but the
prehistoric road at a point a mile and more up stream.
Taking into consideration the general alignment of the Old Road, its
'habits,' the pits that mark it, and its crossing-place in the Mole
valley, we did not doubt that we should find it again on the hillside
beyond Gomshall.
[Illustration: THAT SPLENDID AVENUE OF LIMES]
Its track must have crossed the high-road at a point nearly opposite
Netley House, and by a slow climb have made for the side of the
Downs and for the chalk, which henceforward it never leaves, save
under the necessity of crossing a river valley, until it reaches
Chilham, sixty miles away.
Beyond the grounds of Netley House the Old Road is entirely lost. A
great ploughed field has destroyed every trace of it, but the
direction is quite easy to follow when one notes the alignment which
it pursues upon its reappearance above the line of cultivation. It
must have run, at first, due north-west, and turned more and more
westward as it neared Colekitchen Lane: it must have crossed the mouth
of Colekitchen Combe, which here runs into the hills, and have reached
in this fashion the 400-feet contour-line at the corner of Hacklehurst
Down, where we come on it just at the far edge of the Combe, on the
shoulder about three hundred yards east of the rough lane which leads
up from under the railway arch to the Downs.[24]
From this point we could follow it mile after mile without any
difficulty. Its platform is nearly always distinct; the yews follow it
in a continual procession, though it is cut here and there by later
roads. The old quarries and chalk pits which mark it henceforward
continually along the way to Canterbury begin to appear, and it does
not fail one all along the hill and the bottom of Denbies Park until,
at the end of that enclosure, it is lost in the pit of the Dorking
Lime Works. It does not reappear. Beyond there is a considerable
gap--nearly a mile in length--before it can reach the river Mole,
which it must cross in order to pursue its journey. With this gap I
shall deal in a moment, but it was the affair of our next day's
journey, for short as had been the distance from Shalford, the many
checks and the seeking here and there which they had entailed had
exhausted the whole of the short daylight. The evening had come when
we stood on the Down looking over to Box Hill beyond.
From thence across the valley, Box Hill attracted and held the sight
as one looked eastward: the strongest and most simple of our southern
hills. It stood out like a cape along our coasting journey, our
navigation of the line of the Downs. The trend of the range is here
such that the clean steep of this promontory hides the slopes to the
east. It occupies the landscape alone.
It has been debated and cannot be resolved, why these great lines of
chalk north and south of the Weald achieve an impression of majesty.
They are not very high. Their outline is monotonous and their surface
bare. Something of that economy and reserve by whose power the classic
in verse or architecture grows upon the mind is present in the Downs.
These which we had travelled that day were not my own hills--Duncton
and Bury, Westburton, Amberley and all--but they were similar because
they stood up above the sand and the pines, and because they were of
that white barren soil, clothed in close turf, wherein nothing but the
beech, the yew, and our own affection can take root and grow.
At the end of a day's work, a short winter day's, it was possible to
separate this noble mark of what was once a true county of Surrey; to
separate it even in the mind, from the taint of our time and the
decay and vileness which hang like a smell of evil over whatever has
suffered the influence of our great towns. The advancing darkness
which we face restored the conditions of an older time; the staring
houses merged with the natural trees; a great empty sky and a river
mist gave the illusion of a place unoccupied.
It was possible to see the passage of the Mole as those rare men saw
it who first worked their way eastward to the Straits, and had not the
suggestion seemed too fantastic for a sober journey of research, one
might have taken the appeal of the hills for a kind of guide;
imagining that with such a goal the trail would plunge straight across
the valley floor to reach it.
By more trustworthy methods, the track of the Old Road was, as I have
said, less ascertainable. Presumably it followed, down the shoulder of
the hill, a spur leading to the river, but the actual mark of the road
was lost, its alignment soon reached ploughed land; nothing of the
place of crossing could be determined till the stream itself was
examined, nor indeed could we make sure of the true point until we
found ourselves unexpectedly aided by the direction of the road when
we recovered it upon the further bank. This we left for the dawn of
the next day; and so went down into Dorking to sleep.
I have said that from Denbies, or rather from the pits of Dorking Lime
Works, the path is apparently lost. It reappears, clearly enough
marked, along the lower slope of Box Hill, following the 300-feet
contour-line; but between the two points is a gap extending nearly a
mile on one side of the river and almost half a mile upon the other.
I have seen it conjectured that the Old Road approached the Mole near
Burford, and that it turned sharply up over Ranmore Common on its way.
That it crossed Ranmore Common is impossible. Undoubtedly a
prehistoric track ran over that heath, but it was a branch track to
the Thames--one of the many 'feeders' which confuse the record of the
Old Road. But that it crossed at Burford Bridge is arguable.
The name Burford suggests the crossing of the river. The pilgrims
undoubtedly passed here, going down Westhumble Lane, and using the
bridge--for everybody uses a bridge once it has been built. Thence
they presumably followed along the western flank of Box Hill, and so
round its base to that point where, as I have said, the embankment and
the old trees reappear.
[Illustration]
Nevertheless, those who imagine that the original road, the
prehistoric track, followed this course, were, we thought, in error.
We had little doubt that, after the lime pit outside Denbies Park, the
road followed down the moderate shoulder or spur which here points
almost directly eastward towards the valley, crossed the railway just
north of the road bridge over the line, approached the Mole at a point
due east of this, and immediately ascended the hill before it to
that spot where it distinctly reappears: a spot near the 300-feet
contour-line somewhat to the west of the lane leading from the Reigate
Road to the crest of the hills.[25]
[Illustration: IT STOOD OUT LIKE A CAPE ALONG OUR COASTING JOURNEY,
OUR NAVIGATION OF THE LINE OF THE DOWNS]
I will give my reasons for this conclusion.
A diversion round by Burford Bridge would have taken the early
travellers far out of their way. Roughly speaking, they would have had
to go along two sides of an equilateral triangle instead of its base:
three miles for one and a half. Now, had they any reason to do this?
None that I can see. Wherever, in crossing a valley, the Old Road
diverges from its general alignment, it diverges either to avoid bad
soil or to find a ford. The name Burford would suggest to those who
have not carefully examined the river that this diversion might have
been made necessary in order to find a shoal at that point; but the
Mole is very unlike the other streams south of the Thames. It
disappears into 'swallows': it 'snouzles,' and there is a theory that
the river got its name from this habit of burrowing underground. At
almost any one of these numerous 'swallows' the river can quite easily
be crossed, and a considerable diminution of its stream, though
perhaps not a true 'swallow,' is to be found at the point I indicate.
Again, that all-important consideration in a new country--I mean the
dryness of the soil over which a road passes--was very much helped by
taking the more direct of the two lines. Ground with some slope to it,
and always fairly dry, comes here on either side, close to the river.
But down by Burford, on the western side, there is quite a little
plain, which must have been marshy, and for all I know, may be so
still. Moreover, we shall find further on at Otford, and at Snodland,
that the Old Road in crossing a valley always chooses a place where
some spur of high land leads down to the river and corresponds to a
dry rise immediately upon the other bank. Coupled with the fact that a
direction such as I suggest makes a natural link between the two
known parts of the road, being very nearly in one alignment with them,
and remembering that Burford Bridge was built in connection with a
very much later Roman way northward up the valley (it is evidently the
Bridge of the Stane Street), that its direction and the place at which
it crosses are obviously dependent on a north and south road, not on
an east and west one, we decided to approach the eastern bank, and to
see whether any existing trace of a road would support what seemed to
us the most tenable hypothesis.
It cannot be pretended that any very distinct evidence clinched what
remains, after all, our mere theory; but there was enough to convince
us, at least, and I believe to convince most people, who will do as we
did, and stand upon the Old Road at the base of Box Hill looking
towards Denbies on the other side of the valley. He will see,
following a very obvious course, a certain number of yews of great
age, remaining isolated in the new-ploughed land. These, leading
across the river, are continued at a very slight angle by a definite
alignment of three trees, equally isolated though far less old,
standing equally in comparatively modern cultivated land, and leading
directly to the place where the track is lost at its exit from Denbies
Park; and the whole line follows two spurs of land which approach the
river from either side.
A conclusion thus reached cannot pretend to such a value as I would
demand for the rest of our reconstructions: such as, for instance, can
legitimately be demanded for the way in which we filled the gap at
Puttenham. But it is far more convincing on the spot, and with the
evidence before one (such as it is), than any verbal description can
make it, and I would repeat that any one making the experiment with
his own eyes will be inclined to agree with us.
When we had arrived at this decision in the first hour of daylight we
turned eastward, and pursued our way by the raised and yew-lined track
which was now quite unmistakable, and which we could follow for a
considerable time without hesitation. It ran straight along the
300-feet contour-line, and took the southern edge of a wood called
Brockham Warren.
Here for a short way we went through a stately but abandoned avenue,
with the climbing woods up steep upon our left, and on our right a
little belt of cover, through which the fall of the slope below us and
the more distinct Weald and sandy hills could be seen in happy
glimpses. When we came out upon the further side and found the open
Down again, we had doubled (as it were) the Cape of Boxhill, and found
ourselves in a new division of the road.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] The field is unnumbered in the 25-inch Ordnance, but the diagonal
can be given as going to the NW. corner of the two-acre plot and
cottage, marked 121 in the 1/2500 map for Surrey (XXXII. 1), and
forming a detached part of the parish of Shere.
[24] The spot where the Old Road is recovered again beyond the plough
may be identified on the 1/2500 map for Surrey (XXXII. 4.) It is the
north-west corner of the field marked 147, just at the Chalk Pit.
[25] The course of this portion may be traced on the 1/2500 Ordnance
(Surrey, XXV. 15) as follows:--Under the old quarry just east of the
lime pits, right across the seventy-five acre field marked 42 (which
forms the spur), over the railway line and the London Road bridge, and
crossing the Mole a few yards north of Pixham Mill. Then right across
plot marked 75 to the westernmost isolated tree in plot 74. At this
point the Old Road is traceable again.
BOXHILL TO TITSEY
_Eighteen miles_
After one turns the corner of Box Hill and enters this new division of
the road is a great lime pit, which is called Betchworth Pit, and next
to it a similar work, not quite as large, but huge enough to startle
any one that comes upon it suddenly over the edge of the Downs.
Between them they make up the chief landmark of the county.
We had already come across the first working of this kind shortly
after we had recovered the Old Road beyond Gomshall, but that and the
whole succeeding chain of pits were now disused, grown over with
evergreens and damp enormous beeches. We had found a more modern
excavation of the sort at the end of Denbies Park: it was called the
Dorking Lime Works. Here, however, in these enormous pits, we came to
something different and new. I looked up at their immensity and
considered how often I had seen them through the haze: two patches of
white shining over the Weald to where I might be lying on the crest of
my own Downs, thirty miles away.
It is the oldest, perhaps, of the industries of England. Necessary for
building, an excellent porous stratum in the laying of roads, the best
of top-dressings for the stiff lands that lie just beneath in the
valley, chalk and the lime burnt from it were among the first of our
necessities.
Its value must have come even before stone building or made roads or
the plough; it furnished the flints which were the first tools and
weapons; it ran very near by the healthy green-sand where our earliest
ancestors built their huts all along the edges of their
hunting-ground, the Weald, on ridges now mostly deserted, and dark for
the last three hundred years with pines.
The chalk, which I have spoken of coldly when I discussed the
preservation of the Old Road, should somewhere be warmly hymned and
praised by every man who belongs to south England, for it is the
meaning of that good land. The sand is deserted since men learnt to
plough; the Weald, though so much of its forest has fallen, is still
nothing but the Weald--clay, and here and there the accursed new towns
spreading like any other evil slime. But the chalk is our landscape
and our proper habitation. The chalk gave us our first refuge in war
by permitting those vast encampments on the summits. The chalk
filtered our drink for us and built up our strong bones; it was the
height from the slopes of which our villages, standing in a clear air,
could watch the sea or the plain; we carved it--when it was hard
enough; it holds our first ornaments; our clear streams run over it;
the shapes and curves it takes and the kind of close rough grass it
bears (an especial grass for sheep), are the cloak of our counties;
its lonely breadths delight us when the white clouds and the flocks
move over them together; where the waves break it into cliffs, they
are the characteristic of our shores, and through its thin coat of
whitish mould go the thirsty roots of our three trees--the beech, the
holly, and the yew. For the clay and the sand might be deserted or
flooded and the South Country would still remain, but if the Chalk
Hills were taken away we might as well be the Midlands.
These pits which uncover the chalk bare for us show us our principal
treasure and the core of our lives, and show it us in grand façades,
steep down, taking the place of crags and bringing into our rounded
land something of the stern and the abrupt. Every one brought up among
the chalk pits remembers them more vividly than any other thing about
his home, and when he returns from some exile he catches the feeling
of his boyhood as he sees them far off upon the hills.
Therefore I would make it a test for every man who boasted of the
South Country, Surrey men (if there are any left), and Hampshire men,
and men of Kent (for they must be counted in): I would make it a test
to distinguish whether they were just rich nobodies playing the native
or true men to see if they could remember the pits. For my part I
could draw you every one in my country-side even now. Duncton, where
the little hut is, surrounded by deep woods, Amberley, Houghton,
which I have climbed with a Spaniard, and where twice the hounds have
gone over and have been killed, Mr. Potter's pit, down which we hunted
a critic once, the pit below Whiteways, Bury Pit, and Burpham, and all
the older smaller diggings, going back to the beginning, and abandoned
now to ivy and to trees.
I know them and I love them all. The chalk gives a particular savour
to the air, and I have found it good to see it caked upon my boots
after autumn rains, or feel it gritty on my hands as I spread them
out, coming in to winter fires.
All this delays me on the Old Road, but the pits can be given a
meaning, even in research such as that upon which we were engaged.
The chalk hills, from Betchworth here right on to the Medway, have
many such bites taken out of them by man, and there is this
peculiarity about them, that very many of them cut into and destroy
the Old Road.
I think it not fantastic to find for such a repeated phenomenon an
explanation which also affords a clue to difficult parts of the way.
The Old Road being originally the only track along these hills was
necessarily the base of every pit that should be dug. Along it alone
could the chalk be carried, or the lime when it was baked, and it was
necessary for the Britons, the Romans, and their successors to make
the floor of the lime pit upon a level with this track. Later when the
valley roads were developed and the Old Road was no longer
continuously used, it was profitable to sink the cutting further,
below the level of the Old Road, and, indeed, as far as the point
where the chalk comes to mix with the sand or clay of the lower level.
As the Old Road grew more and more neglected the duty of protecting it
was forgotten, and the exploitation of the pits at last destroyed it
at these points.
Nevertheless, its line was quite easy to recover, across these
Betchworth pits, though they are the largest cuttings in the county;
later on we found no difficulty across the smaller ones near Otford
and at Merstham. It is even true that the pits afforded a guide in one
or two cases where we were in doubt what path to follow, and that our
hypothesis according to which the pits naturally arose upon the track
of the Old Road confirmed itself by discovering the way to us in more
than one ambiguity.
