[1] The sacredness of wells is commingled all through Christendom with
that of altars. As, for instance, the wells in the cathedrals of
Chartres, of Nimes, of Sangres, and in St. Nicholas of Bari. In Notre
Dame at Poissy, in St. Eutropius at Santes (a Roman well), in the
Augustinian chapel at Avignon (now a barracks). In Notre Dame at
Etampes there are three wells. There is a well in St. Martin of Tours,
in the Abbey of Jobbes, in the Church of Gamache. Our Lady of the
Smithies at Orleans (now pulled down) had a well into which Ebroin
threw St. Leger, the Bishop; and close by at Patay there is one in St.
Sigismund's into which Chlodomir threw some one or other. Old Vendée
is full of such sacred wells. The parish church of Praebecq has one,
of Perique, of Challans (filled up in fourteenth century). At Cheffoi
you can see one in full use, right before the high altar and adorned
with a sculpture of the woman at the well--and this is but a short and
random list.
[2] See upon this abandoned portion Mr. Shore's article in the third
volume of the _Archæological Review_.
THE CAUSES OF THE PRESERVATION OF THE OLD ROAD; ITS GENERAL
CHARACTER, AND OUR APPLICATION OF THIS IN OUR METHOD OF
RECOVERING IT
We can regard Winchester, then, and Canterbury, as the point of
departure and the termination of the Old Road. We can be certain that
it would lie along the upper valleys of the Itchen and the Wey until
it struck the Hog's Back, and that thenceforward it would follow the
southern slope of the North Downs until these are cut by the river
Stour. From that point the last few miles to Canterbury would
naturally run parallel with, and in the valley of, the little Kentish
river.
But the task which is attempted in this book is more definite than
such a general scheme would convey. Many portions of the Old Road have
been preserved, many more have been recovered and mapped by the
researches of antiquarians; the remaining gaps alone was it our care
to explore and settle, until we should, if possible, have
reconstituted the whole ancient way, yard for yard, from the capital
of Hampshire to the capital of Kent. That was our business, and in
order that the reader may follow the more clearly my account of our
journey I shall, before beginning that account, set down here, at the
end of the present essay, the difficulty which the task presented, how
we were aided by certain causes which had conspired to preserve the
Old Road, what those causes were, and finally what method we applied
to the problem that lay before us.
All archæological research must necessarily repose upon evidence less
firm than that of true history, yet a great part of it deals with
things lying right to hand.
A barrow is an unmistakable thing. You open it and you find a tomb.
Whatever may be said of paleolithic man, neolithic man has left the
most enduring and indubitable evidence. He worked in the most
resisting of materials, and he worked well.
A Roman road is a definite thing. Its known dimensions are a guide for
our research: the known rules of the Roman engineers. The strata of
material, often the embankment, remain. Its long alignments have but
to be recovered in a couple of points to establish its direction
through a considerable stretch of country. Did a man but know the
ridge over Gumber Corner and down Bignor Hill, the Billingshurst Road,
the hard foundations through Dorking Churchyard, it would be enough to
make him certain of the Stane Street.
But of all the relics of antiquity the prehistoric road is the most
difficult to establish.
These old tracks, British, and (if the word has any meaning)
pre-British, though they must abound in the island, have become most
difficult to reconstitute.
The wild, half-instinctive trail of men who had but just taken on
humanity: later a known and common track, but a track still in the
hands of savages for countless generations, a road of this kind is
preserved by nothing stronger than habit. No mathematical calculation
presided at its origin, none can therefore be used to reconstruct it
when it has been lost. When (as in the last phase of the road which is
the subject of this book) religion may have prolonged its use into
historic times, that influence is capable indeed of perpetuating a
tradition; but though religion maintains a shrine or a legend it does
not add those consistent records of material works which are the best
guide for the research of posterity.
The Old Road was not paved; it was not embanked. Wherever the plough
has crossed it during the last four hundred years, the mark of it is
lost.
