Читать книгу The Collected Works - Hilaire Belloc - Страница 21

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.

AND BEYOND, THE WHOLE OF THE WEALD

It is possible that a way from the Portus Adurni29 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.