Portions of the road remain even along the great Betchworth pits.
These portions reappear at the same level, wherever the pits have left
a crag of the old hillside standing, and when one gets to the point
just above Betchworth station and to the cottages of the workmen, the
path reappears quite plainly. It follows the hillside at a level of
about 400 feet, falls slightly below this contour-line to round the
projecting spur of Brockham Hill, comes down to the high-road (the
main road to London through Tadworth), follows it a couple of hundred
yards, and leaves it to climb the hill at a point just south of the
place where the 1-inch Ordnance map marks the height of 353 feet.[26]
Here there is a combe known as 'Pebble Combe.' The Old Road does not
go round the combe but straight across its mouth, and begins to assume
a character so new as to perplex us for a considerable time in our
search. We did not understand the nature of the change until we had
very carefully traced the path for more than another mile.
I will explain the difficulty.
The escarpment of the hills is here extremely steep. It falls at an
angle which could not conveniently support a road, or at least could
not support it without such engineering work as primitive men would
have been incapable of performing, and this steep bit lasts without
interruption from just east of Pebble Combe right away to the height
above Reigate which is known as Quarry Hill.
Now, if the road could not be supported upon the bank of the
escarpment, and yet desired--as it always must--to escape the damp
land of the lower levels, it was bound to seek the crest. Nowhere
hitherto in all this march from Winchester had we found it attempting
the summits of the hills, but there were here unmistakable evidences
that it was going to approach those summits and to keep to them as
long as the steepness of the escarpment lasted.
Our inexperience made us hesitate a long while; but at last we saw,
in a line of old yews above us, an indication that the hill was to be
climbed, and on going up close to those yews we found that they ran
along a platform which was the trodden and levelled mark of the Old
Road, running here in a form precisely similar to that which we had
found round Box Hill.
[Illustration]
Once we had thus recovered it, it did not fail us. Within half a mile
it climbed sideways along the hillside from that point, 353 feet above
the sea, which I have mentioned, to the neighbourhood of the 600-feet
contour-line which here marks the edge of the range; and this line it
follows with a slight rise corresponding to the rise of the crest all
the way to what are known as the Buckland Hills, and the high knot
which just tops the 700 feet near Margery Wood.[27]
To the north and to the south of this, at Walton Heath on the plateau
above, and at Colley Farm in the valley below, there had been
discoveries of Roman and of pre-Roman things; but though they pointed
to its neighbourhood, these relics would not of themselves have given
us the exact line of the road; that was furnished by the broad and
unmistakable track which it had itself impressed upon the chalk from
the usage of so many hundred years.
It was slow work here. Much of it ran through dense brushwood, where
one had to stoop and push aside the branches, and all of it was damp,
shaded from the sun by the mass of old yews, and less well drained on
this flat edge and summit than it is on the hillside where it usually
hangs. But though it is a difficult two miles, the path is
discoverable all the way.
With Margery Wood it reaches the 700-feet line, runs by what I fear
was a private path through a newly-enclosed piece of property. We
remembered to spare the garden, but we permitted ourselves a trespass
upon this outer hollow trench in the wood which marked our way.
A magnificent bit of open ground, from which we saw below us the sandy
hills, and beyond, the whole of the Weald, led us on to a point where
the Old Road once again corresponds with a modern and usable, though
unmetalled and very dirty lane. This is the lane which runs to the
south of the park of Margery Hall. It skirts to the north the property
recently acquired by the War Office, and when it has passed the War
Office boundary-stone it is carried across the high-road from Reigate
to London by a suspension bridge, which must surely be the only
example in Europe of so modern an invention serving to protect the
record of so remote a past. Nor would there be any need for such a
suspension bridge had not the London Road in the early part of the
nineteenth century been eased in its steepness by a deep cutting, to
cross which the suspension bridge was made. That bridge, once passed,
the road pointed straight to the lodge of Gatton, and pursued its way
through that park to the further lodge upon the eastern side.[28]
Here should be submitted some criticism of the rather vague way in
which the place-names of this district have been used by those who had
preceded us in the reconstruction of the Pilgrim's Way.
Reigate, which was Churchfell at the Conquest, has been imagined to
take its later title from the Old Road. Now the name, like that of
Riggate in the north country, means certainly the passage near the
road; but Reigate lay well below in the valley.
True, the pilgrims, and many generations before them, must have come
down to this point to sleep, as they came down night after night to so
many other points, stretched along the low land below the Old Road in
its upland course from the Wey to the Stour. So common a halting-place
was it in the later Middle Ages that the centre of Reigate town, the
place where the Town Hall now stands, held the chapel of St. Thomas
from perhaps the thirteenth century to the Reformation. But Reigate no
more than Maidstone, another station of the medieval pilgrimage, could
have stood on the Old Road itself. It may be another track which gives
Reigate its name. Some Roman by-way which may have run from Shoreham
(which the experts do not believe to have been a port), right through
the Weald to Reigate, and so to London.
[Illustration: AND BEYOND, THE WHOLE OF THE WEALD]
It is possible that a way from the Portus Adurni[29] to London ran
here by Reigate and climbed the hill above; one of those fingers
reaching to the ports of the south coast, of which the Stane Street,
the Watling Street, and perhaps the fragment further east by
Marden, are the remnants: moreover, in the existence of such a road I
think one can solve the puzzle of Gatton.
Gatton, which is now some three or four houses and a church and a
park, sent two members to Parliament, from the fifteenth century until
the Reform Bill. It was therefore at some time, for some reason, a
centre of importance, not necessarily for its population but as a
gathering-place or a market, or a place from which some old town had
disappeared. Indeed a local tradition of such a town survives. One may
compare the place with that other centre, High Cross, where is now the
lonely crossing of the Fosse Way and Watling Street in Leicestershire.
Now, what would have given this decayed spot its importance long ago?
Most probably the crossing of an east and west road (the Old Road)
with another going north and south, which has since disappeared.
The influence of vested interests (for Gatton Park fetched twice its
value on account of this anachronism) preserved the representation in
the hands of one man until the imperfect reform of seventy years ago
destroyed the Borough.
There is another point in connection with the Pilgrim's Way at Gatton.
For the second time since it has left Winchester it goes to the north
of a hill. At Albury it did so, as my readers have seen, for some
reason not to be explained. In every other case between here and
Canterbury the explanation is simple. It goes north to avoid a
prominent spur in the range and a re-entrant angle at the further
side. The map which I append will make this point quite clear.
[Illustration]
For precisely the same cause it goes north of the spur south of
Caterham and much further on, some miles before Canterbury, it goes
north of the spur in Godmersham Park.
We did not here break into another man's land, but were content to
watch, from the public road outside, the line of the way as it runs
through Gatton, and when we had so passed round outside the park we
came to the eastern lodge, where the avenue runs on the line of the
Old Road. Here the public lane corresponds to the Pilgrim's Way and
passes by the land where was made a find of Roman and British coins,
close to the left of the road.
After this point the road went gently down the ridge of the falling
crest. This was precisely what we later found it doing at Godmersham,
where also it climbs a crest and goes behind a spur, and having done
so follows down the shoulder of the hill to the lower levels of the
valley. The valley or depression cutting the hills after Gatton is the
Merstham Gap, by which the main Brighton Road and the London and
Brighton Railway cross the North Downs. The Old Road goes down to this
gap by a path along the side of a field, is lost in the field next to
it, but is recovered again just before the grounds of Merstham House;
it goes straight on its way through these grounds, and passes south of
Merstham House and just _south_ of Merstham church; then it is
suddenly lost in the modern confusion of the road and the two railway
cuttings which lie to the east.
We left it there and went down to Merstham inn for food, and saw there
a great number of horsemen all dressed alike, but of such an accent
and manner that we could not for the life of us determine to what
society they belonged. Only this was certain, that they were about to
hunt some animal, and that this animal was not a fox. With reluctance
we abandoned that new problem and returned to Merstham church to look
for the road from the spot where it had disappeared.
So to have lost it was an annoyance and a disturbance, for the point
was critical.
We had already learnt by our experience of the way between Dorking and
Reigate, that when the escarpment is too steep to bear a track the Old
Road will mount to the crest, and we saw before us, some two miles
ahead, that portion of the Surrey hills known as Whitehill or (on the
slopes) Quarry Hangers, where everything pointed to the road being
forced to take the crest of the hill. The escarpment is there
extremely steep, and is complicated by a number of sharp ridges with
little intervening wedges of hollow, which would make it impossible
for men and animals to go at a level halfway up the hillside. The Old
Road then, certainly, had to get to the crest of these Downs before
their steepness had developed. On the other hand the top of the crest
was a stiff and damp clay which lasted up to the steep of Quarry
Hangers.
The pilgrims of the Middle Ages probably went straight up the hill
from Merstham by an existing track, got on to this clay, and followed
Pilgrim's Lane along the crest--some shrine or house of call attracted
them. The prehistoric road would certainly not have taken the clay in
this fashion. On every analogy to be drawn from the rest of its course
it would climb the hill at a slow slant, keeping to the chalk till it
should reach the summit at some point where the clay had stopped and
the slope below had begun to be steep. The problem before us was to
discover by what line it climbed. And the beginning of the climb that
would have given us the whole alignment was utterly lost, as I have
said, in this mass of modern things, roads, railways, and cuttings,
which we found just after Merstham church.
We walked along the road which leads to Rockshaw, and along which
certain new villas have been built. We walked slowly, gazing all the
time at the fields above us, to the north and the hillside, and
searching for an indication of our path.
The first evidence afforded us was weak enough. We saw a line of hedge
running up the hill diagonally near the 400-feet contour-line, and
climbing slowly in such a direction as would ultimately point to the
crest of the Quarry Hangers. Then we noticed the lime works, called on
the map 'Greystone Lime Works,' which afforded us a further clue. We
determined to make by the first path northward on to the hillside, and
see if we could find anything to follow.
Such a path, leading near a cottage down a slight slope and the hill
beyond, appeared upon our left when we had covered about three
quarters of a mile of road from Merstham. We took it and reached the
hedge of which I have spoken. Once there, although no very striking
evidence was presented to us, there was enough to make us fairly
certain of the way.
A continuous alignment of yew, hedge, and track, appeared behind us,
coming straight, as it should do, from Merstham church and right
_across_ the old lime pit; before us it continued to climb diagonally
the face of the hill. Lost under the plough in more than one large
field, it always reappeared in sufficient lengths to be recognised,
and gained the crest at last at a point which just missed the end of
the clay, and was also just over the beginning of the Quarry Hangers
steep.[30]
Once arrived at the summit of Quarry Hangers we found the road to be
quite clear: a neat embankment upon the turf; and when, half a mile
beyond, we came to the cross-roads and the tower, we had reached a
part of the Pilgrim's Way which, though short, had already been
settled and did not need to detain us. It corresponds with the modern
lane, goes just north of the spur known as Arthur's Seat (a spur upon
the southern side of which stands a prehistoric camp), goes up over
the summit of Gravelly Hill (where it is the same as a modern road now
in the making), and at last strikes Godstone Woods just at the place
where a boundary-stone marks the corner of another little patch of
land belonging the War Office.
On the further side of this patch of land, which is a kind of isolated
cape or shoulder in the hills, runs a very long, deep combe, which may
be called Caterham Combe. Up this ran one of the Roman roads from the
south, and up this runs to-day the modern road from Eastbourne to
London. On the steep side of that precipitous ravine, which is a
regular bank of difficult undergrowth (called Upwood Scrubbs), the Old
Road was, as we had rightly expected from our previous study of the
map, very hopelessly lost.
It is a difficult bit. Had the road followed round the outer side of
the hill it would have been much easier to trace, but crossing as it
does to the north of the summit, in order to avoid the re-entrant
angle of Arthur's Seat, it has disappeared. For the damper soil upon
that side, and the absence of a slope into which it could have cut its
impression, has destroyed all evidence of the Old Road. One can follow
it in the form of a rough lane up to the second of the War Office
landmarks. After that it disappears altogether.
When one considers the condition of the terrain immediately to the
east, the loss is not to be marvelled at. The hillside of Upwood
Scrubbs falls very steeply into the valley by which the modern
high-road climbs up to Caterham. It is an incline down which not even
a primitive road would have attempted to go, and when one gets to the
valley below the whole place is so cut up with the modern road, the
old Roman road a little way to the east, and the remnants of a quarry
just beyond, that it would have been impossible in this half-mile for
the trace of the Pilgrim's Way to be properly preserved. I will,
however, make this suggestion: that it descended the hillside
diagonally going due NE. from the summit to the old gravel pit at the
bottom, that then it curved round under the steep bank which supports
Woodlands House, that is Dialbank Wood, went north of Quarry Cottage,
and so reached the face of the hill again where the lane is struck
which skirts round the southern edge of Marden Park. This, I say, will
probably be found to be the exact track; but it is quite certain that
the Way cannot have run more than a couple of hundred yards away from
this curve. It cannot have been cut straight across the valley, for
the steepness of the valley-side forbids that, and, on the other hand,
there would have been no object in going much further up the valley
than was necessary in order to save the steep descent.
At any rate, the gap is quite short and the road is easily recovered
after the combe and the high-road are passed; it is thence identical
with the lane I have spoken of above. This lane is called Flower Lane.
It follows the 600-feet contour-line and winds therefore exactly
round the outline of the hill. It passes the lodge of Marden Park, and
within a few hundred yards comes to a place where the modern road
bifurcates. The good macadamised lane goes straight on and somewhat
downwards towards the plain. Another, less carefully made, begins to
wind up the hill above one. From this point onward the Old Road takes
again to the rough ground.
[Illustration]
There lies just before one on the hillside a wood, called 'The Hanging
Wood.'
We skirted the south edge of this wood and found beyond it a field in
which the track is lost;[31] nor was the task of recovering it an easy
one, for the light was just failing, and here, as always where
cultivation has risen above the old level, the Old Road is confused
and destroyed.
We had, however, over these few yards an excellent clue. In a wood
called 'The Rye Wood' just in front of us the track of the Old Road is
not only clearly marked, but has been preserved by local traditions.
For this NW. corner of the Rye Wood we made, through the south of the
spinney called 'Hogtrough Spinney.'
Just beyond the Rye Wood, the hillside is pierced by a deep railway
cutting which is the entrance to Oxted Tunnel. This cutting comes
right across the line of the Old Road. We made for this point (which
is a few yards north of the first bridge), but when we reached it, it
was quite dark, and if we had covered in that day but eighteen miles
or so, it must be remembered how much of our time had been spent in
the perpetual checks of this division.[32]
We reluctantly determined, then, to abandon the hillside for that
evening, and to go down to the plain and sleep. The nearest place of
hospitality was Oxted. We made for that village in the darkness,
stumbling along the railway-line, and in the inn we met a third
companion who had come to join us, and who would accompany us now as
far as Canterbury.