From the clay it has often disappeared: from marshy soil, always. On
the chalk alone has it preserved an unmistakable outline. Nor can it
be doubted that it would have vanished as completely as have so many
similar roads upon the Continent and in our own Midlands, had it not
been for one general, and three particular, influences which, between
them, have preserved a proportion of it sufficient to serve as a basis
for the exploration of the remainder.
The general influence was that political sequence by which England has
developed a peculiar power for retaining the evidences of her remote
past. The three particular influences were, first, the Canterbury
pilgrimage; secondly, the establishment of a system of turnpikes in
the eighteenth century; thirdly, and most important of all, the chalk.
Consider first the general influence: the effect of English society
upon this matter.
This little district of the world is a very museum of such primitive
things as lie at the basis of society: of such immaterial things as
our existing relics of barbaric polity: of such material things as
early systems of defence, the tombs of various forgotten races, the
first instruments of iron, bronze and stone; and of my own subject
here, the primeval track-ways, in what way has our political history
helped to preserve them?
The Empire held this province sufficiently to preserve, but not so
thoroughly as to destroy. The districts bounded but untraversed by the
great military roads which fed the frontier garrisons must have been
left in part autonomous; forbidden indeed to disturb the peace, but
not transformed by an ubiquitous administration.
Flourishing as were the very numerous towns, and large as their
combined populations must have been, they seem to have remained to the
end an archipelago surrounded as it were by a sea of forest and heath,
wherein could be found a thin but permanent population, preserving its
own language and its tribal system, in touch with the unconquered
tribes beyond the Grampians and the Irish Sea, and remaining to the
end but half-impressed with the stamp of Latin government.
The picture is but general; exceptions are numerous. Roman estates
were cultivated peacefully far from the towns, and certainly nothing
dangerous to the ruling man could befall him in the half-conquered
tracts of which I speak; but in the rough the picture is true.
Now such a state of things would have among other results this: that
it would not destroy the habits of the barbarians, it would
crystallise them.
Under such conditions a great activity and wealth accentuated the use
of a hundred pre-Roman things. The prosperity which the barbarians
enjoyed, the markets in the towns which they must have frequented,
would multiply their ancient instruments and would put to a continual
use their native trails; and these, as I have pointed out, were not to
any great extent overlaid by or forgotten in the new civilisation.
Whatever Gaulish track may have led from Paris to Orleans (and it is
historically certain that such a trail did run through the woods to
the south of Lutetia), or whatever old track-way was carried along the
north of the Apennines, both have wholly disappeared. The great
straight causeway of Rome cutting across the Beauce has killed the
one, the Æmilian Way the other. So it is throughout nearly all the
land which Rome developed, with the exception of this province; here
the fragments of a score of British track-ways survive.
When the Empire fell the nature of our decline equally preserved our
past. Alone of the Roman provinces the eastern half of Britain was
really ruined. It had been exposed for two centuries to the attacks
of pirates who came from the unconquered and inexhaustible north.
Remote, an Island, impoverished, the first of the frontiers to be
abandoned, it was at last overwhelmed: to what extent we can only
guess, and in what manner we cannot tell at all, but at any rate with
sufficient completeness to make us alone lose the Faith which is the
chief bond of civilisation.
The interval was short. There is still some glimmering of light in the
middle of the fifth century. In little more than a hundred years
communication was reestablished with the Continent, and before the
sixth century had closed St. Augustine had landed.
The anarchy had covered a gap no greater than the interval which
separates us from the Declaration of Independence, but it had been
sufficient to restore to the island the atmosphere of barbarism. There
was no Palace, nor any such central authority as everywhere else
maintained in the provinces the main traditions of Rome. In the west a
medley of Celtic, in the east a confusion of Teutonic dialects had
drowned the common medium of thought.
Religion itself when it returned was coloured by the simplicity and
folly of the ruin. In the west the unity of Christendom was hardly
comprehended, in the east the town of Rome became for the Anglo-Saxons
the subject of a sort of idolatry. Letters, geography, common history,
glass, and the use of half the metals were forgotten. Not till the
Latin re-conquest in the eleventh century was the evil overcome and an
organisation at last regained.
