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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 field22 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.