When we had eaten and drunk wine, and had had some quarrelling with a
chance traveller who suffered terribly from nerves, we left our
entertainment. We slept, and the next morning, before it was light, we
all three set out together, taking the northern road towards the hill.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] It is possible that it goes _over_ the spur of Brockham Hill. The
track is not at all clear for these few yards.
[27] Here our track is quite different from that given in the 1/2500
Ordnance map for Surrey (XXVI. 10), where it is carried along the base
of the hill past Buckland Lime Pits. The Ordnance map practically
confesses its error, for in the succeeding sheet (XXVI. 11) the
Pilgrim's Way reappears suddenly in its right place, at the top of the
crest. It is easy for any one who has walked the road to see how this
part of it was neglected. It is overgrown with a thick growth, and
most of it, though quite plain, is not seen till you are right upon
it.
[28] The 1/2500 Ordnance map for Surrey (XXVI. 11) gives the road as
going outside the Park. This is an error. It destroys the alignment
altogether. The true course of it is: Enters Gatton Park south of the
upper lodge, passes through the trees to the left of the carriage
drive, forms part of this drive towards bottom of hill near middle
lodge. Then enters wood north of Gatton Tower, and appears as terrace
along side of hill. Then appears again in avenue leading to east
lodge, and so out of the Park.
[29] It is denied that the _Portus Adurni_ was Shoreham: but then,
everything is denied.
[30] On the 1/2500 Ordnance map for Surrey (XXVII. 5) this track may
be followed thus: Along the top of Ockley Wood, across the large
fields marked 192 and 189 (rising slightly), and reaching summit
towards NE. corner of the next field (168).
[31] This field is marked 2 in the 1/2500 Ordnance map for Surrey
(XXVII. 8).
[32] The conjecture of the 6-inch Ordnance map for Surrey, that the
road plunged down on to the plain before Gravelly Hill, and stayed
there till it reappeared again in the Eye Wood, may be dismissed for
the following reasons:--(1) There is no trace of it nor of any
footpath or trench the whole way; (2) the Old Road never goes into the
plain (save to cross a valley) at any other point; (3) the arbitrary
straight line in the Ordnance map perversely clings to a very narrow
belt of stiff gault! (4) there is no drainage slope on this line; (5)
there is no view of the track before one such as is maintained as far
as possible throughout the Old Road.
The conjecture appears to be based upon nothing more than the name,
'Palmer's Wood,' at the turning point of this supposed track.
TITSEY TO WROTHAM
_Sixteen miles_
Beyond the railway-cutting, the road is recovered, as I have said, by
tradition and by a constant use which lasted almost to our own
time.[33] It goes beneath the large wood which here clothes the hill,
and after a partial loss in the field next the park, leads up to the
farm known as 'Limpsfield Lodge Farm'; it comes to the paling of the
park just north of the farm.
Across Titsey Park the track of the road is clear, and its interest is
the greater from the anxiety which the owners of the place have shown
to discover its antiquities.
A little off the Way, at the base of the hill, was discovered in 1867
a Roman villa, situated thus (as at Walton Heath, at Colley Hill, at
Bletchingly, as later on at Burham, or, to take a remote instance, as
in the case of the Roman village on the Evenlode, or again, that at
Bignor) not right on the road itself, but from a quarter to half a
mile off it. So the heirs of the Roman owners, the feudal lords, built
their manor-houses off the roads and led to them by short
perpendicular ways and avenues such as you may still see approaching
half the French chateaux to-day.
It is probable (to guess at matters of which there is no proof) that
while this road, serving no strategical purpose, leading to no
frontier, and communicating between no two official centres of Roman
life, was not used in the official system, the country people
continued to make it one of their main ways, and that in the profound
peace which the southern civilisation had imposed, the rich built for
pleasure or to superintend their farms, along what was nothing but a
British way.
Henceforward antiquities of every kind were to meet us as we advanced,
because the Old Road on its way to the Straits gained importance with
every ten miles of its way. Tributary roads continually fell into it:
one had come in long ago at Alton, from Portsmouth and the Meon
valley; at Farnham, a second had joined, which as the reader knows was
probably older than the Old Road itself; others at the Guildford gap,
others from the Weald and from the north as well at Dorking, another
at Gatton, another at the Caterham Road: and each would swell the
traffic and the movement upon this principal line of advance towards
the Straits of Dover. More were to come. One of the highest importance
(for it led from London along the valley of the Darent) was to join us
at Otford; the last and perhaps the greatest, beyond the Medway, in
the stretch before Boxley. With each of these the importance and the
meaning of the road developed, and the increasing crowd of memories or
records was like a company coming in on either side to press on with
us to Canterbury.
Before leaving Titsey Park, the Old Road showed another of its
characteristics in passing again just south of the site where the old
church once stood; thenceforward for many miles it becomes a good
modern lane, pursuing its way without deviation for five miles due
east along the slope of the hills. Of this part, as of all such
sections of our way, where a modern road coincides with the
prehistoric way, there is little to be said. The level was not high,
nor the vale immediately beneath us broad. Above us from the main
ridge was granted, I knew by many journeys, that great vision: the
whole southern plain, and above the near sand-hills, at one sweep,
half the county of Sussex. But the matter of our journey forbade the
enjoyment of such a sight, just as the matter of my book forbids me to
speak of the very entertaining people of all kinds who came across us
during these days and days, especially in the inns.
The road continues thus, following a contour between four and five
hundred feet above sea-level, crosses the Kentish Border, and remains
a good, well-kept lane, until it reaches the border of Chevening Park.
The right-of-way along the road across the park (where, of course, it
has ceased to be a lane, and is no more than an indication upon the
turf) has ceased since the passing of an Act of Parliament in the
late eighteenth century, which Act diverts the traveller to the south,
round the enclosure. But the direction taken by the Old Road across
this ground is fairly evident until the last few hundred yards.
On the eastern side of the Park it is continued for about 200 yards as
a footpath. It is then lost under the plough; but a lane, some seven
furlongs further on to the east, recovers the alignment,[34] and leads
straight on to the crossing of the Darent, down just such a spur as
marked the crossing of the Mole, while above us went a flanking road,
marked by stunted trees, on the windy edge of the Downs.
Following it thus we passed the northernmost of the two railway
arches, went down the hill a mile or so, crossed the plain that was
till recently marshy and difficult, and entered the village of Otford
by the bridge and over the ford whereby, certainly since Edmund
Ironside, and probably for many thousands of years before that, men
had come to it.
Indeed, here, where the Old Road falls into the valley of the Darent,
its importance in recorded history, which had been growing steadily as
we went eastward, was suddenly increased for us, and the cause was the
reception at this point of its tributary from London. From Otford the
Old Road becomes strategic. It is the road by which marched the
defending forces when invasion was threatened from the Thames estuary.
It becomes hierarchic; the power of Canterbury seizes it; and it
becomes royal, perpetually recalling the names and at last the tyranny
of the kings. The battle against the invader, the king's progress to
the sea, the hold of the Church upon the land it traverses, fill all
the final marches from the crossing of the Darent to that of the
Stour. Something of military history as at Alton, at Farnham, and just
down the Stane Street at Anstie Bury, had attached even to the earlier
part of so ancient a way--but from Otford onward it is greatly
emphasised.
As one comes down from the chalk pit above the river one is crossing
what is probably the site of Edmund Ironside's great and successful
struggle with the Danes in 1016, when he defeated Canute and drove him
across the river, and pursued the rout mile upon mile to Aylesford.
Half a mile further down on the plain, just before you get into the
village, is the field where Offa is said to have achieved the
supremacy of England by the conquest of Kent in 773.
It is only a doubtful bit of tradition, but it is worth recording that
one more battle was fought here--as the populace believed--in the very
first struggle of all--in the legendary fifth century. It is said that
the Saxons were defeated here by the British, and that they also
retreated towards Aylesford.
Canterbury had shown its influence long before this valley. We had
seen the chapels and had but just left Brasted, whose allegiance to
the archbishop was old beyond all record. But from Otford onward the
power of the See became peculiar and more definite.
First there was the string of great palaces, Otford, Wrotham,
Maidstone, Charing: Otford, Wrotham, and Charing especially, standing
as they did directly upon the Old Road and created by it. We saw them
all. They are in ruins.
Their authority, their meaning, had been suddenly destroyed. No one
had claimed or supported their enormous walls. The new landlords of
the Reformation, the swarm, the Cecils and the Russells and the rest,
seem for once to have felt some breath of awe. The palaces were
permitted to die. I imagined as I saw them one by one that the few
stones remaining preserved a certain amplitude and magnificence; it
may have been nothing but the fantasy of one who saw them thus for the
first time, his mind already held for so many days by the antiquity of
the Road.
They are forgotten. They were great for their time. Their life was
intense. The economic power of the throne and of the chief altar in
England ran through them. Otford at Domesday had its hundred small
farms, its six mills; it was twice the size of Westerham. Wrotham and
Charing, somewhat less, were yet (with Maidstone) the chief centres of
Kent south of the Downs.
And apart from the See the Church in general held all the line. At
Boxley, eldest daughter of Waverley, Clairvaux and the spirit of St.
Bernard showed; it became as great as the palaces. Hollingbourne,
fifty years before the Conquest, had been granted to St. Augustine's,
a hundred years before that Lenham to Christchurch. The connection of
Charing with Canterbury was so old that men believed their 'Vortigern'
to have dedicated its land, and the church could show, even of
writing, a parchment older than Alfred by a hundred years.
All these things had gone as utterly as the power to build and to
think and to take joy in the ancient manner; the country-side we were
treading held their principal and silent memorials.
For upon all this--which was England and the people--had fallen first
the crown and then the rich, but the crown had begun the devastation.
I have said that from Otford the Old Road becomes royal, for it is at
Otford that the road from Greenwich, after following the valley of the
Darent, falls into the Pilgrim's Way. From Westminster by water to
Greenwich, from Greenwich down here to Otford, and thence along the
Old Road to the sea, had been a kind of sacred way, for the kings, who
used as they went the great palaces of the Archbishops for their
resting-places. By this road, last of so many, went Henry VIII. to the
Field of the Cloth of Gold. It was an alternative to the straight road
by Watling Street, and an alternative preferred from its age and
dignity.
Then came its ruin. The grip of the crown caught up all the string of
towns and villages and palaces and abbeys. You see the fatal date,
'20th November, 29th Henry VIII.' recurring time and time again.
Otford is seized, Wrotham is seized, Boxley, Hollingbourne, Lenham,
Charing, and with these six great bases, a hundred detached and
smaller things: barns, fields, mills, cells--all the way along this
wonderful lane the memory of the catastrophe is scarred over the
history of the country-side like the old mark of a wound, till you get
to poor Canterbury itself and find it empty, with nothing but
antiquarian guesses to tell you of what happened to the shrine and the
bones of St. Thomas.
The Holy Well at Otford, its twin at Burham, the rood of Boxley, the
block of Charing were trampled under. The common people, first
apathetic, then troubled,--lastly bereft of religion, lost even the
memory of the strong common life as the old men died; sites which had
been sacred ever since men had put up the stones of Addington or
Trottescliffe, or worshipped Mithra on the bank of the Medway, or put
the three monoliths of Kit's Coty House together to commemorate their
chief, or raised the hundred stones--all these were utterly forgotten.
It was not enough in this revolution that the Church should perish.
The private lands of the most subservient were not safe--Kemsing, for
example. It was the Manor of Anne Boleyn's father: it may be imagined
what happened to such land. I know of no district in England where the
heavy, gross, and tortured face of Henry in his decline haunts one
more. Sacredness is twofold--of pleasure and pain--and this, the
sacred end of our oldest travel, suffered in proportion to its
sanctity.
* * * * *
When we had passed the Darent at Otford and climbed the hill beyond,
we came upon a section of the road which might be taken as a kind of
model of its character along these hills.
It is a section six miles long, beginning upon the hillside just above
Otford station and ending near the schoolhouse above Wrotham. But in
this short distance it gives examples of nearly all the points which
it is the business of this book to describe. There is indeed no part
of it here which requires to be sought out and mapped. The whole is
known and has a continuous history; and such certitude is the more
valuable in a typical division, because it permits us to deduce much
that can elsewhere be applied to the less known portions of the road.
The Old Road runs here (as throughout nearly the whole of its course
between Dorking and Canterbury) up on the bare hillside above the
valley. The road appears, as one walks it, to run at the same level
all along the hillside, but really it is rising as the floor of the
valley rises, in order to keep continuously at the same distance
above it. Its lowest point is not much under 300 feet, but its highest
is just over 500.
Immediately below it lies that string of habitations which everywhere
marks its course, and between which it was originally the only means
of communication. Just as Bletchingly, Reigate, Limpsfield, Westerham,
Brasted, and the rest stood below its earlier course, and just as in
its further part we shall find Hollingbourne, Harrietsham, Lenham and
Charing, so here there runs a little succession of hamlets, churches,
and small towns, which are the centres of groupings of arable land in
the valley floor, while above them the Pilgrim's Road follows just
above the margin of cultivation. Their names are Kemsing, Heaverham,
St. Clere, Yaldham, and at last Wrotham.
The section further gives an admirable example of the way in which the
Old Road was gradually replaced.
[Illustration]
These six miles of its length may, for the purpose of the illustration
they afford, be divided into three nearly equal parts by the village
of Kemsing, and the hamlet of Yaldham. Each of these divisions shows
the Old Road in one of its three historical phases: first as the only
artery of the country-side, then as an alternative way supplemented by
a valley road, and finally as a decayed and unused path whose value
has been destroyed by the more modern highway below it. It is
astonishing to see with what precision each of these phases is shown,
how exactly each division ends, and how thoroughly the character of
each is maintained.
In the first, from Otford to Kemsing, a distance of about two miles,
one can see the two valley villages below one, and the track one
follows is the only good road between them, though it lies above them
both and can only be reached from either by a short rising lane. A
short cut across the fields connects the two places, but if one wishes
to use a proper and made way, there is none to take but that which
still represents the Old Road, and so to go up out of Otford and then
down into Kemsing. One has to do, in other words, exactly what was
done for centuries when the archbishops came up to London from
Canterbury; wherever one may desire to halt one has to leave the Old
Road and come down from it to the village below.
In the second part, between Kemsing and Yaldham, the modern influence
has been sufficient to provide an alternative. The distance is
somewhat more than two miles. The Pilgrim's Way runs up along the
hillside, a metalled lane, while below in the valley the old footpaths
and cart tracks have been united into a modern permanent road, and a
man going from Kemsing through Heaverham to Yaldham need not take the
Pilgrim's Road above as his ancestors would have had to do, but can go
straight along the lower levels.