But this catastrophe, deplorable as it still remains to history, has
proved of the highest value to antiquarians. It produced indeed
fantastic legends, stories of the landing of the Horse and the Mare,
of Cerdic, Port, Cymric and Wightgar, which have disturbed our
national tradition, and which an ignorant bias has credited almost to
our own day: alone, therefore, of Western nations have we suffered a
real gap in our national story. On the other hand, this gap
re-created, as I have pointed out in a former page, those conditions
under which the primitive values of hill, wood, marsh, and river
reappeared.
The sight of such and such a group of ancient habitations, the meaning
to unprotected men of such and such a physical opportunity for
defence, in a word, all the influence which topography could exercise
on the rudest and most remote of our ancestors, grew real again in the
welter and breakdown which we call the Anglo-Saxon period. The
artifice and clear creative power of the Mediterranean races was gone:
it has never wholly returned to these shores; and what this time chose
for the building of cities or the use of roads or of places for
defence, is ever an excellent indication of what men had also done
long before the Romans came.
How our past has further been preserved by the shape and moulding of
the land I shall describe more fully in a further page. There remain
to be mentioned two political forces equally conservative. The first
is that species of lethargy and contempt which has forbidden us, as it
has forbidden every other aristocratic community, to destroy the
vestiges of its past. The second is a power more especial but closely
allied to this, I mean the influence of the few great owners of the
soil.
Whatever results of disorder and of public apathy may proceed from
the constitution of this class, and whatever historical learning may
have suffered from its power over the universities, prehistoric
research has secured from it the greatest advantage, for the landlords
of our villages have maintained the antiquities of their manors with
the force of a religion. The first barrow to be opened in England was
examined by the orders of a great landlord; the fine discoveries of
Titsey Park were directly due to the initiative of its owner, the
inheritor of Gresham's land. Albury preserves and dignifies one of the
critical portions of the Old Road; Eastwell another--and these are but
a few of the many that might be cited from this one track-way alone.
We may sum up and say that the political development of England has,
in a general fashion, preserved antiquity, and that we owe to it very
largely the survival of such relics as the Old Road.
But those particular causes, which have already been mentioned,
exercised a more powerful influence: the first of these was the Great
Pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, which arose
immediately after his murder in 1174.
To appreciate what that pilgrimage did for the preservation of the Old
Road one must grasp the twelfth century.
From just before its opening till a generation after its close, from
the final conquests of the Normans to the reign of St. Louis, from the
organising plan of Gregory VII. to the domination of Innocent III.,
from the first doubts of the barbaric schools to the united system of
the Summa, from the first troubled raising of the round arch in tiers
that attempted the effect of height to the full revelation of Notre
Dame--in that 120 years or more moved a process such as even our own
time has not seen. It was an upheaval like that by which, in the
beginnings of terrestrial life, the huge and dull sea-monsters first
took to the keen air of the land. Everything was in the turmoil which
the few historians who have seen the vision of this thing have called,
some an anarchy, and others a brief interlude of liberty in the
politics of Europe. It was neither one nor the other: it was the
travail of a birth.
When this young life was once started in the boiling energies of the
Crusades:--young Louis VI. the fighter, St. Bernard, the man that
would put all into order, young Abelard, who again, after so many
silent centuries, began to answer the riddle of the sphinx--when this
argosy of youth was launched, the first task of the Church was to
attempt to steer it. We know that the Church succeeded, as she
succeeded in saving all that could be saved of the Mediterranean
civilisation when the Roman Empire bowed, and all that could be saved
of our common moral tradition when, after the terrors of the fifteenth
century, Europe of the sixteenth threatened to fall into dust.
In the twelfth century the Church captured and rode the new energies,
but in that storm of creation a very great deal went down. How much we
do not know. It is probable that Rome was still Roman until the
Normans sacked it at the beginning of this era. It is certain that the
walls surrounding our English cities and those of the northern French
and the western Germans were unchanged since the Pagan time, until
the expansion of the twelfth century came to break them. I say what
relics of primeval learning, what verbal inheritance of primeval
experience, were lost in the new violence of Europe, cannot be known.
