Part 12
The road goes parallel to and above the line where the sharp spring of the hill leaves the floor of the valley; it commands a sufficient view of what is below and of what lies before; it is well on the chalk, just too high to interfere with cultivation, at least with the cultivation of those lower levels to which the Middle Ages confined themselves; it is well dried by an exposure only a little west of south; it is well drained by the slope and by the porous soil; it is uninterrupted by combes, or any jutting promontories, for the range of the hills is here exactly even. In a word, it here possesses every character which may be regarded as normal to the original trail from the west of England to the Straits of Dover.
The villages which lie immediately below it are all at much the same distance--from a quarter to half a mile: it can be said to traverse one alone--Detling, and this it passes through to the north. The others, Harrietsham, Hollingbourne, Lenham, Charing, are left just to the south. They are now connected by the high-road which joins up the valley, and were once, it may be presumed, isolated from each other by the common fields and the waste of each village, or if connected, connected only by paths. They may have depended, during many centuries, for their intercommunication, upon the Old Road, to which each of them possesses a definitely marked line of approach: and the Old Road remains the typical main artery, which passes near, but not through, the places it serves.[38]
This thirteen miles of the way is often vague, and is indeed actually broken at one point between Cobham Farm and Hart Hill, a mile and a half east of Charing; but it is a gap which presents no difficulty. The alignment is precisely the same before and after it; it is but seven furlongs in extent; it has been caused by the comparatively recent ploughing of this land during the two generations of our history when food was dear.
From Boxley to Lenham the plain beneath the Old Road is drained by a stream called the Len, tributary to the Medway. Just before or at Lenham is the watershed: a parting of no moment, not a ridge, hardly observable to one standing above it on the hillside. It is the dividing line between the basins of the Medway and the Stour. All the hydrography of south-eastern England presents this peculiarity. The watersheds are low; the bold ranges do not divide the river-basins, because the water system is geologically older than the Chalk Hills.
The Stour rises in Lenham itself, but its course has at first no effect upon the landscape, so even is the plain below. A village, which preserves the great Norman name of the Malherbes, stands on the watershed: the whole flat saddle is a rich field diversified by nothing more than slight rolls of land, in between which the spring comes as though up from a warmer earth, long before it touches the hills.
It is peculiar in England, this county of Kent, and especially its valleys. I had known it hitherto only as a child, a stranger, but no one who has so visited it in childhood can forget the sheep in the narrow lanes, or the leaning cones of the hop-kilns against the sky: the ploughlands under orchards: all the Kentish Weald.
At Charing the great hills begin to turn a corner. The Stour also turns, passes through a wide gap, and from east and south begins to make north and east straight for Canterbury; henceforward the spirit of Canterbury and the approach to it occupies the road.
We had reached the end of that long, clean-cut ridge which we had followed all the way from Farnham, the ridge which the four rivers had pierced in such well-defined gaps. Charing is the close of that principal episode in the life of the Way.
Charing again was the last convenient halt in any rich man's journey until, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. It is something under sixteen miles from Canterbury, following the track of the Old Road, and even the poor upon their pilgrimages would have halted there; though the slow progress of their cumbersome caravans may have forced them to a further repose at Chilham before the city was reached.
Charing, therefore, was designed by its every character to be a place of some importance, and was a very conscious little town.
It counts more in Domesday than any other of the valley villages between Maidstone and the cathedral; it possessed the greatest and the first of those archiepiscopal palaces, the string of which we came on first at Otford; it has a church once magnificent and still remarkable after its rebuilding, and it maintains to this day an air of prosperity and continued comfort. The inn is one of the best inns to be found on all this journey; the whole village may be said, in spite of its enemies,[39] to be livelier in the modern decay than the other remote parishes of that plain.
We had imagined, before seeing the ground, that, after Charing, we should have some difficulty in tracing the Old Road.
The Ordnance map, which has given it the traditional name of the Pilgrim's Road all through this valley, not only drops the title immediately after Charing, but, for some reason I do not understand, omits to mark it at all along the skirts of Longbeech wood.
When we came to follow it up, however, we found it a plainly-marked lane, leading at much the same height round the shoulder of the hill, to the western lodge of Lord Gerrard's park. Just before we entered that park two local names emphasised the memories of the road: the cottage called 'Chapel' and the word 'Street' in 'Dun Street' at the lodge.
