_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.