It is enough for us that the essence of civilisation was saved; that
if we let go the history of the tribal past with one hand we at least
beat off Asia with the other; that if the Romanesque gave up its last
spark in that gale, at least the Gothic replaced it.
For the purpose of this book one great loss must be noted: most of the
prehistoric roads disappeared.
The unity of Europe, a thing hitherto highly conscious, fully
existent, but inactive like the soul of a man in a reverie, sprang
into expression and permeated outward things. Men travelled.
Inter-communication became within fifty years from a pastime a habit,
and from a habit a necessity. Not only the Crusades had done this, but
something anterior, some passion for new horizons, which of itself had
helped to produce the Crusades. The orders and appeals of a united
Church began to circulate throughout Christendom. The universities
had arisen, and were visited almost as nomads would visit them: the
students crowding now Bologna, now Salerno, now Oxford, and fixing
themselves at last, like a swarm of bees, in Paris. The Benedictines
had already sketched the idea of the representative system--it was
beginning to invade political life. The justice of the central kings
went touring on assize. Some say that the cathedral builders
themselves were like the soul of Europe wandering from place to place.
With all this the cross-roads developed. Every little village was
linked up with every other; the main vague ways, older than history,
which joined not even towns directly, but followed only the dry and
open of the high lands, necessarily decayed. Some few kept their
place. The Watling Street was a necessity; it led from the Straits of
Dover to London, and from London to the corner which is the triple
gate to Ireland, to Wales and to Strathclyde--the only road by which
you can outflank Snowdon if you are going west, the Pennines if you
are going west and north. It is still, on the whole, the line of our
principal railway. But the Fosse Way began to lose its meaning. The
Ermine Street maintained some eminence, for Lincoln was a great town,
but the Icknield Way fell into broader and broader gaps. A man would
with difficulty discover that the Stane Street was still used.
The road of which this book treats would have disappeared more
certainly than any of these.
Winchester was decaying (for England was now quite united, and the
north counted in a way), London was becoming more and more--for with
intercommunication commerce was arising, and with the harsh efforts of
the German against the eastern heathen the Baltic was acquiring a
civilisation; with travel the sea was becoming familiar to others than
to pirates, and with the sea the port was growing in position--London
was becoming more and more, and was already almost the capital of
England. Henry II. was perhaps the last king who thought of Winchester
as his chief town. London was to overawe his son; his great-grandson
was to make Westminster the centre of the constitution.
From Southampton to London the road would remain; the roads from
London to Canterbury and to the ports of Kent would grow in
importance; but our road, the base of that triangle, would necessarily
have decayed: there was less traffic than ever before from west to
east, from the Mendips and Cornwall to the Straits. The metals of the
Devonian peninsula, and of the Severn valley had lost their economic
position, the iron of the Sussex Weald had taken their place. The
expeditions to Ireland and the new Scottish problem had removed to
Chester and to Lancaster the centres of strategical importance; the
same commerce which was giving London its hegemony--I mean the
commerce of the Baltic and the North Sea--was developing Orford and
King's Lynn, and all East Anglia, and, to a lesser degree, the Humber.
The Germanic states had spread so eastward as to draw the life of Gaul
also eastward, and to bleed its western promontory; the crossing of
the sea between the Cornwalls had lost its old political importance:
all combined to kill Winchester, and with Winchester the road from
that old capital to Canterbury, when an accident came to preserve that
way.
This accident was the murder of Thomas à Becket.
I will not deny that an effect always mingles with its cause; for
things that happen are realities, whereas time is not real at all. Not
only does the saint make the shrine, but the shrine also the saint. A
saint must have come to Canterbury. A primeval site will sooner or
later bring to fruit a primeval sacredness. But a study of this kind
cannot lose itself in such mysteries. It must confine itself to
definite history. In that moment, when the spiritual vision of Europe
was at its keenest, when stone itself was to be moulded like clay by
the intense vision of things beyond the world, when Suger had
conceived the pointed arch at St. Denis, and the gem upon St.
