_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.
[Illustration]
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.