Within the fence of this park it is included. For nearly a mile the fence of the park itself runs on the embankment of the Old Road. At the end of that stretch, the fence turns a sharp angle outwards, and for the next mile and a half, the road, which is here worn into the clearest of trenches and banks, goes right across the park till it comes out on the eastern side a few yards to the south of the main gates. The Old Road thus turns a gradual corner, following the curve of the Stour valley.
The modern road from Charing to Canterbury cuts off this corner, and saves a good two miles or three, but the reasons which caused men in the original condition of the country to take the longer course of the Old Road are not far to seek.
There is, first, that motive which we have seen to be universal, the dryness of the road, which could only be maintained upon the southern side of the hill.
Next, it must be noted that these slopes down to the Stour were open when the plateau above was dense forest. This in its turn would mean a group of villages--such a group is lacking even to this day to the main road, and the way would naturally follow where the villages lay.
Finally, the water-supply of the plateau was stagnant and bad; that of the valley was a good running stream.
In its passage through Eastwell Park, the road passed near the site of the house, and it passed well north of the church, much as it had passed north of the parishes in the valley we had just left. This would lead one to conjecture, I know not with what basis of probability, that a village once existed near the water around the church at the bottom of the hill. If it did, no trace of it now remains, but whether (already in decay) it was finally destroyed, as some have been by enclosure, or whether the church, being the rallying-point of a few scattered farmhouses (as is more often the case), was enclosed without protest and without hurt to its congregation, I have no means of determining. It is worth noting, that no part of the Old Road is enclosed for so great a length as that which passes from the western to the eastern lodge of Eastwell Park. Nearly two miles of its course lies here within the fence of a private owner.
It is odd to see how little of the road has fallen within private walls. In Hampshire nothing of it is enclosed; in Surrey, if we except the few yards at Puttenham, and the garden rather than the park at Monk's Hatch, it has been caught by the enclosures of the great landlords in four places alone: Albury, Denbies, Gatton, and Titsey. It passes, indeed, through the gardens of Merstham House, but that only for a very short distance.
In Kent, Chevening has absorbed it for now close upon a century; then it remains open land as far as this great park of Eastwell, and, as we shall see, passes later through a portion of Chilham.
Clear as the road had been throughout Eastwell Park (and preserved possibly by its enclosure), beyond the eastern wall it entirely disappears. The recovery of it, rather more than half a mile further on, the fact that one recovers it on the same contour-line, that the contour-line is here turned round the shoulder of the hill which forms the entrance into the valley of the Stour, give one a practical certainty that the Old Road swept round a similar curve, but the evidence is lost.[40]
The portion near Boughton Aluph is perfectly clear; it goes right up under the south porch. It has disappeared again under the plough in the field between the church and Whitehill Farm. There it has been cut, as we had found it so often in the course of our journey, by a quarry. Another field has lost it again under the plough; it reappears on the hillside beyond in a line of yews.[41] But within a hundred yards or so there arises a difficulty which gave rise to some discussion among us.
A little eastward of us, on the way we had to go, the range of hills throws out one of those spurs with a re-entrant curve upon the far side, which we had previously discovered in Surrey above Red Hill and Bletchingly. It was our experience that the Old Road, when it came to an obstacle of this kind, made for the neck of the promontory and cut off the detour by passing just north of the crest. The accompanying sketch will explain the matter.
We knew from the researches of others that the road was certainly to be found again at the spot marked A. It was our impression, from a previous study of the map, that the trail would make straight for this point from the place where I was standing (X). But we were wrong. At this point the road turned _up_ the hill, its track very deeply marked, lined with trees, and at the top with yews of immense antiquity. The cause of this diversion was apparent when we saw that the straight line I had expected the road to follow would have taken it across a ravine too shallow for the contours of the Ordnance map to indicate, but too steep for even a primitive trail to have negotiated. And this led me to regret that we had not maps of England such as they have for parts of Germany, Switzerland, and France, which give three contour-lines to every 100 feet, or one to every 10 metres.
We followed up the hill, then, certain that we had recovered the Old Road. It took the crest of the hill, went across the open field of Soakham, plunged into a wood, and soon led us to the point marked upon my sketch as A, where any research of ours was no longer needed. It is from this place that a man after all these hundred miles can first see Canterbury.
We looked through the mist, down the hollow glen towards the valley between walls of trees. We thought, perhaps, that a dim mark in the haze far off was the tower of the Cathedral--we could not be sure. The woods were all round us save on this open downward upon which we gazed, and below us in its plain the discreet little river the Stour. The Way did not take us down to that plain, but kept us on the heights above, with the wood to our left, and to our right the palings of Godmersham.