Finally, with Yaldham and on to Wrotham the more common condition of
modern times asserts itself. The lower valley road becomes the only
important one, the Pilgrim's Road above dwindles into, first, a lane
very little used and falling into decay, then a path thick with
brambles and almost impassable. A man going from Yaldham to Wrotham
nowadays is bound to use the modern valley road. When we had pushed
through the brambles of the deserted path for perhaps a mile and a
half, the way broadened out again, crossed the London Road, and
turning the corner of the hill overlooked the church and roofs of
Wrotham a hundred feet below.
Of Wrotham, the second link in that chain of palaces which afforded
shelter to the Archbishop and to the King, as the one journeyed to
Lambeth, the other to the sea-coast, I have already spoken. I desire
here to discuss rather the topographical interest of the corner upon
which we stood and its connection with the prehistoric road which it
was our principal business to examine.
And for that purpose, though it occupied but the last part of a day, I
would devote to a separate division the passage of the Medway which
was now at hand.
FOOTNOTES:
[33] We owed our knowledge of this, as so much else, to Mrs. Adie's
book, of which I wish to make continual acknowledgment.
[34] The track here is well marked on the 1/2500 Ordnance map of Kent
(XXVIII. 12, XXVIII. 16), first as a footpath (on field 73), then
right across the small plantation to the east, past a clump of trees a
little east of that (where it is marked by a distinct embankment), and
so to the lane which has no local name, but bounds to the north the
field numbered 19.
WROTHAM TO BOXLEY
_Eleven miles_
At Wrotham is a kind of platform, or rather shoulder, which is made by
such a turning of the great chalk hills as I shall presently describe.
This turning revealed to us the plain at our feet as we came round the
corner of the hill and saw before us the whole valley of the Medway.
We were perhaps some hundred feet above Wrotham and five hundred above
the sea as we stood upon this platform before noon, and overlooked the
great flats and the distant river and the further hills.
It is a view of astonishing effect, such as I did not know to be in
south England; for our rivers are small, and, exquisite as is their
scenery, they do not commonly impress the mind with grandeur. The
Medway, perhaps because it is the relic of some much greater river
now drowned by the sinking of the land, perhaps because its tidal
estuary lends it twice a day an artificial breadth, gives one the
impression of those continental streams, the Seine or the Meuse, which
are sufficient to animate a whole country-side, and which run in so
wide a basin that a whole province attaches to their name.
The manner of this landscape was that of a great gesture; its outline
was like the movement of a hand that sketches a cartoon; its sweep was
like the free arm of a sower sowing broadcast. The bank, moreover,
upon which the Old Road here stands is so steep that it produces an
effect of greater height and whatever expansion of the mind
accompanies a wide horizon.
There dominated that view a character of space and dignity which not
even the Itchen valley from the heights, nor the Weald from the crest
of the Surrey Downs, could equal. The crossings of the Wey, of the
Mole, and of the Darent, the valleys which there interrupted the
general line of our hillside road, seemed narrow and familiar as one
gazed upon this much greater plain.
Far off, miles and miles away, the hills continued their interminable
line. The haze, and a certain warm quality in the winter light, added
to the vastness of the air, and made the distant range seem as remote
as a to-morrow; it was lost in a grey-blue that faded at last into a
mere sky upon the extreme east.
Along those hills our way was clearly to be continued. Their trend was
not, indeed, due east and west as the Old Road had run so long: they
turned a little southerly; but the general line, bending down to
Canterbury and to the Straits, followed that crest, and its furthest
visible height was not far distant from our goal.
Just opposite us, upon the further side of the valley, was faintly to
be discerned such another shoulder as that upon which we stood. We
made it out upon our map to bear the good name of 'Grey Wethers,' as
does that rock far off eastwards, out of which was built Stonehenge.
Upon that shoulder had stood the abbey of Boxley. It marked the point
where, beyond the valley, the Pilgrim's Way is recognised again. But
in the interval between, across this broad flat valley, its passage
had never been fixed.
We might have thought, had we not hitherto learnt much of the Old
Road, that no problem was there, save to cross in a direct line the
valley before us, and make by evening that further shoulder of 'Grey
Wethers,' where we should find the road again; but we had followed the
track too long to think that it could so easily be recovered. We
guessed that in so wide a gap as was here made by the Medway in the
line of hills a difficulty, greater than any we had yet met, would
arise, and that we should not overcome it without a longer search than
had been necessary at the Wey or even the Mole.
We were now familiar with such platforms and such views. Upon a lesser
scale we had felt their meaning when we stood upon the rock of St.
Catherine's at evening and considered the crossing of the Wey; or on
that other spur, eastward of Dorking, when we had seen Box Hill beyond
the valley under the growing night. They also, the men long before
us, had chosen such particular places from whence to catch the whole
of a day's march, and to estimate their best opportunity for getting
to the further shore.
We knew how difficult it was to trace again their conclusion, and to
map out the Old Road in places like these.
To debate its chances and draw up the main line of our decision, we
went down into Little Wrotham, and at an inn there which is called the
'Bull,' we ate beef and drank beer, spoke with men who knew the fords
and the ferries, compared our maps with a much older one belonging to
the place, and in general occupied our minds with nothing but the
passage of the river: the passage, that is, which alone concerned us;
the place where men, when men first hunted here, fixed their
crossing-place, and carried the Old Road across the tide-way of the
stream.
* * * * *
Now, having said so much of the landscape, it is necessary to turn to
the more minute task of topography. For it is the business of this
book not to linger upon the pleasures of our journey, but to
reconstitute an ancient thing. And for that purpose a simple
sketch-map will explain perhaps as much as words can do.
The features of this map are very few, but their comprehension will be
sufficient for my readers to grasp the matter upon which we are
engaged.
[Illustration]
A single heavy line indicates the crest of the hills--a crest from
over six hundred to over seven hundred feet in height. A dotted line
indicates the limit of what may be called the floor of the valley. The
brackets )( show the four possible crossings of the river. Two points,
numbered _A_ and _B_, mark the 'shoulders' or platform. The first
(_A_) above Wrotham, the second (_B_) at Grey Wethers. Finally, the
megalithic monument at Coldrum and that near Grey Wethers (whose
importance will be seen in a moment) are marked with circles.
Far up the valley on each hill continues the remnant of an ancient
road, and the reader will see from this, that, as in the valley of the
Mole and of the Darent, our difficulties were confused and increased
from the fact that, quite apart from the crossing of the river, other
prehistoric tracks led off northwards upon either side of the river,
whose crossing was our concern.
The great main range of chalk which runs all across south-eastern
England; the range whose escarpment affords for sixty miles a platform
for the Old Road is broken, then, by the Medway, which cuts through it
on its way to the sea. But there is not only a gap; it will be seen
that the hills 'bend up,' as it were, upon either bank, and follow the
stream northward, making a kind of funnel to receive it. The effect of
this is best expressed by saying, that it is as though the Medway
valley had been scooped out by a huge plough, which not only cut a
five-mile gap in the range, but threw the detritus of such a cutting
to left and right for miles beyond the point of its passage. It is at
the mouth of this gap that the two shoulders or turning-places are to
be found; one on the west at Wrotham, the other on the east at Grey
Wethers: while beyond them the Downs turn northward either way, to
sink at last into the flats of the Thames estuary.
The interval between these 'shoulders' was the most considerable of
any that had to be filled in all our exploration.
The reason that this gap in the Old Road should be found at such a
place was evident. It was here that the road had to cross the most
important of the rivers it meets upon its course, the Medway. Alone of
the rivers which obstruct the road, it is a tidal stream, and, as
though in recognition of its superior claim, the hills receded from it
more grandly than they had from the Wey at the Guildford, or the Mole
at the Dorking passage. They left six miles of doubtful valley between
them, and across these six miles a track had to be found.
[Illustration: THE MOST IMPORTANT OF THE RIVERS IT MEETS UPON ITS
COURSE, THE MEDWAY]
A clear statement of the problem will lead one towards its solution.
I have said that for several miles before Wrotham, the chalk hills,
well defined and steep, running almost due east and west, present an
excellent dry and sunny bank for the road. As one goes along this part
of one's journey, Wrotham Hill appears like a kind of cape before one,
because beyond it the hills turn round northward, and their
continuation is hidden. I have also told how, a long way off, over the
broad flat of the Medway valley, the range may be seen continuing in
the direction of Canterbury, and affording, when once the river is
crossed, a similar platform to that from which one is gazing.
We knew, also, that the road does, as a fact, follow those distant
hills, precisely as it had the range from which we made our
observation, and if no physical obstacles intervened, the first
travellers upon this track would undoubtedly have made a direct line
from the projecting shoulder of Wrotham Hill to the somewhat less
conspicuous turning-point which marks the further hills of Grey
Wethers, where also Boxley once stood.
But obstacles do intervene, and these obstacles were of the most
serious kind for men who had not yet passed the early stages of
civilisation. A broad river with a swift tidal current, flanked here
and there (as tidal rivers always are before their embankment) by
marshes; a valley floor of clay, the crossing of which must prove far
more lengthy than that of any they had hitherto encountered, made the
negotiation of this gap a difficult matter. Moreover, the direct line
would have led them by the marshiest way of all: the fields of
Snodland brook.
Oddly enough the difficulty of rediscovering the original track by
which the road forded the Medway, does not lie in the paucity of
evidence, but rather in the confusion arising from its nature and
amount. So great is this confusion that some authorities have been
content to accept alternative routes at this point.
Savage trails, however, never present alternatives so widely separate,
and least of all will they present any alternative, even one
neighbouring the main road, where a formidable obstacle has to be
overcome: to do so would be to forfeit the whole value which a
primitive road possesses as a guide (for this value depends upon
custom and memory), and when a tidal river had to be traversed, a
further and very cogent reason for a single track was to be found in
the labour which its construction upon a marshy soil involved.
If some one place of crossing had held a monopoly or even a
pre-eminence within the limits of recorded history, the evidence
afforded by it would be of the utmost value. But an indication of this
simplicity is lacking.
It is certain that within historic times and for many centuries
continuously, the valley and the river were passed at four places,
each of which now may lay a claim to be the original passage.
The modern names of these places are, in their order from the sea,
Cuxton, Lower Halling, Snodland, and Aylesford.
Before proceeding I must repeat what was said above, that two tracks
of great antiquity continue the Old Road northward on each side of
the Medway far beyond any point where it would have crossed; these
tracks (I have called them elsewhere 'feeders') are not only clearly
defined, but have each received the traditional name of the Pilgrim's
Way, and their presence adds a considerable complexity to the search
for the original passage.
So much of the elements of the problem being laid down, let us now
recapitulate certain features which we have discovered to be true of
the road in the earlier part of its course, where it had to cross a
river, and certain other features which one knows to be common to
other British track-ways over valleys broader than those of the Mole
or the Wey. To these features we may add a few others, which are
conjecturally those that such a road would possess although we might
have no direct evidence of them.
A list of these features will run very much as follows:--
(1) The road will attempt the shortest passage of the valley floor,
the breadth being more or less of an obstacle, according as the soil
is more or less low, covered, or damp.
(2) It will seek for a ford.
(3) Other things being equal, it would naturally cross a river as high
up as possible, where the stream was likely to be less difficult to
ford.
(4) It would cross in as immediate a neighbourhood as possible to that
height upon which survey could be made of the opportunities for
crossing.
(5) The nature of the bottom at the crossing would influence it
greatly, whether that bottom were gravel and sand, or treacherous mud.
Moreover, a primitive road would often leave evidence of its choice by
the relics of good material thrown in to harden the ford.
(6) A point of so much importance would probably be connected with
religion, and almost always with some relic of habitation or weapons.
(7) It would often preserve in its place-name some record of the
crossing.
(8) It would (as we had found it at Dorking and at Otford) choose a
place where a spur on either side led down to the river.
To these eight points may be added the further consideration, that
whatever was the more usual crossing in early historic times affords
something of a guide as to prehistoric habits, and, finally, that
where a tidal river was concerned, the motives which were present on
any river for seeking a passage as far up stream as possible would be
greatly strengthened, for the tide drowns a ford.
Now, in the light of what the map tells us, and of these principles,
let us see where the crossing is most likely to be found, and having
determined that, discover how far the hypothesis is supported by other
evidence.
To begin with Cuxton:
At Cuxton the firm land of the hills comes upon either side close to
the river. An ancient track-way upon either side leads very near to
the point of crossing and cannot be followed, or at least nothing like
so clearly followed further down the valley. At Cuxton, moreover, as a
constant tradition maintains, the crossing of the river by pilgrims
was common.
On the other hand there is nothing approaching a ford at this place.
The bottom is soft mud, the width of the river very considerable, the
tidal current strong, and of all the points at which the river might
have been crossed, it is the most distant from the direct line;
indeed, compared with the next point, Lower Halling, a traveller would
add five or six miles to his journey by choosing Cuxton.
Now, consider Aylesford, the other extreme; the highest up as Cuxton
is the lowest down the river of the four points. Aylesford has many
powerful arguments in its favour. It has produced one of the most
interesting and suggestive prehistoric relics in England: I mean that
'Aylesford pottery' which is an imitation, or possibly even an import,
of the pottery of northern Italy in the first or second centuries
before our area. It has furnished a mass of other antiquities:
armillae of gold have been found in the river and British coins and
graves on the northern bank. It preserves in the last part of its name
the tradition of a ford, and though 'ford' in place-names by no means
always signifies a ford any more than 'bridge' signifies a bridge, yet
in this case we have historic knowledge that a ford existed; and (as
is most frequently the case) the ford has been bridged.
A further argument, and in its way one of the strongest that could be
adduced, is the position of the place in the earliest of our annals.
Whether 'the Horse and the Mare,' Vortigern, and the rest are wholly
legendary or not, cannot be determined. Certainly the texture of the
story is fabulous, but Bede and 'Nennius' have both retained the
memory of a great battle fought here, in which the British overcame
the Pirates, and what is most significant of all, the legend or memory
records a previous retreat of the Saxons from a defeat at Otford. We
know, therefore, that a writer in the seventh century, though what he
was writing might be fable, would take it for granted that a retreat
westward from Otford would naturally lead along some road which passed
the Medway at Aylesford. We get another much later example of the same
thing when Edmund Ironside, after his great victory at Otford over the
Danes, pursued them to Aylesford, and was only prevented from
destroying them by their passage over the river under the cover of
treason.
This is very strong evidence in favour of Aylesford, and when one
remembers that the manor was ancient demesne, its antiquity and
importance are enhanced.
But against Aylesford there are three strong arguments. They are not
only strong, they are insuperable. The first is the immense width of
valley that would have to be crossed to reach it. That is, the immense
tract of uncertain, wooded way, without a view either of enemies or of
direction.
The second is the clay. A belt of gault of greater or lesser width
stretches all along the Downs just below the chalk. Here it is
particularly wide, and no straight line can be taken from Wrotham to
the Aylesford gravels without crossing nearly two miles of this
wretched footing, which, throughout its course, the road has most
carefully avoided. That a ford of great antiquity was there; that the
men of the sandy heights used it; that the Romans used so admirable a
ford (it is gravel near the river on either side), that they bridged
it, that they made a causeway over the clay, and that this causeway
and that bridge were continuously used after their time, I am willing
to believe; but not that the prehistoric road along the chalk hills
could have waded through all that clay to reach it, and have gone out
of its way into the bargain.
