_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.
To debate its chances and draw up the main line of our decision, we
went down into Little Wrotham, and at an inn there which is called the
'Bull,' we ate beef and drank beer, spoke with men who knew the fords
and the ferries, compared our maps with a much older one belonging to
the place, and in general occupied our minds with nothing but the
passage of the river: the passage, that is, which alone concerned us;
the place where men, when men first hunted here, fixed their
crossing-place, and carried the Old Road across the tide-way of the
stream.
* * * * *
Now, having said so much of the landscape, it is necessary to turn to
the more minute task of topography. For it is the business of this
book not to linger upon the pleasures of our journey, but to
reconstitute an ancient thing. And for that purpose a simple
sketch-map will explain perhaps as much as words can do.
The features of this map are very few, but their comprehension will be
sufficient for my readers to grasp the matter upon which we are
engaged.
[Illustration]
A single heavy line indicates the crest of the hills--a crest from
over six hundred to over seven hundred feet in height. A dotted line
indicates the limit of what may be called the floor of the valley. The
brackets )( show the four possible crossings of the river. Two points,
numbered _A_ and _B_, mark the 'shoulders' or platform. The first
(_A_) above Wrotham, the second (_B_) at Grey Wethers. Finally, the
megalithic monument at Coldrum and that near Grey Wethers (whose
importance will be seen in a moment) are marked with circles.
Far up the valley on each hill continues the remnant of an ancient
road, and the reader will see from this, that, as in the valley of the
Mole and of the Darent, our difficulties were confused and increased
from the fact that, quite apart from the crossing of the river, other
prehistoric tracks led off northwards upon either side of the river,
whose crossing was our concern.
The great main range of chalk which runs all across south-eastern
England; the range whose escarpment affords for sixty miles a platform
for the Old Road is broken, then, by the Medway, which cuts through it
on its way to the sea. But there is not only a gap; it will be seen
that the hills 'bend up,' as it were, upon either bank, and follow the
stream northward, making a kind of funnel to receive it. The effect of
this is best expressed by saying, that it is as though the Medway
valley had been scooped out by a huge plough, which not only cut a
five-mile gap in the range, but threw the detritus of such a cutting
to left and right for miles beyond the point of its passage. It is at
the mouth of this gap that the two shoulders or turning-places are to
be found; one on the west at Wrotham, the other on the east at Grey
Wethers: while beyond them the Downs turn northward either way, to
sink at last into the flats of the Thames estuary.
The interval between these 'shoulders' was the most considerable of
any that had to be filled in all our exploration.
The reason that this gap in the Old Road should be found at such a
place was evident. It was here that the road had to cross the most
important of the rivers it meets upon its course, the Medway. Alone of
the rivers which obstruct the road, it is a tidal stream, and, as
though in recognition of its superior claim, the hills receded from it
more grandly than they had from the Wey at the Guildford, or the Mole
at the Dorking passage. They left six miles of doubtful valley between
them, and across these six miles a track had to be found.
[Illustration: THE MOST IMPORTANT OF THE RIVERS IT MEETS UPON ITS
COURSE, THE MEDWAY]
A clear statement of the problem will lead one towards its solution.
I have said that for several miles before Wrotham, the chalk hills,
well defined and steep, running almost due east and west, present an
excellent dry and sunny bank for the road. As one goes along this part
of one's journey, Wrotham Hill appears like a kind of cape before one,
because beyond it the hills turn round northward, and their
continuation is hidden. I have also told how, a long way off, over the
broad flat of the Medway valley, the range may be seen continuing in
the direction of Canterbury, and affording, when once the river is
crossed, a similar platform to that from which one is gazing.
We knew, also, that the road does, as a fact, follow those distant
hills, precisely as it had the range from which we made our
observation, and if no physical obstacles intervened, the first
travellers upon this track would undoubtedly have made a direct line
from the projecting shoulder of Wrotham Hill to the somewhat less
conspicuous turning-point which marks the further hills of Grey
Wethers, where also Boxley once stood.
But obstacles do intervene, and these obstacles were of the most
serious kind for men who had not yet passed the early stages of
civilisation. A broad river with a swift tidal current, flanked here
and there (as tidal rivers always are before their embankment) by
marshes; a valley floor of clay, the crossing of which must prove far
more lengthy than that of any they had hitherto encountered, made the
negotiation of this gap a difficult matter. Moreover, the direct line
would have led them by the marshiest way of all: the fields of
Snodland brook.
Oddly enough the difficulty of rediscovering the original track by
which the road forded the Medway, does not lie in the paucity of
evidence, but rather in the confusion arising from its nature and
amount. So great is this confusion that some authorities have been
content to accept alternative routes at this point.
Savage trails, however, never present alternatives so widely separate,
and least of all will they present any alternative, even one
neighbouring the main road, where a formidable obstacle has to be
overcome: to do so would be to forfeit the whole value which a
primitive road possesses as a guide (for this value depends upon
custom and memory), and when a tidal river had to be traversed, a
further and very cogent reason for a single track was to be found in
the labour which its construction upon a marshy soil involved.
If some one place of crossing had held a monopoly or even a
pre-eminence within the limits of recorded history, the evidence
afforded by it would be of the utmost value. But an indication of this
simplicity is lacking.
It is certain that within historic times and for many centuries
continuously, the valley and the river were passed at four places,
each of which now may lay a claim to be the original passage.
The modern names of these places are, in their order from the sea,
Cuxton, Lower Halling, Snodland, and Aylesford.
Before proceeding I must repeat what was said above, that two tracks
of great antiquity continue the Old Road northward on each side of
the Medway far beyond any point where it would have crossed; these
tracks (I have called them elsewhere 'feeders') are not only clearly
defined, but have each received the traditional name of the Pilgrim's
Way, and their presence adds a considerable complexity to the search
for the original passage.
So much of the elements of the problem being laid down, let us now
recapitulate certain features which we have discovered to be true of
the road in the earlier part of its course, where it had to cross a
river, and certain other features which one knows to be common to
other British track-ways over valleys broader than those of the Mole
or the Wey. To these features we may add a few others, which are
conjecturally those that such a road would possess although we might
have no direct evidence of them.