We had already learnt, miles westward of this, that the Old Road does not take to the crest of a hill without some good reason, but that once there it often remains, especially if there is a spur upon which it can fall gently down to the lower levels.
The lane we were following observed such a rule. It ran along the north of Godmersham Park, just following the highest point of the hill, and I wondered whether here, as in so many other places, it had not formed a natural boundary for the division of land; but I have had no opportunity of examining the history of this enclosure. Chilham Park marches with Godmersham; where one ends and the other begins the road passed through the palings (and we with it) and went on in the shape of a clear ridge, planted often with trees, right down to the mound on which stands Chilham Castle.
Down in the valley below, something much older bore witness to the vast age of this corner of inhabited land: the first barrow to be opened in England; the tomb in which Camden (whom Heaven forgive) thought that a Roman soldier lay; in which the country people still believe that the great giant Julaber was buried, but which is the memorial of something far too old to have a name.
This castle and this grave are the entry into that host of antiquities which surrounds upon every side the soil of Canterbury. In every point of the views which would strike us in the last few miles, the history of this island would be apparent.
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From the mound on which Chilham Castle stands to the farm called Knockholt, just two miles away, is what I believe to be a gap in the Old Road, and I will give my reasons for that conviction. Did I not hold it, my task would be far easier, for all the maps give the Way continuously from point to point.
Up to the mound of Chilham the path is clear. After Knockholt it is equally clear, and has, for that matter, been studied and mapped by the highest authority in England.[42] But to bridge the space between is not as easy as some writers would imagine.
It will be apparent from this sketch-map that between Chilham and Knockholt there rises a hill. On the south-east of it flows the Stour, with the modern main road alongside of it; on the north two lanes, coming to an angle, lead through a hamlet called Old Wives' Lees.
There is a tradition that the pilgrims of the later Middle Ages went through Chilham and then turned back along these northern lanes, passing through Old Wives' Lees. This tradition may be trusted. They may have had some special reason, probably some devotional reason, for thus going out of their way, as we found them to have had at Compton. If their action in this is a good guide (as their action usually is) to the trace of the Old Road, well and good; there is then no appreciable gap, for a path leads to Knockholt and could only correspond to the Old Road; but I should imagine that here, as at Merstham, the pilgrims may have deceived us. They may have made a detour for the purpose of visiting some special shrine, or for some other reason which is now forgotten. It is difficult to believe that a prehistoric trail would turn such sharp corners, for the only time in all this hundred and twenty miles, without some obvious reason, and that it should choose for the place in which to perform this evolution the damp and northern side of a rather loamy hill. I cannot but believe that the track went over the side of the hill upon the southern side, but I will confess that if it did so there is here the longest and almost the only unbridged gap in the whole of the itinerary. I am confirmed in my belief that it went over the southern side from the general alignment, from the fact that the known path before Chilham goes to the south of the castle mound, that this would lead one to the south of the church, and so over the southern shoulder of the hill; but, if it did so, ploughed land and the careful culture of hop-gardens have destroyed all traces of it. I fancied that something could be made of an indication about a quarter of a mile before Knockholt Farm, but I doubt whether it was really worth the trouble of examining.[43]
From the farm, right up through Bigberry Wood, we were on a track not only easy to recognise, but already followed, as I have said, by the first of authorities upon the subject.
We came after a mile of the wood to the old earthwork which was at once the last and the greatest of the prehistoric remains upon the Old Road, and the first to be connected with written history.
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It was a good place to halt: to sit on the edge of the gravelly bank, which had been cast up there no one knows how many centuries ago, and to look eastward out towards Canterbury.
The fort was not touched with the memory of the Middle Ages: it was not our goal, for that was the church of St. Thomas, but it was the most certain and ancient thing of all that antiquity which had been the meaning of the road, and it stood here on the last crest of so many heights from which we had seen so many valleys in these eight days.
History and the prehistoric met at this point only.
Elsewhere we had found very much of what men had done before they began to write down their deeds. We had passed the barrows and the entrenchments, and the pits from whence coins with names, but without a history or a date, had been dug, and we had trodden on hard ground laid down at fords by men who had left no memory. We had seen also a very great many battlefields of which record exists. We had marched where Sweyn marched; Cheriton had been but a little way upon our right; we had seen Alton; the Roman station near Farnham had stood above us; the great rout of Ockley had lain not far off below our passage of the Mole; and we had recalled the double or treble memory of Otford, and of the Medway valley, where the invader perpetually met the armies of the island.