Thirdly, there is the clinching fact that a number of prehistoric
remains, Kit's Coty House and the rest, lie to the _north_ of such a
crossing, and that to reach Boxley itself, a site indubitably
dependent upon the prehistoric road, a man crossing at Aylesford would
have to turn _back_ upon his general direction.
It must further be remembered that by the seventh century some of the
valleys had acquired firm roads, inherited from the old civilisation,
and that in the rout after a battle, an army making for a tidal river,
and not able to choose their own time of crossing (as can a wayfarer),
would certainly make for a point as far up the stream as possible and
for a bridge.
If Cuxton and Aylesford, then, are to be neglected (as I think they
certainly must be), there remain only Lower Hailing and Snodland.
At first sight the weight of argument is for Lower Halling, and if the
various parts of such an argument as I adduce have different
proportions from those I lend them, one might conclude that at Lower
Halling was the original passage of the Medway.
True, there is for the passage at Lower Halling but one evidence that
I can discover, but it is an evidence of the greatest weight, and such
an one as is often permitted alone to establish a conclusion in
archæology. It is this, that there was good surface over the original
soil from the Pilgrim's Way on the hills above, right down to the
river-bank at this point. No clay intervenes between the chalk and
gravel. The primitive traveller would have had fairly dry land all the
way down to the river. Even beyond the river the belt of alluvial soil
is less broad than it is at Snodland; and altogether, if the
geological argument alone were considered, the decision undoubtedly
would be given to this place.
The claims of Snodland are asserted by a number of converging
arguments. I will enumerate them, and it will, I think, be seen that
though each is individually slight, the whole bundle is convincing.
_First._--The spur, which leaves the main range of hills for the river
(such a spur as has elsewhere, at Shalford, and at Dorking, and at
Otford, attracted the Old Road towards the ford it points to), touches
indeed both Snodland and Lower Halling on either side, but with this
great difference--that Snodland is on the south, Lower Halling upon
the north of the ridge. The elevation is not pronounced, the slope is
slight, but a little experience of such ground at various seasons will
determine one that the southern bank would be chosen under primitive
conditions. In such a conformation the southern bank alone has during
the winter any chance of drying, and in a dry summer, it matters
little whether a slope be partly of clay[35] (as is the descent to
Snodland) or of chalk (as is that to Lower Halling). During more than
half the year, therefore, the descent to Snodland was preferable;
during the other half indifferent.
_Secondly._--Immediately before and beyond the Lower Halling crossing
no antiquities of moment have been discovered: a grave, possibly
Roman, is, I believe, the only one. At Snodland, and beyond its
crossing, they are numerous. An ancient and ruined chapel marks the
descent from the hills. The church itself has Roman tiles. Beyond the
river, the Roman villa which was unearthed in 1896 by Mr. Patrick is
precisely upon the road that would lead from such a crossing up to the
Pilgrim's Way upon the hill. Close by the origin of this lane from the
ford to the hillside were discovered the fragments of what some have
believed to be a Mithraic temple; and earlier, in 1848, Roman urns and
foundations were found near the road at Little Culand.
_Thirdly._--The crossing at Snodland is shallower than that at Lower
Halling, and (though I do not pretend that the artifice is
prehistoric) the bottom has been artificially hardened.
_Fourthly._--There stands at Snodland a church, past the _southern_
porch of which goes the road, and when the river is crossed, and the
same alignment followed along the bank upon the further side for a
little way, the track again passes by a church, and again by its
_southern_ porch.
_Fifthly._--The 'Horseshoe Reach'--the reach, that is, between
Snodland and Burham--has always marked the limit between Rochester's
jurisdiction over the lower, and Maidstone's over the upper, Medway.
This is of great importance. All our tidal rivers have a sea-town and
a land-town; the limits up to which the seaport has control is nearly
always the _traditional crossing-place_ of the river. Thus Yarmouth
Stone on the Yare divides the jurisdiction of Norwich from that of
Yarmouth; it is close to the Reedham Ferry, which has always been the
first passage over the river. For London and the Thames we have the
best example of all--Staines.
_Finally_, it is not extravagant to note how the megalithic monument
(now fallen) near Trottescliffe, corresponds to Kit's Coty House on
the opposite shoulder beyond the valley. The crossing at Snodland
would be the natural road between the two.
[Illustration: ROCHESTER]
These seven converging lines of proof, or rather of suggestion--seven
points which ingenuity or research might easily develop into a
greater number--seem to me to settle the discussion in favour of
Snodland.[36]
By that ferry then we crossed. We noted the muddy river, suggestive of
the sea, the Medway, which so few miles above suggests, when it brims
at high tide, a great inland river. It has hidden reaches whose fields
and trees have quite forgotten the sea. We passed by the old church at
Burham. We were in a very field of antiquity[37] as we went our way,
and apart from the stones and fragments it has left, we were
surrounded by that great legend which made this place the funeral of
the first barbarians.
It was already nearly dark when we came to the place where that old
sphinx of three poised monoliths, Kit's Coty House, stands in a field
just north of the lane; the old circle of stones, now overthrown, lay
below us to the south.
We would not pass Kit's Coty House without going near it to touch it,
and to look at it curiously with our own eyes. Though we were very
weary, and though it was now all but dark, we trudged over the plough
to where it stood; the overwhelming age of the way we had come was
gathered up in that hackneyed place.
Whether the name be, or be not, a relic of some Gaelic phrase that
should mean 'the grave in the wood,' no one can tell. The wood has at
any rate receded, and only covers in patches the height of the hill
above; but that repeated suggestion of the immense antiquity of the
trail we were pursuing came to us from it again as we hesitated near
it, filled us with a permanent interest, and for a moment overcame our
fatigue.
When we had struck the high-road some yards beyond, just at the place
where the Pilgrims Way leaves it to reach the site where Boxley Abbey
once stood, our weakness returned. Not that the distance we had
traversed was very great, but that this kind of walking, interrupted
by doubts and careful search, and much of it of necessity taken over
rough land, had exhausted us more than we knew.
With difficulty, though it was by a fine, great falling road, we made
the town of Maidstone, and having dined there in the principal inn to
the accompaniment of wine, we determined to complete the journey, if
possible, in the course of the next day.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] Not quite half a mile of it. Snodland itself stands on gravel,
which just touches the river at the site of the church and ferry.
[36] The full trace of this crossing may be followed in the 1/2500
Ordnance map for Kent (XXX. 3) as follows:--From Wrotham to (_a_) The
_Kentish Drover_. The significance of this sign is the use of the Old
Road by drovers in order to avoid turnpike charges, (_b_) on north of
the _Trottescliffe megalithic monument_, under the old quarry there,
on past Bunkers to the cross-roads. Then (_c_) leave present path and
go a little east of south under _another old pit_, and so diagonally
across field marked 79 (on map XXX. 4), thus reaching Paddlesworth
Farm, when from the (_d_) _ruined chapel_ the track is marked by the
division between fields 72 and 73 till Mark Farm is reached, whence
the track is a plain road ultimately becoming the High Street of
Snodland. After crossing the river it is a road all the way, passing
at last between the two megalithic monuments of the hundred stones and
Kit's Coty House.
[37] Thus in the immediate neighbourhood alone were the Roman remains
of Snodland, of Burham, of Hoborough. The group of a dozen or more
round Maidstone, the bronze celts found at Wrotham. Oldbury Camp, the
group of Roman foundations and coins at Plaxtol, the British and Roman
coins found at Boxley. The megalithic monuments of Addington, of
Coldrum, Kit's Coty House, and the hundred stones. The group already
mentioned at Aylesford, the camp at Fosbery, the Roman pottery at
Thurnham--and this is a very incomplete list.
BOXLEY TO CANTERBURY
_Twenty-six miles_
From Boxley to Charing the Old Road presents little for comment, save
that over these thirteen miles it is more direct, more conspicuously
marked, and on the whole better preserved than in any other similar
stretch of its whole course. The section might indeed be taken as a
type of what the primitive wayfarers intended when the conditions
offered them for their journey were such as they would have chosen out
of all. It is not a permanent road as is the section between Alton and
Farnham, therefore nothing of its ancient character is obliterated. On
the other hand, it is not--save in two very short spaces--interfered
with by cultivation or by private enclosure. This stretch of the road
is a model to scale, preserved, as though by artifice, from modern
changes, and even from decay, but exhibiting those examples of disuse
which are characteristic of its history.
The road goes parallel to and above the line where the sharp spring of
the hill leaves the floor of the valley; it commands a sufficient view
of what is below and of what lies before; it is well on the chalk,
just too high to interfere with cultivation, at least with the
cultivation of those lower levels to which the Middle Ages confined
themselves; it is well dried by an exposure only a little west of
south; it is well drained by the slope and by the porous soil; it is
uninterrupted by combes, or any jutting promontories, for the range of
the hills is here exactly even. In a word, it here possesses every
character which may be regarded as normal to the original trail from
the west of England to the Straits of Dover.
The villages which lie immediately below it are all at much the same
distance--from a quarter to half a mile: it can be said to traverse
one alone--Detling, and this it passes through to the north. The
others, Harrietsham, Hollingbourne, Lenham, Charing, are left just to
the south. They are now connected by the high-road which joins up the
valley, and were once, it may be presumed, isolated from each other by
the common fields and the waste of each village, or if connected,
connected only by paths. They may have depended, during many
centuries, for their intercommunication, upon the Old Road, to which
each of them possesses a definitely marked line of approach: and the
Old Road remains the typical main artery, which passes near, but not
through, the places it serves.[38]
This thirteen miles of the way is often vague, and is indeed actually
broken at one point between Cobham Farm and Hart Hill, a mile and a
half east of Charing; but it is a gap which presents no difficulty.
The alignment is precisely the same before and after it; it is but
seven furlongs in extent; it has been caused by the comparatively
recent ploughing of this land during the two generations of our
history when food was dear.
From Boxley to Lenham the plain beneath the Old Road is drained by a
stream called the Len, tributary to the Medway. Just before or at
Lenham is the watershed: a parting of no moment, not a ridge, hardly
observable to one standing above it on the hillside. It is the
dividing line between the basins of the Medway and the Stour. All the
hydrography of south-eastern England presents this peculiarity. The
watersheds are low; the bold ranges do not divide the river-basins,
because the water system is geologically older than the Chalk Hills.
The Stour rises in Lenham itself, but its course has at first no
effect upon the landscape, so even is the plain below. A village,
which preserves the great Norman name of the Malherbes, stands on the
watershed: the whole flat saddle is a rich field diversified by
nothing more than slight rolls of land, in between which the spring
comes as though up from a warmer earth, long before it touches the
hills.
It is peculiar in England, this county of Kent, and especially its
valleys. I had known it hitherto only as a child, a stranger, but no
one who has so visited it in childhood can forget the sheep in the
narrow lanes, or the leaning cones of the hop-kilns against the sky:
the ploughlands under orchards: all the Kentish Weald.
At Charing the great hills begin to turn a corner. The Stour also
turns, passes through a wide gap, and from east and south begins to
make north and east straight for Canterbury; henceforward the spirit
of Canterbury and the approach to it occupies the road.
We had reached the end of that long, clean-cut ridge which we had
followed all the way from Farnham, the ridge which the four rivers had
pierced in such well-defined gaps. Charing is the close of that
principal episode in the life of the Way.
[Illustration: THE SHEEP IN THE NARROW LANES, OR THE LEANING
CONES OF THE HOP-KILNS AGAINST THE SKY]
Charing again was the last convenient halt in any rich man's journey
until, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. It is something under
sixteen miles from Canterbury, following the track of the Old Road,
and even the poor upon their pilgrimages would have halted there;
though the slow progress of their cumbersome caravans may have
forced them to a further repose at Chilham before the city was
reached.
Charing, therefore, was designed by its every character to be a place
of some importance, and was a very conscious little town.
It counts more in Domesday than any other of the valley villages
between Maidstone and the cathedral; it possessed the greatest and the
first of those archiepiscopal palaces, the string of which we came on
first at Otford; it has a church once magnificent and still remarkable
after its rebuilding, and it maintains to this day an air of
prosperity and continued comfort. The inn is one of the best inns to
be found on all this journey; the whole village may be said, in spite
of its enemies,[39] to be livelier in the modern decay than the other
remote parishes of that plain.
We had imagined, before seeing the ground, that, after Charing, we
should have some difficulty in tracing the Old Road.
The Ordnance map, which has given it the traditional name of the
Pilgrim's Road all through this valley, not only drops the title
immediately after Charing, but, for some reason I do not understand,
omits to mark it at all along the skirts of Longbeech wood.
When we came to follow it up, however, we found it a plainly-marked
lane, leading at much the same height round the shoulder of the hill,
to the western lodge of Lord Gerrard's park. Just before we entered
that park two local names emphasised the memories of the road: the
cottage called 'Chapel' and the word 'Street' in 'Dun Street' at the
lodge.
Within the fence of this park it is included. For nearly a mile the
fence of the park itself runs on the embankment of the Old Road. At
the end of that stretch, the fence turns a sharp angle outwards, and
for the next mile and a half, the road, which is here worn into the
clearest of trenches and banks, goes right across the park till it
comes out on the eastern side a few yards to the south of the main
gates. The Old Road thus turns a gradual corner, following the curve
of the Stour valley.
The modern road from Charing to Canterbury cuts off this corner, and
saves a good two miles or three, but the reasons which caused men in
the original condition of the country to take the longer course of the
Old Road are not far to seek.
There is, first, that motive which we have seen to be universal, the
dryness of the road, which could only be maintained upon the southern
side of the hill.
Next, it must be noted that these slopes down to the Stour were open
when the plateau above was dense forest. This in its turn would mean a
group of villages--such a group is lacking even to this day to the
main road, and the way would naturally follow where the villages lay.
Finally, the water-supply of the plateau was stagnant and bad; that of
the valley was a good running stream.
In its passage through Eastwell Park, the road passed near the site of
the house, and it passed well north of the church, much as it had
passed north of the parishes in the valley we had just left. This
would lead one to conjecture, I know not with what basis of
probability, that a village once existed near the water around the
church at the bottom of the hill. If it did, no trace of it now
remains, but whether (already in decay) it was finally destroyed, as
some have been by enclosure, or whether the church, being the
rallying-point of a few scattered farmhouses (as is more often the
case), was enclosed without protest and without hurt to its
congregation, I have no means of determining. It is worth noting, that
no part of the Old Road is enclosed for so great a length as that
which passes from the western to the eastern lodge of Eastwell Park.
Nearly two miles of its course lies here within the fence of a private
owner.