Michael's Hill was being cut into its facets, when the Church was most
determined to fashion the new world, and to give it a philosophy, and
when that task was at its most difficult, from the necessary quarrel
between the Soul and the State: that is, between things eternal,
personal, inward, and things civic, communal--when the world was fully
engaged in such a tangle outward, and the nerves of men, citizens and
Christians, were wrought as are those of antagonists in a wrestling
match, there fell this blow. For the first time in all these centuries
(and at what a time) violence, our modern method, attempted to cut the
knot. At once, and as it always must, fool violence produced the
opposite of what it had desired. All the West suddenly began to stream
to Canterbury, and à Becket's tomb became, after Rome, the chief
shrine of Christendom.
Ireland of the saints, South Wales still tribal, still in a way
unfixed, lending its population to far adventures and to the
attraction of distant places, all the south-western peninsula of
England, Brittany for ever mystic, the mountain masses of the Asturias
which had themselves preserved an original sanctity, the western ports
from Vigo to recently conquered Lisbon--the only ports by which the
Christian enthusiasm of the Spaniards conquering Islam could take to
the newly opened sea and to the north--all these sent their hordes to
converge on Winchester, and thence to find their way to Canterbury.
The whole year came at last to see the passing and re-passing of such
men. It was on the 29th of December that St. Thomas had been struck
down. For fifty years his feast had been kept upon that day, and for
fifty years the damp English winter had grudged its uneasy soil to the
pilgrims: the same weather in which we ourselves traversed it during
the journey of exploration which is the subject of this work.
With the jubilee the body was translated in the flush of early summer,
and the date of this translation (the 7th of July) became the new and
more convenient day upon which Canterbury was most sought. But the
habit of such a journey had now grown so general that every season saw
some example of it. The spring, as we know from Chaucer, the winter as
we know from the traditional dates preserved upon the Continent, the
summer as we know from the date of the chief gatherings: and there
must have been a constant return past the stubble and the new plough
of the autumn.
It was not only the directness of the Old Road between Winchester and
Canterbury that reconstituted its use for the purpose of these
pilgrimages: it was also that peculiar association of antiquity and of
religion which mingles the two ideas almost into one thing.
The pilgrim set out from Winchester: 'You must pass by that well,' he
heard, 'it is sacred.' ... 'You must, of ritual, climb that isolated
hill which you see against the sky. The spirits haunted it and were
banished by the faith, and they say that martyrs died there.' ... 'It
is at the peril of the pilgrimage that you neglect this stone, whose
virtue saved our fathers in the great battle.' ... 'The church you
will next see upon your way is entered from the southern porch sunward
by all truly devout men; such has been the custom here since custom
began.'
From step to step the pilgrims were compelled to take the oldest of
paths. The same force of antique usage and affection which, in a past
beyond all record, had lent their meaning to rocks and springs upon a
public way, re-flourished; and once again, to the great pleasure of
myself who write of it now, and of all my readers who love to see
tradition destroying calculated things, the momentum of generations
overcame.
The pilgrimage saved the road. But once started it developed new
sanctities of its own, as a tree transplanted will strike roots and
take a bend this way or that different from the exact intention of the
gardener. In the main it did nothing but preserve the immemorial
sites: the cliff above the river Wey, the lonely peaked hill of St.
Martha's that answers it from beyond the stream, the cross-roads on
the crest of the Downs above Reigate, the ford of the Medway, the
entry into the valley of the Stour, it transformed and fixed as
Christian things. Our remote ancestry was baptized again, and that
good habit of the faith, whereby it refuses to break with any chain of
human development, marked and retained for history the oldest things.
Upon that rock St. Catherine's was built, upon that hill the Martyrs'
Chapel; twin churches in line pointed to the ford of the Medway, the
old and dim great battle of the valley was dominated not only by the
rude monuments of those who had fallen in it, but by the abbey of
Boxley. Charing worshipped the block on which the Baptist had
suffered, and the church of Chilham rose on the flank of the hills
which had first disputed the invasion of the Romans. What Canterbury
became we know.
But this influence, though it was in the main highly conservative, may
here and there mislead us.