But in all these there were two clean divisions: either the thing was archaic--a subject for mere guess-work; or it was clear history, with no prehistoric base that we knew of behind it.
On this hill the two categories mingled, and a bridge was thrown between them. For it was here that the Roman first conquered. This was that defence which the Tenth Legion stormed: the entrenchment which was the refuge for Canterbury; and the river which names the battle was that dignified little stream the Stour, rolling an even tide below.
The common people, who have been thought to be vacant of history, or at the best to distort it, have preserved a memory of this fight for two thousand years.
I remembered as I sat there how a boy, a half-wit, had told me on a pass in Cumberland that a great battle had been fought there between two kings; he did not know how long ago, but it had been a famous fight. I did not believe him then, but I know now that he had hold of a tradition, and the king who fought there was not a George or a James, but Rufus, eight hundred years before. As I considered these things and other memories halting at this place, I came to wish that all history should be based upon legend. For the history of learned men is like a number of separate points set down very rare upon a great empty space, but the historic memories of the people are like a picture. They are one body whose distortion one can correct, but the mass of which is usually sound in stuff, and always in spirit.
Thinking these things I went down the hill with my companions, and I reoccupied my mind with the influence of that great and particular story of St. Thomas, whose shadow had lain over the whole of this road, until in these last few miles it had come to absorb it altogether.
The way was clear and straight like the flight of a bolt; it spanned a steep valley, passed a windmill on the height beyond, fell into the Watling Street (which here took on its alignment), and within a mile turned sharp to the south, crossed the bridge, and through the Westgate led us into Canterbury.
We had thoroughly worked out the whole of this difficult way. There stood in the Watling Street, that road of a dreadful antiquity, in front of a villa, an omnibus. Upon this we climbed, and feeling that a great work was accomplished, we sang a song. So singing, we rolled under the Westgate, and thus the journey ended.
* * * * *
There was another thing to be duly done before I could think my task was over. The city whose name and spell had drawn to itself all the road, and the shrine which was its core remained to be worshipped. The cathedral and the mastery of its central tower stood like a demand; but I was afraid, and the fear was just. I thought I should be like the men who lifted the last veil in the ritual of the hidden goddess, and having lifted it found there was nothing beyond, and that all the scheme was a cheat; or like what those must feel at the approach of death who say there is nothing in death but an end and no transition. I knew what had fallen upon the original soul of the place. I feared to find, and I found, nothing but stones.
I stood considering the city and the vast building and especially the immensity of the tower.
Even from a long way off it had made a pivot for all we saw; here closer by it appalled the senses. Save perhaps once at Beauvais, I had never known such a magic of great height and darkness.
It was as though a shaft of influence had risen enormous above the shrine: the last of all the emanations which the sacred city cast outwards just as its sanctity died. That tower was yet new when the commissioners came riding in, guarded by terror all around them, to destroy, perhaps to burn, the poor materials of worship in the great choir below: it was the last thing in England which the true Gothic spirit made. It signifies the history of the three centuries during which Canterbury drew towards it all Europe. But it stands quite silent and emptied of every meaning, tragic and blind against the changing life of the sky and those activities of light that never fail or die as do all things intimate and our own, even religions. I received its silence for an hour, but without comfort and without response. It seemed only an awful and fitting terminal to that long way I had come. It sounded the note of all my road--the droning voice of extreme, incalculable age.
As I had so fixed the date of this journey, the hour and the day were the day and hour of the murder. The weather was the weather of the same day seven hundred and twenty-nine years before: a clear cold air, a clean sky, and a little wind. I went into the church and stood at the edge of the north transept, where the archbishop fell, and where a few Norman stones lend a material basis for the resurrection of the past. It was almost dark.... I had hoped in such an exact coincidence to see the gigantic figure, huge in its winter swaddling, watching the door from the cloister, watching it unbarred at his command. I had thought to discover the hard large face in profile, still caught by the last light from the round southern windows and gazing fixedly; the choir beyond at their alternate nasal chaunt; the clamour; the battering of oak; the jangle of arms, and of scabbards trailing, as the troops broke in; the footfalls of the monks that fled, the sharp insults, the blows and Gilbert groaning, wounded, and à Becket dead. I listened for Mauclerc's mad boast of violence, scattering the brains on the pavement and swearing that the dead could never rise; then for the rush and flight from the profanation of a temple, and for distant voices crying outside in the streets of the city, under the sunset, 'The King's Men! The King's!'
But there was no such vision. It seems that to an emptiness so utter not even ghosts can return.
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