_Twenty-six miles_
From Boxley to Charing the Old Road presents little for comment, save
that over these thirteen miles it is more direct, more conspicuously
marked, and on the whole better preserved than in any other similar
stretch of its whole course. The section might indeed be taken as a
type of what the primitive wayfarers intended when the conditions
offered them for their journey were such as they would have chosen out
of all. It is not a permanent road as is the section between Alton and
Farnham, therefore nothing of its ancient character is obliterated. On
the other hand, it is not--save in two very short spaces--interfered
with by cultivation or by private enclosure. This stretch of the road
is a model to scale, preserved, as though by artifice, from modern
changes, and even from decay, but exhibiting those examples of disuse
which are characteristic of its history.
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.
[Illustration: THE SHEEP IN THE NARROW LANES, OR THE LEANING
CONES OF THE HOP-KILNS AGAINST THE SKY]
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.
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration: THE PLOUGHLANDS UNDER ORCHARDS: ALL THE KENTISH WEALD]
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.
* * * * *
[Illustration]
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.
* * * * *
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.
[Illustration: 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.
* * * * *
In the inn, in the main room of it, I found my companions. A
gramophone fitted with a monstrous trumpet roared out American songs,
and to this sound the servants of the inn were holding a ball. Chief
among them a woman of a dark and vigorous kind danced with an amazing
vivacity, to the applause of her peers. With all this happiness we
mingled.
[Illustration]