Part 10

[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.

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.