It is odd to see how little of the road has fallen within private
walls. In Hampshire nothing of it is enclosed; in Surrey, if we except
the few yards at Puttenham, and the garden rather than the park at
Monk's Hatch, it has been caught by the enclosures of the great
landlords in four places alone: Albury, Denbies, Gatton, and Titsey.
It passes, indeed, through the gardens of Merstham House, but that
only for a very short distance.
In Kent, Chevening has absorbed it for now close upon a century; then
it remains open land as far as this great park of Eastwell, and, as
we shall see, passes later through a portion of Chilham.
Clear as the road had been throughout Eastwell Park (and preserved
possibly by its enclosure), beyond the eastern wall it entirely
disappears. The recovery of it, rather more than half a mile further
on, the fact that one recovers it on the same contour-line, that the
contour-line is here turned round the shoulder of the hill which forms
the entrance into the valley of the Stour, give one a practical
certainty that the Old Road swept round a similar curve, but the
evidence is lost.[40]
The portion near Boughton Aluph is perfectly clear; it goes right up
under the south porch. It has disappeared again under the plough in
the field between the church and Whitehill Farm. There it has been
cut, as we had found it so often in the course of our journey, by a
quarry. Another field has lost it again under the plough; it
reappears on the hillside beyond in a line of yews.[41] But within a
hundred yards or so there arises a difficulty which gave rise to some
discussion among us.
A little eastward of us, on the way we had to go, the range of hills
throws out one of those spurs with a re-entrant curve upon the far
side, which we had previously discovered in Surrey above Red Hill and
Bletchingly. It was our experience that the Old Road, when it came to
an obstacle of this kind, made for the neck of the promontory and cut
off the detour by passing just north of the crest. The accompanying
sketch will explain the matter.
[Illustration]
We knew from the researches of others that the road was certainly to
be found again at the spot marked A. It was our impression, from a
previous study of the map, that the trail would make straight for
this point from the place where I was standing (X). But we were wrong.
At this point the road turned _up_ the hill, its track very deeply
marked, lined with trees, and at the top with yews of immense
antiquity. The cause of this diversion was apparent when we saw that
the straight line I had expected the road to follow would have taken
it across a ravine too shallow for the contours of the Ordnance map to
indicate, but too steep for even a primitive trail to have negotiated.
And this led me to regret that we had not maps of England such as
they have for parts of Germany, Switzerland, and France, which give
three contour-lines to every 100 feet, or one to every 10 metres.
We followed up the hill, then, certain that we had recovered the Old
Road. It took the crest of the hill, went across the open field of
Soakham, plunged into a wood, and soon led us to the point marked upon
my sketch as A, where any research of ours was no longer needed. It is
from this place that a man after all these hundred miles can first see
Canterbury.
We looked through the mist, down the hollow glen towards the valley
between walls of trees. We thought, perhaps, that a dim mark in the
haze far off was the tower of the Cathedral--we could not be sure. The
woods were all round us save on this open downward upon which we
gazed, and below us in its plain the discreet little river the Stour.
The Way did not take us down to that plain, but kept us on the heights
above, with the wood to our left, and to our right the palings of
Godmersham.
[Illustration: THE PLOUGHLANDS UNDER ORCHARDS: ALL THE KENTISH WEALD]
We had already learnt, miles westward of this, that the Old Road
does not take to the crest of a hill without some good reason, but
that once there it often remains, especially if there is a spur upon
which it can fall gently down to the lower levels.
The lane we were following observed such a rule. It ran along the
north of Godmersham Park, just following the highest point of the
hill, and I wondered whether here, as in so many other places, it had
not formed a natural boundary for the division of land; but I have had
no opportunity of examining the history of this enclosure. Chilham
Park marches with Godmersham; where one ends and the other begins the
road passed through the palings (and we with it) and went on in the
shape of a clear ridge, planted often with trees, right down to the
mound on which stands Chilham Castle.
Down in the valley below, something much older bore witness to the
vast age of this corner of inhabited land: the first barrow to be
opened in England; the tomb in which Camden (whom Heaven forgive)
thought that a Roman soldier lay; in which the country people still
believe that the great giant Julaber was buried, but which is the
memorial of something far too old to have a name.
This castle and this grave are the entry into that host of antiquities
which surrounds upon every side the soil of Canterbury. In every point
of the views which would strike us in the last few miles, the history
of this island would be apparent.
* * * * *
[Illustration]
From the mound on which Chilham Castle stands to the farm called
Knockholt, just two miles away, is what I believe to be a gap in the
Old Road, and I will give my reasons for that conviction. Did I not
hold it, my task would be far easier, for all the maps give the Way
continuously from point to point.
Up to the mound of Chilham the path is clear. After Knockholt it is
equally clear, and has, for that matter, been studied and mapped by
the highest authority in England.[42] But to bridge the space between
is not as easy as some writers would imagine.
It will be apparent from this sketch-map that between Chilham and
Knockholt there rises a hill. On the south-east of it flows the Stour,
with the modern main road alongside of it; on the north two lanes,
coming to an angle, lead through a hamlet called Old Wives' Lees.
There is a tradition that the pilgrims of the later Middle Ages went
through Chilham and then turned back along these northern lanes,
passing through Old Wives' Lees. This tradition may be trusted. They
may have had some special reason, probably some devotional reason,
for thus going out of their way, as we found them to have had at
Compton. If their action in this is a good guide (as their action
usually is) to the trace of the Old Road, well and good; there is then
no appreciable gap, for a path leads to Knockholt and could only
correspond to the Old Road; but I should imagine that here, as at
Merstham, the pilgrims may have deceived us. They may have made a
detour for the purpose of visiting some special shrine, or for some
other reason which is now forgotten. It is difficult to believe that a
prehistoric trail would turn such sharp corners, for the only time in
all this hundred and twenty miles, without some obvious reason, and
that it should choose for the place in which to perform this evolution
the damp and northern side of a rather loamy hill. I cannot but
believe that the track went over the side of the hill upon the
southern side, but I will confess that if it did so there is here the
longest and almost the only unbridged gap in the whole of the
itinerary. I am confirmed in my belief that it went over the southern
side from the general alignment, from the fact that the known path
before Chilham goes to the south of the castle mound, that this would
lead one to the south of the church, and so over the southern shoulder
of the hill; but, if it did so, ploughed land and the careful culture
of hop-gardens have destroyed all traces of it. I fancied that
something could be made of an indication about a quarter of a mile
before Knockholt Farm, but I doubt whether it was really worth the
trouble of examining.[43]
From the farm, right up through Bigberry Wood, we were on a track not
only easy to recognise, but already followed, as I have said, by the
first of authorities upon the subject.
We came after a mile of the wood to the old earthwork which was at
once the last and the greatest of the prehistoric remains upon the Old
Road, and the first to be connected with written history.
* * * * *
It was a good place to halt: to sit on the edge of the gravelly bank,
which had been cast up there no one knows how many centuries ago, and
to look eastward out towards Canterbury.
The fort was not touched with the memory of the Middle Ages: it was
not our goal, for that was the church of St. Thomas, but it was the
most certain and ancient thing of all that antiquity which had been
the meaning of the road, and it stood here on the last crest of so
many heights from which we had seen so many valleys in these eight
days.
History and the prehistoric met at this point only.
Elsewhere we had found very much of what men had done before they
began to write down their deeds. We had passed the barrows and the
entrenchments, and the pits from whence coins with names, but without
a history or a date, had been dug, and we had trodden on hard ground
laid down at fords by men who had left no memory. We had seen also a
very great many battlefields of which record exists. We had marched
where Sweyn marched; Cheriton had been but a little way upon our
right; we had seen Alton; the Roman station near Farnham had stood
above us; the great rout of Ockley had lain not far off below our
passage of the Mole; and we had recalled the double or treble memory
of Otford, and of the Medway valley, where the invader perpetually met
the armies of the island.
But in all these there were two clean divisions: either the thing was
archaic--a subject for mere guess-work; or it was clear history, with
no prehistoric base that we knew of behind it.
On this hill the two categories mingled, and a bridge was thrown
between them. For it was here that the Roman first conquered. This was
that defence which the Tenth Legion stormed: the entrenchment which
was the refuge for Canterbury; and the river which names the battle
was that dignified little stream the Stour, rolling an even tide
below.
The common people, who have been thought to be vacant of history, or
at the best to distort it, have preserved a memory of this fight for
two thousand years.
I remembered as I sat there how a boy, a half-wit, had told me on a
pass in Cumberland that a great battle had been fought there between
two kings; he did not know how long ago, but it had been a famous
fight. I did not believe him then, but I know now that he had hold of
a tradition, and the king who fought there was not a George or a
James, but Rufus, eight hundred years before. As I considered these
things and other memories halting at this place, I came to wish that
all history should be based upon legend. For the history of learned
men is like a number of separate points set down very rare upon a
great empty space, but the historic memories of the people are like a
picture. They are one body whose distortion one can correct, but the
mass of which is usually sound in stuff, and always in spirit.
Thinking these things I went down the hill with my companions, and I
reoccupied my mind with the influence of that great and particular
story of St. Thomas, whose shadow had lain over the whole of this
road, until in these last few miles it had come to absorb it
altogether.
The way was clear and straight like the flight of a bolt; it spanned a
steep valley, passed a windmill on the height beyond, fell into the
Watling Street (which here took on its alignment), and within a mile
turned sharp to the south, crossed the bridge, and through the
Westgate led us into Canterbury.
We had thoroughly worked out the whole of this difficult way. There
stood in the Watling Street, that road of a dreadful antiquity, in
front of a villa, an omnibus. Upon this we climbed, and feeling that a
great work was accomplished, we sang a song. So singing, we rolled
under the Westgate, and thus the journey ended.
* * * * *
There was another thing to be duly done before I could think my task
was over. The city whose name and spell had drawn to itself all the
road, and the shrine which was its core remained to be worshipped. The
cathedral and the mastery of its central tower stood like a demand;
but I was afraid, and the fear was just. I thought I should be like
the men who lifted the last veil in the ritual of the hidden goddess,
and having lifted it found there was nothing beyond, and that all the
scheme was a cheat; or like what those must feel at the approach of
death who say there is nothing in death but an end and no transition.
I knew what had fallen upon the original soul of the place. I feared
to find, and I found, nothing but stones.
I stood considering the city and the vast building and especially the
immensity of the tower.
Even from a long way off it had made a pivot for all we saw; here
closer by it appalled the senses. Save perhaps once at Beauvais, I had
never known such a magic of great height and darkness.
[Illustration: SUCH A MAGIC OF GREAT HEIGHT AND DARKNESS]
It was as though a shaft of influence had risen enormous above the
shrine: the last of all the emanations which the sacred city cast
outwards just as its sanctity died. That tower was yet new when the
commissioners came riding in, guarded by terror all around them, to
destroy, perhaps to burn, the poor materials of worship in the great
choir below: it was the last thing in England which the true Gothic
spirit made. It signifies the history of the three centuries during
which Canterbury drew towards it all Europe. But it stands quite
silent and emptied of every meaning, tragic and blind against the
changing life of the sky and those activities of light that never fail
or die as do all things intimate and our own, even religions. I
received its silence for an hour, but without comfort and without
response. It seemed only an awful and fitting terminal to that long
way I had come. It sounded the note of all my road--the droning voice
of extreme, incalculable age.
As I had so fixed the date of this journey, the hour and the day were
the day and hour of the murder. The weather was the weather of the
same day seven hundred and twenty-nine years before: a clear cold air,
a clean sky, and a little wind. I went into the church and stood at
the edge of the north transept, where the archbishop fell, and where a
few Norman stones lend a material basis for the resurrection of the
past. It was almost dark.... I had hoped in such an exact coincidence
to see the gigantic figure, huge in its winter swaddling, watching the
door from the cloister, watching it unbarred at his command. I had
thought to discover the hard large face in profile, still caught by
the last light from the round southern windows and gazing fixedly; the
choir beyond at their alternate nasal chaunt; the clamour; the
battering of oak; the jangle of arms, and of scabbards trailing, as
the troops broke in; the footfalls of the monks that fled, the sharp
insults, the blows and Gilbert groaning, wounded, and à Becket dead. I
listened for Mauclerc's mad boast of violence, scattering the brains
on the pavement and swearing that the dead could never rise; then for
the rush and flight from the profanation of a temple, and for distant
voices crying outside in the streets of the city, under the sunset,
'The King's Men! The King's!'
But there was no such vision. It seems that to an emptiness so utter
not even ghosts can return.
* * * * *
In the inn, in the main room of it, I found my companions. A
gramophone fitted with a monstrous trumpet roared out American songs,
and to this sound the servants of the inn were holding a ball. Chief
among them a woman of a dark and vigorous kind danced with an amazing
vivacity, to the applause of her peers. With all this happiness we
mingled.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[38] The lane is continuous after Boxley, though not everywhere
equally important. North of Hollingbourne it is but a path. It soon
becomes a lane again, is enclosed in the private grounds of Stede Hill
(Kent, 1/2500 Ordnance map, XLIII. 12), and is but a track for
three-quarters of a mile from Lenham quarries. It is lost after Cobham
Farm, and reappears as a long hedge and division between fields, and
after the pits at Hart Hill becomes a lane again.
[39] It has enemies, like all good things. Its neighbours to the south
have sung for centuries:--
'Dirty Charing lies in a hole,
Has but one bell, and that she stole.'
[40] The 1/2500 Ordnance map of Kent (LV. 10) seems to me to commit a
slight error at this point. There is no need to take the Old Road
through the gas works. It obviously goes south of the lodge, curls
northwards on leaving the park, and is lost in the buildings near the
smithy. After this it forms the lane which bounds to the north the
fields marked 111 and 119.
[41] Here again the 25-inch Ordnance for Kent (LV. 10) draws a
conventional straight line which seemed to us erroneous. We took it to
go from near Brewhouse Farm along the raised footpath to Whitehill,
and then (LV. 6) under the pit, across fields 13 and 67 (not down by
Soakham Farm as the map gives it), and so on to the turf where is a
raised embankment and a characteristic line of yews.
[42] Professor Boyd-Dawkins in connection with his examination of the
iron implements found in Bigberry Camp has traced the Old Road for a
mile or two westward. The map may be seen in Owens College at
Manchester.
[43] I would trace it more or less as follows on the 25-inch Ordnance
map for Kent (XLIV. 16):--Through the orchards marked 378, 379a there
just south of Bowerland, down the valley beyond, and up to Knockholt.
But it is all cultivated land, and except for a footpath at the end
there is no trace left.
INDEX
=À Becket, St. Thomas=. See '=St. Thomas=.'
=Addington=, megalithic remains at, 253 (note 2).
=Adie, Mrs.=, her valuable book, The Pilgrim's Way, referred to,
136, 214.
=Albury=, 'Weston Street' old name of, 136 (note 2).
=---- Church=, old (SS. Peter and Paul), passed, according to
Ordnance map, to south by Old Road, 110 (note).