The new civilisation was well settled before the pilgrimage began. The
Normans had governed and ordered for a century; the new taxes, the new
system of justice, the new central kingship, had been well founded for
over a generation.
The pilgrims, therefore, at certain places did not need to follow step
by step the ancient way. They sometimes fail to find us the
prehistoric ford, for many bridges and ferries would exist in their
time. They sometimes bend right out of the original path to visit some
notable shrine, and there is more than one point where another stream
of their fellows, coming from London or from the Channel, joins and
tends to confuse the track. The occasions are but rare,[3] and they
are noted here only to explain certain conclusions which will follow
in the second part of this book. Taking the pilgrimage as a whole it
was the chief factor in the preservation of the Old Road.
Second in the causes of the survival of the Old Road came the
turnpikes. The system of turnpike roads served to perpetuate, and in
many cases to revive, the use of the old way when the pilgrimage
itself was but very vaguely remembered. The tolls chargeable upon
these new and firm roads furnished a very powerful motive for drovers
and pack-riders to use an alternative route where such charges would
not fall upon them. A similar cause was in operation to preserve 'the
Welsh road' in the Midlands, and on this southern way of ours there
are places when it was in operation, not indeed within living memory,
but within the memory of the parents of those now living.
For instance, the road along the summit of the Hog's Back was a better
road than the old track which follows the 300-feet contour upon the
south side of the hill; but the summit road was a turnpike for many
years during which the lower ill-kept lane was free, and hence a track
which, since the Reformation, had served only to link up the little
villages of Seale and Puttenham was used once more as a thoroughfare
between Guildford and Farnham. A new stream had been diverted into the
old channel, and this habit of avoiding the turnpike continued till a
date so close to our own time as easily to bridge a gap which, but for
that diversion, might have proved impassable. It is not without irony
that a system whose whole object was to replace by new and more
excellent roads the old rough tracks, proved, indirectly, one of the
principal sources of their survival.
The chalk, the third cause of that survival, is of such importance,
and that importance is so commonly neglected, that it almost merits an
essay of its own.
Consider the various characters which make of this soil the best
conceivable medium for the preservation of an ancient road.
Like the sandy heaths and rocky uplands through which other primitive
trails would naturally lead, it never paid to cultivate and therefore
invited the wayfarer who was not permitted to trespass upon tilled
land. But unlike other waste soil, it was admirably adapted to retain
the trace of his passage. Long usage will wear into chalk a deep
impression which marshy land will not retain, and which hard rocky
land will never suffer. Compare, for example, the results of
continuous travel along certain of the Yorkshire moors with that which
will be produced along the Chilterns above the Thames valley. In the
first case very marshy land, perpetually changing, alternates with
hard rock. Unless some considerable labour were expended, as in the
making of a causeway, neither of these would retain any record of the
road when once it had fallen into desuetude. But on the chalk some
trace would rapidly form, and with every succeeding year would grow
more obvious.
Chalk is viscous and spongy when it is wet. It is never so marshy as
to lose all impression made upon it. It is never so hard as to resist
the wearing down of feet and of vehicles. Moreover, those who are
acquainted with chalk countries must have noticed how a road is not
only naturally cut into the soil by usage, but forms of itself a kind
of embankment upon a hillside from the plastic nature of the soil. The
platform of the road is pressed outward, and kneaded, so to speak,
into an outer escarpment, which would make such a track, for
generations after it was abandoned, quite plain along the hillside.
Finally, there are, or were until lately, no forces at work to destroy
such a record. The chalk was little built upon; it had no occasion to
be largely traversed by modern roads; it stood up in steep hills
whereon no one would have dreamt of building, until the torture of
our modern cities drove men to contrast.
How these hills invited, and almost compelled, the primitive traveller
to use them has been already described. Once he began to use their
soil, better than any other soil in England, it would retain his
memory.
* * * * *
Now since some considerable portion of the Old Road has been
preserved, a basis for knowledge is afforded. Patches aggregating in
length to just over eighty miles are certain and fixed. It is possible
to work from that known thing to the unknown, and the gaps where the
Road is lost can be recovered by the consistent pursuit of a certain
method; this method when it is described will be seen to lend to a
first vague and tentative examination a greater value than it seemed
to promise. It permitted us to establish by converging lines of proof
so much of what had been lost, that one may now fairly call the full
course of the Road established from the north gate of Winchester,
whence it originates, to the west gate of Canterbury, which is its
goal.
A description of our method is a necessary preliminary to that of the
journey upon which it was put to the test.
The reconstitution of such a road is essentially the filling up of
gaps. The task would be impossible if a very large proportion did not
remain evident to the eye, or recorded by continuous history. The task
would be much more difficult if the gaps in question were of very
great length, succeeded by equally long unbroken pieces of the
existing road. Luckily, the record or preservation of the Pilgrim's
Way has not fallen upon these lines. There is no continuous gap
throughout the whole of these 120 miles of greater length than seven
miles, and we have in what may be called the 'known portions,'
stretches of ten, thirteen, and even fifteen miles, almost unbroken.
Moreover, the proportion of the known to the unknown is considerable:
60 per cent. of the total distance of 120 miles is known to 40 per
cent. unknown, and it must be understood that throughout this book I
speak of those parts as 'known' or 'recognised,' which have been
universally admitted since the study of the subject was approached by
archæologists.
[Illustration]
These two facts, the considerable proportion of the known to the
unknown, and the absence of any very long stretch in which the Road is
lost, facilitate the task in a manner that can be put best graphically
by some such little sketch as the preceding, where the dark line is
the known portion of the Road. It is evident that the filling up of
the gaps is indicated by the general tendency of the rest.
There is a mass of other indications besides the mere direction to
guide one in one's research; and a congeries of these together make
up what I have called the method by which we approached the problem.
That method was to collate all the characteristics which could be
discovered in the known portions of the Road, and to apply these to
the search for traces of the lost portion.
Supporting such a method there are the _a priori_ arguments drawn from
geographical and geological conditions.
There are place-names which point out, though only faintly, the
history of a village site.
There is the analogy of trails as they exist in savage countries at
the present day.
There is the analogy of other portions of prehistoric tracks which
still exist in Britain.
All these confirm or weaken a conclusion, but still the most important
arguments are found in the characteristics which can be discovered in
the known portions of the Road, and which may be presumed, in the
absence of contradictory evidence, to attach to the lost portions
also.
When a gap was reached, it was necessary to form an hypothesis to
guide one in one's next step, and such an hypothesis could best be
formed upon a comparison of all these various kinds of knowledge. The
indication afforded by any one of them would, as a rule, be slight,
but the convergence of a number of such indications would commonly
convey a very strong presumption in favour of some particular track.
It was then our business to seek for some remaining evidences,
apparent to the eye, whereby the track could be recovered. Such
evidences were the well-known fact that a line of very old yews will
often mark such a road where it lies upon the chalk; the alignment of
some short path with a known portion behind, and a known portion
before one; while, of course, the presence of a ridge or platform upon
such an alignment we regarded (in the absence of any other lane) as
the best guide for our search.
Occasionally, the method by which we brought our conjecture to the
test had to be applied to another kind of difficulty, and a choice had
to be made between two alternative tracks, each clear and each with
something in its favour; in one or two short and rare examples, the
Road very plainly went one way, when by every analogy and experience
of its general course it should have gone another. But, take the
problem as a whole, whether applied to the commonest example, that of
forming an hypothesis and then finding whether it could be sustained,
or to the most exceptional (as where we found the Road making straight
for a point in a river where there was no ford), the general method
was always the same: to consider the geographical and geological
conditions, the analogy of existing trails of the same sort, the
characters we had found in the Road itself throughout its length as
our research advanced, and to apply these to the parts where we were
in doubt.
The number of 'habits,' if I may so call them, which the Road
betrayed, was much larger than would at first have appeared probable,
and that we could discover them was in the main the cause of our
success, as the reader will see when I come to the relation of the
various steps by which we reconstituted, as I hope, the whole of the
trail.