=---- Park=, preservation of Old Road in, 82;
discussion of Old Road in, 174, 175.
=---- Wood.= See '=Weston=.'
=Alfred=, desecration of grave of, 125.
=Alresfords=, the, not on the Old Road, 127;
medieval road to, from Alton, 129, 130 (note 1).
=Alton=, battle of, mentioned, 126;
approach to medieval road to Alresford from, 129, 130 (note 1);
approach to, described, 144-146.
=Anchor=, Inn at Ropley, 137, 138 (map).
=Anglo-Saxon Period=, character of, 83-85. See also =Dark Ages=.
=Antiquity=, fascination of, 10.
=Arthur's Seat= (near Redhill), exceptional passage of Old Road to
north of crest at, 106 (note); described on journey, 209.
=Avebury=, and Stonehenge, mark convergence of prehistoric roads,
16.
=Aylesford=, a crossing of the Medway, its claims discussed,
245-248;
and map, 236; 253 (note 2).
=Barfleur=, last southern port of 'Second Crossing,' 49, 50.
=Barrow=, near Chilham, 269.
=Bentley=, passage of Old Road by, 149.
=Betchworth Lime Pits=, passed on journey and described, 188-193.
=Bigberry Camp=, fort of Canterbury, stormed by Caesar, 43;
compared with St. Catherine's Hill at Winchester, 70;
Professor Boyd-Dawkins's examination of, 271 (note), visited on
journey and described, 273-275.
=Bishopstoke=, church of, on site of Druidical stone circle, 109.
=Bishop Sutton=, church of, passage of Old Road as near as possible
to south of, 110;
mentioned in Domesday, 130;
passed on our journey, 134.
=Bittern= (=Clausentum=), example of Roman use of Second Crossing,
55.
=Bletchingly=, example of Old Road on crest of hill, 107.
=Boughton Aluph=, hills beyond, example of Old Road on crest of
hill, 107.
=---- ---- Church=, example of church passed to south, 110;
passed on journey, 265;
discussion of road to eastward of, 265, 266.
=Boulogne=, principal historic, but probably not earliest, southern
port of Straits of Dover, 35.
=Box Hill=, its appearance from Denbies at evening described, 178;
track of Road recovered on, 181.
=Boxley=, Roman and British coins found at, 253 (note 2).
=---- Abbey=, site of referred to, 240;
Roman and British coins found at, 253.
=Boyd-Dawkins=, Professor, his examination of Bigberry Camp, 271
(and note).
=Brackham Warren=, passage of Old Road by, 186.
=Brading=, example of Roman use of Second Crossing, 55.
=Brisland Lane=, coincident with Old Road, 140.
=Britain, Roman.= See '=Roman Britain=.' (Conservation of
antiquities in, 81-82.)
=British Coins=, discovered at Gatton, 203;
at Aylesford, 245;
at Boxley, 253 (note 2).
=Brixbury Wood=, passage of Old Road along, 162.
=Broad Street=, near Lenham, place-name significant of passage of
Old Road, 136 (note 2).
=Bull Inn=, near Bentley, approach of Old Road to River Wey at,
152.
=Burford Bridge=, error caused by passage of Pilgrimage at, 95
(note);
not crossed by Old Road, 182-184.
=Burham=, church of, passage of Old Road to south of, 110;
passed on journey, 253.
=Bury Hill Camp=, on original track of Old Road, 27.
=Butts=, the, at Alton, entry both of medieval and prehistoric
roads, 145.
=Caesar=, first eye-witness of conditions of southern Britain,
24;
fort at Canterbury stormed by him, 43, 275.
=Calais=, probably first southern port of the Straits of Dover,
34-35.
=Calvados=, reef of, 50.
=Camp=, of Canterbury (Bigberry Wood), stormed by Caesar, 43;
of Winchester (St. Catherine's hill), 70;
of Holmbury, Farley Heath, and Anstie Bury, alluded to, 170-171;
of Oldbury, of Fosbery, 253 (note 2);
Bigberry described, 273-275.
=Camps=, of Winchester and Canterbury compared, 70.
=Canterbury=, why the goal of Old Road in its final form, causes
of development of, 31-42;
created by necessity of central depôt for Kentish ports, 41;
importance of its position on the Stour, 42;
resistance to Caesar, 43;
origin of its religious character, 44;
compared with Winchester, 66-71;
entered by Westgate, 277.
=---- Cathedral=, visited, 278-280.
=Cassiterides=, their identification with Scilly Isles doubtful,
20.
=Chalk=, has preserved Old Road, 75-76;
third cause of preservation of Old Road fully discussed, 97, 98;
excursion upon, 189-192.
=Chantries Wood=, 163.
=Charing=, block of St. John at, 94;
example of church passed to north, 111, 257;
described, 260, 261;
rhyme on, 261 (note).
=Chawton Wood=, medieval road from Alton to Alresford passed
through, 136 (note 1).
=---- Village=, passed, 146.
=Chevening Park=, passage of Old Road across, 217.
=---- church=, example of Old Road passing to north, 111.
=Chequers Inn=, Ropley, passage of Old Road through garden of, 138.
=Chilham=, church, mentioned, 94;
probable diversion of Old Road at, by Pilgrimage, 95 (note);
probability of Old Road passing south of hill at, 106 (note);
church probably passed from south, 110;
Park crossed, 269;
discussion as to track of Road east of, 267-273 (and map).
=Chilterns=, the, their position in scheme of prehistoric roads,
16;
connection with Icknield Way, 23.
=Christianity=, effect of a main road on its development, 7.
=Churches, Wells in.= See '=Wells=.' Often built on pre-Christian
sites, 109;
passed to south by Old Road, list of, 108-110;
of King's Worthy, Itchen Stoke, Bishop Sutton, Seale, Puttenham,
St. Catherine's, St. Martha's, Albury, Shere, Merstham, Titsey,
Chevening, Bishopstoke, Snodland, Burham, Lenham, Charing,
Eastwell, Chilham, etc. See under name of place.
=Clausentum.= See =Bittern=.
=Clay=, Old Road often lost on, 75;
how avoided by Old Road in Upper Valley of Wey, 152 (and note);
above Quarry Hangers, argument against identity of Pilgrim's Road
with Prehistoric, 205.
=Cobham Farm=, Old Road lost at, 258.
=Coldrum= (or =Trottescliffe=), megalithic monument, 252-253 (and
note), and 236 (map).
=Colekitchen Combe=, passage of Old Road across, 177.
=Colley Farm=, Roman remains at, 197.
=---- Hill=, example of Old Road on crest of hill, 107;
described with map, 196.
=Compton=, probable diversion of Old Road through, by Pilgrimage,
95 (note); also 159, 160.
=Cotentin=, promontory of the, its value as a breakwater to the
'Second Crossing,' 46, 50;
height of shore hills upon, 48.
=Cotswolds=, the, their position in scheme of prehistoric road,
16, 23.
=Cowes=, as a harbour of Second Crossing, 55.
'=Crossing, Second=.' See '=Second Crossing=.'
=Cultivation= avoided by Old Road, exceptions to this, 148-149.
=Cuxton=, a possible crossing of the Medway, map, 236; its claims
discussed, 244.
=Darent=, river crossing, of, 219-225.
=Dark Ages=, reproduce barbaric conditions previous to Roman
Conquest, 65.
=Denbies Park=, clear trace of Old Road along edge of, 178.
=Detling=, 257.
=Domesday=, Worthies mentioned in, 121 (note);
three churches at Alresford mentioned in, 129;
Bishop Sutton mentioned in, 130;
Wrotham, Oxford, Charing mentioned in, 221.
=Dorking Lime Pits=, track lost after, 178.
=Dorsetshire Downs=, their position in scheme of prehistoric
roads, 16, 23.
=Dover=, Straits of, harbour of, originally an inlet, modern
artificial character of, 36.
See =Straits=.
=Downs=. See =North=, =South=, =Dorsetshire=.
=Drovers=, preserve old tracks by avoiding turnpike roads, 95;
their road to London after Shere confused with Old Road, 176.
=Dun Street=, near Eastwell Park, place-name significant of
passage of Old Road, 136 (note 2);
passed on journey, 262.
=Duthie=, his record of medieval road from Alresford to Alton,
136 (note 1).
=Eastwell Park=, preservation of Old Road, 82;
passage through on journey, 263.
=Ermine Street=, alluded to, 19;
less affected than Icknield Way by revolution of the twelfth
century, 87.
=Farnham=, marks ends of North Down Ridge, 26;
on original track of Old Road, 27;
strategical and political importance of, 153-154.
=Farnham Lane=, marks end of disused western portion of Old Road,
27.
=Flanking Roads=, 107.
=Folkestone=, one of modern harbours on northern shore of the
Straits, its artificial character, 36.
=Ford=, of Itchen at Itchen Stoke, discussed, 130-133 (and map);
of Wey at Shalford, position of, 166-167 (and map);
of Mole, discussed, 181-183;
of Medway, or crossing, fully discussed, 236-253.
=Fords=, Old Road chooses those approached by a spur on either
side, 111.
=Fordwych=, original limit of tide on Stour, 43.
=Fosse Way=, alluded to, 19;
begins to disappear with advent of Middle Ages, 87.
=Froyle=, passage of Old Road by, 152.
=Gatton=, exceptional passage of Old Road to north of crest at,
106 (note);
speculation on history of, 201;
track of Old Road through, and passage to north of crest
described, 199 (note), 202-203.
=Geological conditions= of exit from Winchester, 122;
of upper Wey valley, 152 (and note);
of Quarry Hangers, 205;
of crossing of Medway in general, 244-251;
of Snodland in particular, 250-251.
=Gilbert Street=, place-name suggesting passage of Old Road, 137.
=Glastonbury=, example of original importance of West Country, 22.
=Gloucester=, medieval tax on iron at, 20.
=Godmersham=, exceptional passage of Old Road to north of crest
at, 106 (note);
track of Road at, 267-269 (and map).
=Goodnestone=, village of, geographical centre of Kentish ports,
why unsuitable as a political centre, 42.
=Goodwin Sands=, probably prehistoric, 39.
=Greystone Lime Pits=, Merstham, recovery of Old Road at, 206.
'=Grey Wethers=,' name of platform beyond Medway opposite Wrotham,
233.
=Grésivaudan=, example of advantage of Partial Isolation, 30.
=Gris Nez=, look-out towards English shore, 32;
forbids harbours near it, but provides shelter to eastward
coast, 34.
=Gomshall=, doubt as to passage of Old Road at, 176.
'=Habits=,' of the Old Road, list of, 104-113.
=Hamble, River=, as a harbour of the 'Second Crossing,' 54.
=Harbours=, multiplicity of, in Straits of Dover, produced by
complexity of tides, 31, 32, 35;
list of original and modern, on northern shore of the Straits,
35;
of Southampton Water, Solent, and Spithead, excellence of, 55;
list of, on Solent and Southampton Water, 55.
=Harrietsham=, 257.
=Hart Hill=, Old Road recovered at, 258.
=Hastings=, mirage at, alluded to, 34.
=Haverfield=, his map giving Roman road from north gate of
Winchester, 124 (note).
=Headbourne Worthy=, arguments for and against its standing
on Old Road, 120-125;
mentioned in Domesday, 121.
=High Cross=, compared to Gatton, 201.
=Hills=, ranges of, correspond with prehistoric roads, 15-16
(with map);
crest of, usually avoided by Old Road, 106.
=Hoborough=, Roman remains in, 253 (note 2).
=Hog's Back=, hill near Farnham, continues range of North Downs,
26;
affords example of turnpike protecting Old Road, 96;
excellent example of 'Flanking Road,' 107;
passage of Old Road along, 156 _et seq._
=Hollingbourne=, 257.
=Horizons=, of Barfleur and St. Catherine's, 48 (map), 50.
'=Hundred Stones=,' the, megalithic monument, 254 (note 2).
=Hyde Abbey=, site and ruins of, 123-125.
=Icknield Way=, alluded to, 22;
begins to disappear in Middle Ages, 87.
=Inns=, Anchor, Chequers, Jolly Farmer, Kentish Drover, etc. See
under these names.
=Iron=, its early production in West England, 23;
in the Sussex Weald, 24.
=Islands=, examples of advantages of Partial Isolation, 31.
=Isle of Wight=, its projection southward invites 'Second
Crossing,' 46;
importance of St. Catherine's Hill in, 51;
harbours of, and reef off Ventnor, 55.
=Isolation=, Partial, Geographical, political advantages of, 22-31.
=Itchen Abbas=, origin of name, 126;
Roman villa discovered near, 126 (note);
passed on our journey, 125.
=Itchen=, river, continuation of Southampton Water, 56;
compared to Stour, 68, 69;
made navigable by Lucy, 130;
view of, from Alresford Hill, 133-134;
crossing of, at Itchen Stoke, 130-133 (and map).
=---- Valley of=, forms Winchester to Farnham Road, 60.
=Itchen Stoke=, old church of, passage of Old Road to south
of, 110;
site and date of destruction of, 126.
=---- Ford at=, Old Road passes Itchen by, 128-133 (and map);
passed on our journey, 132.
=Jews= occupied principal street of Winchester, 118;
their wealth in early Middle Ages, 118 (note).
=Jolly Farmer=, Inn at Puttenham, 160.
=Kemsing=, manor of, 226;
on map, 227.
=Kent=, shape of, forces Old Road westward, 18;
causes complexity of tides in Straits of Dover, 31-32.
=Kentish Drover=, the, 253 (note 1).
=King's Worthy=, church of, passage of Old Road to south of, 110;
mentioned in Domesday, 121 (note);
its situation on Old Road discussed, 120-125;
passed on our journey, 125.
=Kit's Coty House=, referred to, 248 (note 1);
visited, 253, 254.
=Knockholt Farm=, east of Chilham, Old Road recovered at, 270.
=Land-fall=, importance of, 52.
=Landlords=, their conservation of antiquities, 82.
=Lead=, mined in early times in the north, 19;
in the west, 20.
=Len, River=, 259.
=Lenham=, traces of flanking road above, 107;
church of, example of passage to north, 111;
passed, 257.
=Lime Pits=, =Dorking=, =Betchworth=, etc., see under their
separate names;
a mark of Old Road, 192-193.
=London=, growth of importance of as Roman rule failed, 65;
ousts Winchester, 87.
=Longnose Point=, alluded to, 38.
=Lower Halling=, a crossing of the Medway, its claims discussed,
248-249;
and map, 236.
=Lucy=, Bishop of Winchester, renders Itchen navigable, 130.
=Lymington=, as a harbour of Second Crossing, 54.
=Lympne.= See =Portus Lemanis=.
=Maiden Way=, alluded to, 19.
=Marden Park=, track of Old Road round, and map, 211.
=Margery Wood=, passage of Old Road by, 198.
=Martyrs' Worthy=, passed on journey, 125.
=Medina=, river, as a harbour of the 'Second Crossing,' 54.
=Medstead=, watershed near, mentioned, 113.
=Medway, River=, crossing of, fully discussed, with map, 236-253.
=---- Valley of=, view over, from Wrotham described, 231-233.
=Megalithic Monument.= See =Kit's Coty House=, =Addington=,
=Coldrum=, etc.
=Mendips=, their importance as a metallic centre, 20.
=Merstham=, probable diversion of Old Road at, by Pilgrimage,
95 (note);
example of church passed to south, 110.
=---- House=, passage of Old Road through grounds of, 204.
=Metals=, mined originally in West England, 19.
=Method of Reconstruction of Old Road=, 100-104.
=Mole=, river, point of crossing discussed, 181-183;
with map, 182.
=Monk's Hatch=, passage of Old Road through, 162.
=Neolithic Man=, his principal seat on green-sand south of North
Downs, 23;
endurance of relics of, 73.
=North Country=, not important in early times, 19.
=---- Downs=, their position in scheme of prehistoric roads, 16;
the original and necessary platform of the Old Road, 24-25
(with map);
view of these from Wrotham, 231;
'funnel' formed by them at passage of Medway, 237;
road leaves them after Charing, 260.
=---- Street=, place-name suggesting passage of Old Road, 137.
=Old Road=, why the most important of English prehistoric roads,
17-24;
its first track sketched, 25;
why it ended at Canterbury, 31-42;
why it began at Winchester, 44-58;
short cut from Winchester to Farnham gradually superseded
original western portion, 59-61 (with map);
final form of, 62 (with map);
causes of preservation of, 72-99;
proportion of known to unknown, 100-101 (with map);
characteristics or 'habits' of, 104-113.
its track from north gate of Winchester to King's Worthy,
120-125;
coincidence of, with modern road from King's Worthy to Itchen
Stoke, 124;
arguments in favour of its crossing the Itchen at Itchen Stoke,
127-132;
recovering of lost portion in Ropley Valley, 132-136;
corresponds to high-road after Alton, causes of this, 149-154;
diversion at Puttenham, 158;
crosses Wey, 163-166;
passes St. Martha's, north of Weston Wood, Albury Park, 170-175;
crosses Mole at Pixham Mill, 180-183;
passes Betchworth Pits, 188;
lost after Merstham and recovered, 204-207;
discussion of track near Marden Park, 211;
and across Titsey Park, 214-216;
its loss after Chevening, 217;
typical section of, 225-230 (with map);
its crossing of Medway discussed, 236-253;
clear along Downs to Charing, 256-260;
crosses Eastwell Park, Boughton Aluph, Godmersham, Chilham
Park, 263-269;
lost for two miles east of Chilham, 270-271 (and map);
passes Bigberry Camp, 273;
enters Canterbury by Westgate, 277.
=Old Wives' Lees=, doubts as to passage of Old Road by, 270-271
(and map).
=Ordie=, Domesday name for 'Worthy,' 121 (note).
=Ordnance Map=, 6-inch to the mile, probably wrong in track of
Roman Road from north gate of Winchester, 124 (note);
error in track given from Arthur's Seat to Oxted railway
cutting, 213.
=Ordnance Map=, 1/2500, references to fields at Ropley, 138
(notes 1, 2, 3), 139 (note);
at Puttenham, 158 (note);
Weston Wood, 174 (note);
doubts as to track given by it through Albury Park, 174;
recovery of Old Road after Gomshall, 177 (note);
probable error east of Shere, 176;
crossing of Mole, 183 (note);
crest of Colley Hill, 197;
error of, in regard to Gatton Park, 199 (note);
Merstham to Quarry Hangers, 207 (note);
east of Marden Park, 212 (note);
east of Chevening, 218 (note);
passage of Medway, 253 (note);
error of, east and north of Eastwell Park, and east and north
of Boughton Aluph church, 265-266 (notes 1 and 2).
=Otford=, passage of Old Road through, 218;
battles of, 220;
palace of, 220, 221.
=Oxted=, error caused by approach of pilgrimage to plain of,
95 (note).
=Oxted Railway Cutting=, track of Old Road from Marden Park to,
211-212 (and map).
=Paddlesworth=, passage of Old Road, 253 (note 1).
=Palace= of Archbishops of Canterbury at Otford, 220-223.
=Park=, =Albury=, =Monk's Hatch=, =Denbies=, =Gatton=, =Merstham=,
=Titsey=, =Chevening=, =Stede Hill=, =Eastwell=, =Godmersham=,
=Chilham=. See under these names.
=Pebble Combe=, passage of Old Road across, 194-196 (and map).
=Pilgrimage=, to shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, preserves the
Old Road, 76-81;
change of date of, 91;
rapid development of, 91-92;
ancient sites restored by, 93;
but also prehistoric track sometimes confused by list of places
so affected, 96 (and note);
example at Ropley of its recovery of Old Road, 136 (and note);
confuses record of passing of River Mole, 181;
diversion caused to Road after Merstham, 205;
and Old Wives' Lees, 271.
=Pilgrim's Lane=, near Merstham, 205.
=Pixham Mill=, Old Road crosses Mole at, 182 (map), and 183
(note).
=Porchester=, example of Roman use of 'Second Crossing,' 55.
=Portsmouth=, as a harbour of the 'Second Crossing,' 54.
=Portus Adurni=, possibly origin of a track to London, 200;
doubts on its equivalence to Shoreham, 200.
=Portus Lemanis=, the modern Lympne, perhaps original of Old
Road, 27;
its connection with the earliest crossing of the Straits, 35.
=Puttenham=, apparent exception to straightness of Old Road at,
mentioned, 105;
example of church passed to south, 110;
medieval market at, 158;
diversion of Old Road at, discussed, 159-161 (and map);
neolithic and bronze remains at, 161.
=Quarley Hill=, on original track of Old Road, 27.
=Quarry Hangers=, east of Red Hill, too steep to take Old Road,
205, 206;
arrival at summits of, 207.
=Ramsgate=, one of modern harbours on northern shore of Straits,
its artificial character, 36.
=Reconstruction of Old Road.= See '=Method=.'
=Reculvers=, one of original harbours in connection with crossing
Straits of Dover, 35.
=Reef=, of Calvados, 50;
off Ventnor, 55.
=Reformation=, effect of, on Old Road, 221-224.
=Reigate=, derivation of name of, and relation to Old Road, 199.
=Religion=, effect of a road on development of, 7;
effect of Dark Ages on, in Britain, 80;
preserves and recovers Old Road, 92-94.
=Representative System=, monastic origin of, 86.
=Richborough=, one of original harbours on northern shore of the
Straits, 35 (Rutupiae);
alternative harbour in original crossing, 36.
=Road=, the, primeval importance of, 4-5.
=---- Old.= See '=Old Road=.'
=Road, Roman.= See '=Roman Road=.'
=---- Flanking.= See '=Flanking Roads=.'
=---- Turnpike.= See '=Turnpike=.'
=Roads, prehistoric=, in England, correspond to five hill ranges,
15 (with map);
difficulty of recovering, 74-75;
especially preserved in Britain, 78;
and their destruction in twelfth century, 84, 85.
=Roman Britain=, imperfect occupation of, 76, 77.
=Roman Coins=, discovery of, at Gatton, 203;
at Boxley, 253 (note 2).
=Roman Remains=, near Itchen Abbas, 126 (and note);
near Farnham, 153;
at Colley Farm and Walton Heath, 197;
at Titsey Park, 214;
at Lower Halling, Snodland, Burham, Little Culand, 251;
Plaxtol and Thurnham, Boxley, 253 (note 2).
=Roman Road=, definite character of a, 74;
from Winchester to Silchester, site of, 119, 124 (and note);
conjectural from Portus Adurni to London, 200;
at base of Upwood Scrubbs, 208.
=Ropley=, passage of Pilgrimage through, and position on Old Road,
136 (and note);
valley of, track of Old Road through, 137 (map).
=Rutupiae.= See =Reculvers=.
=Rye=, one of original harbours on northern shores of Straits, 35.
=St. Catherine's Chapel=, near Guildford, discussed in connection
with passage of River Wey, 163-165.
=---- Down=, in Isle of Wight. See '=Isle of Wight=.'
=---- Hill=, camp at Winchester, compared to Bigberry Camp, 70.
=St. Martha's=, doubtful whether passed to north or south, 110;
derivation of name, 170;
described, passed, 172.
=St. Swithin=, his shrine at Winchester, 71.
=St. Thomas à Becket=, his shrine at Canterbury destroys that of
St. Swithin at Winchester, 71;
pilgrimage to tomb of, see '=Pilgrimage=';
his martyrdom, turning-point of twelfth century, 89;
date of martyrdom, jubilee and translation, 91;
his chapel at Reigate, 200.
=Salisbury Plain=, area of convergence of prehistoric roads, 16.
=Sandwich=, one of harbours on northern shore of Straits, 35.
=Scilly Isles=, their identification with Cassiterides doubtful,
20.
'=Second Crossing=,' passage of Channel from Cotentin to Wight
so called, 46;
its advantages, 48;
map of, 49;
high land marking either shore, 50-51;
great advantage of its English harbours, 55;
the direct route to the centre at Salisbury Plain, 56;
principal cause of development of Winchester, _ibid._
=Seale=, church of, passage of Old Road as near as possible to
south of, 110;
passed, 157.
=Seine=, estuary of, its importance in production of Second
Crossing, 48, 49 (and map).
=Severn=, valley of, importance as metallic centre, 20.
=Shalford=, Becket's fair at, 158;
passage of Wey at, discussed, 164-167 (and map).
=Shere=, church of, passage of Old Road to south of, doubtful, 110;
probable track of Old Road through, described, 175.
=Shoelands=, passed on journey, 157;
significance of name, 157.
=Shrines=, of Winchester and Canterbury compared, 71;
of St. Thomas à Becket. See '=St Thomas=.'
=Snodland=, church of, passage of Old Road to south of, 110;
crossing of Medway at, discussed, 248-253 (and map), 236.
=South Country=, originally wealthiest portion of the island,
23, 24.
=Southampton Water, Solent, and Spithead=, regarded as one
harbour, north of 'Second Crossing,' 55.
=South Downs=, their position in scheme of prehistoric roads, 16.
=Stane Street=, example of evidences of a Roman road, 74;
disuse in Middle Ages, 87;
crosses Mole at Burford Bridge, 185.
=Stoke=, meaning of, in place-names, 127.
=Stonehenge=, and Avebury, mark convergence of prehistoric
roads, 16;
original starting-point of Old Road, 27.
=Stour, River=, importance of in development of Canterbury,
42, 43;
compared to Itchen, 68, 69;
source in Lenham, 259;
entry of Old Road into valley of, 260, 262.
=Straits of Dover=, importance of, to England alluded to, 17;
discussed at length, 29-40;
complexity of tides in, 32;
opposite shores visible, 32;
original harbours of, 35;
original crossing of, 37-39.
=Street=, =Stane=, =Ermine=, =Watling=. See under these names.
=Street=, in place-names indicates passage of a road, 136 (and
note 2).
=Swegen=, his march through the Worthies, 126.
=Thomas à Becket, St.= See '=St. Thomas=.'
=Ticino=, example of advantage of partial isolation, 30.
=Tide=, multiplicity of harbours due to their complexity, 31-32;
in Straits of Dover, 37-39;
limit of, on Stour, 43;
and on Itchen, forming Canterbury and Winchester, 68;
political importance of limit of, _e.g._ at Snodland, 252.
=Tin=, mined originally in Cornwall, 20.
=Titsey Church=, old, example of church passed to south by Old
Road, 110;
passed on journey, 216.
=---- Park=, discoveries in, mentioned, 82;
flanking road on hills to east of, 107;
Roman remains of, and passage of Old Road through, 214.
=Towns=, inland, advantages for defence over seaports, 67;
avoided by Old Road, exceptions to this, 149.
=Trottescliffe.= See =Coldrum=.
=Turnpike Roads=, second cause of preservation of Old Road, 76, 95.
=Twelfth Century=, revolution of the, 84-87.
=Upwood Scrubbs=, near Caterham, Old Road lost in, 208.
=Valleys=, examples of advantages of partial isolation, 31;
of Wey, Itchen, Darent, Medway, etc. See under these names.
=Varne=, sand-buoy, alluded to, 37.
=Walton Heath=, Roman remains at, 197.
=Watershed=, method of crossing one, 60-61;
that between Itchen and Wey, 61-62 (and map);
proximity of, to Medstead, 113;
direct approach to, an argument for Itchen Stoke Ford, 131;
also for coincidence of Old Road with Brisland Lane, 135;
how approached from Ropley valley, 137 (and map);
passed on journey, 140;
map of, in detail, 143;
of Medway and Stour, 259.
=Watling Street=, alluded to, 18;
preserved when others disappeared in twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, 86.
=Wells=, in churches, list of, 57 (note).
=Welsh Road=, preserved, like the Old Road, by turnpikes, 95-96.
=West Country=, importance of, in early times, 19-22;
spirit of, 21.
=Weston=, or =Albury Wood=, Old Road passes to north of,
106 (note);
this part of road described in journey, 173.
=Weston Street=, old name for Albury, significant of passage of
Old Road, 136 (note 2).
=West Street=, near Lenham, place-name significant of passage of
Old Road, 136 (note 2).
=Wey River=, discussion of how crossed by Old Road near Shalford,
164-167 (and map).
=----= valley of, forms Winchester to Farnham road, 60;
its geological conditions beyond Alton, 152 (and note);
coincidence of Old and modern road in, 149-152 (and map);
Roman remains in, 153.
=Whitchurch=, on original track of Old Road, 27.
=Whiteways=, point in Hog's Back where Old Road branches from
Turnpike, 156.
=Wight, Isle of.= See '=Isle of Wight=.'
=Winchelsea=, one of original harbours on northern shore of
Straits, 35.
=Winchester=, why the origin of Old Road in its final form,
causes of development of, 45-57;
inland town of the Second Crossing, 56;
great age of, 56;
compared to Chartres, 57;
compared with Canterbury, 66-71;
beginning of decay of, after twelfth century, 87;
arrangement of Roman streets in, 117;
site of north gate of, 118.
=Winds=, prevailing in Straits of Dover, 33;
effect of, on original crossing, 34;
prevailing, of 'Second Crossing,' 48 (map), 49.
=Worthies=, =Headbourne=, =King's=, =Martyrs'=. See under these
names.
=Wrotham=, relation of, to Old Road, 226-227 (and map);
view from, 231-233.
=Wye=, in Kent, why unsuitable as a centre for Kentish ports,
42-44.
=Yaldham=, relation of, to Old Road, 226, 227 (and map).
=Yarmouth=, in Isle of Wight one of harbours of Second Crossing,
54.
=Yews=, often mark Old Road, 103;
indicate recovery of road at Box Hill, 186.
=Yew Walk=, at Albury, mentioned, 174.
=York=, why Roman capital, 65.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Old Road" ***
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