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THE ICKNIELD WAY
* * * * * *
_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_
THE OLD ROAD
By HILAIRE BELLOC
Illustrated by WILLIAM HYDE
THE STANE STREET
By HILAIRE BELLOC
Illustrated by WILLIAM HYDE
THE FOREST OF DEAN
By ARTHUR O. COOKE
Illustrated by J. W. KING
* * * * * *
[Illustration: STREATLEY MILL AND CHURCH]
THE ICKNIELD WAY
by
EDWARD THOMAS
With Illustrations by A. L. Collins
London
Constable & Company Ltd.
1916
DEDICATION
TO HARRY HOOTON
When I sat down at the “Dolau Cothi Arms” this evening I remembered
my dedication to you. You said I could dedicate this book to you if I
would make a real dedication, not one of my shadowy salutes befitting
shadows rather than men and women. It seems odd you should ask thus
for a sovereign’s worth of--shall I say--English prose from a writer
by trade. But though I turn out a large, if insufficient, number of
sovereigns’ worths, and am become a writing animal, and could write
something or other about a broomstick, I do not write with ease: so let
that difficulty give the dedication its value.
It is right that I should remember you upon a walk, for I have walked
more miles with you than with anyone else except myself. While I walked
you very often danced, on the roads of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and
Hampshire. This evening when I went out on the Sarn Helen everybody
was in chapel, I think, unless it was the Lord, for he also seemed
to me to be walking in the cool. I was very much alone, and glad to
be. You were a ghost, and not a man of fourteen stone, and I thought
that perhaps after all that shadowy salute would be fittest. But I
have put my pen to paper: I have set out and I will come to an end;
for, as I said, I am a writing animal. In the days of those old walks
I could have written a dedication in Norfolk jacket style, all about
“the open road,” and the search for something “over the hills and far
away”: I should have reminded you at some length how Borrow stayed at
this inn, and that Dolau Cothi is the house where he could have lived
with satisfaction “if backed by a couple of thousands a year.” To-day
I know there is nothing beyond the farthest of far ridges except a
signpost to unknown places. The end is in the means--in the sight of
that beautiful long straight line of the Downs in which a curve is
latent--in the houses we shall never enter, with their dark secret
windows and quiet hearth smoke, or their ruins friendly only to elders
and nettles--in the people passing whom we shall never know though we
may love them. To-day I know that I walk because it is necessary to do
so in order both to live and to make a living. Once those walks might
have made a book; now they make a smile or a sigh, and I am glad they
are in ghostland and not fettered in useless print. This book for you
was to have been a country book, but I see that it has turned out to be
another of those books made out of books founded on other books. Being
but half mine it can only be half yours, and I owe you an apology as
well as a dedication. It is, however, in some ways a fitting book for
me to write. For it is about a road which begins many miles before I
could come on its traces and ends miles beyond where I had to stop. I
could find no excuse for supposing it to go to Wales and following it
there into the Ceidrych Valley, along the Towy to Caermarthen, and so
to St. David’s which is now as holy as Rome, though once only a third
as holy. Apparently no special mediæval use revived it throughout its
course, or gave it a new entity like that of the Pilgrims’ Way from
Winchester to Canterbury that you and I walked on many a time--by
the “Cock” at Detling, the “Black Horse” at Thurnham, the “King’s
Head” (once, I believe, the “Pilgrims’ Rest”) at Hollingbourne, above
Harrietsham, past Deodara Villas, above Lenham and Robert Philpot’s
“Woodman’s Arms,” and so on to Eastwell; always among beech and yew
and Canterbury bells, and always over the silver of whitebeam leaves.
I could not find a beginning or an end of the Icknield Way. It is thus
a symbol of mortal things with their beginnings and ends always in
immortal darkness. I wish the book had a little more of the mystery of
the road about it. You at least will make allowances--and additions;
and God send me many other readers like you. And as this is the bottom
of the sheet, and ale is better than ink, though it is no substitute, I
label this “Dedication,” and wish you with me inside the “Dolau Cothi
Arms” at Pumpsaint, in Caermarthenshire.
EDWARD THOMAS.
NOTE
I have to acknowledge the very great kindness of Mr. Hilaire Belloc,
Mr. Harold T. E. Peake, and Mr. R. Hippisley Cox while I was writing
this book, though I do so with some hesitation, because I may seem to
make them responsible for some of my possible mistakes and certain
shortcomings. A man could hardly have three better guides than Mr.
Belloc for his grasp and sympathy with roads, Mr. Peake for his caution
and curiosity, and “documents, documents!” and Mr. Cox for his ardour
and familiarity with trodden turf; and I must add my testimony to that
of my betters to the merits of Mr. Belloc’s _Old Road_, Mr. Peake’s
chapter on prehistoric roads in _Memorials of Old Leicestershire_,
and Mr. Cox’s _Avebury_. To Mr. Peake I am indebted not only for
suggestions that were invaluable to me, notably in the matter of the
Ridgeway and the Bishop of Cloyne’s pernicious theory, but for the
use of his copies of the greater part of the materials of my second
chapter. I have also had great kindness from the Rev. E. H. Goddard and
Mr. W. Gough.
EDWARD THOMAS.
LLAUGHARNE,
CAERMARTHENSHIRE.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ON ROADS AND FOOTPATHS 1
II. HISTORY, MYTH, TRADITION, CONJECTURE, AND INVENTION 32
III. FIRST DAY--THETFORD TO NEWMARKET, BY LACKFORD AND KENTFORD 85
IV. SECOND DAY--NEWMARKET TO ODSEY, BY ICKLETON AND ROYSTON 104
V. THIRD DAY--ODSEY TO EDLESBOROUGH, BY BALDOCK, LETCHWORTH,
ICKLEFORD, LEAGRAVE, AND DUNSTABLE 122
VI. FOURTH DAY--EDLESBOROUGH TO STREATLEY, ON THE UPPER ICKNIELD
WAY, BY WENDOVER, KIMBLE, WHITELEAF, GYPSIES’ CORNER,
IPSDEN, AND CLEEVE 145
VII. FIFTH DAY--IVINGHOE TO WATLINGTON, ON THE LOWER ICKNIELD WAY,
BY ASTON CLINTON, WESTON TURVILLE, CHINNOR, AND LEWKNOR 176
VIII. SIXTH DAY--WATLINGTON TO UPTON, BY EWELME, WALLINGFORD,
LITTLE STOKE, THE PAPIST WAY, LOLLINGDON, ASTON, AND
BLEWBURY 199
IX. SEVENTH DAY--STREATLEY TO SPARSHOLT, ON THE RIDGEWAY, BY
SCUTCHAMER KNOB AND LETCOMBE CASTLE 229
X. EIGHTH DAY--SPARSHOLT TO TOTTERDOWN, “BETWEEN THE DESTINIES”
ON THE RIDGEWAY, BY WHITE HORSE HILL AND WAYLAND’S SMITHY 255
XI. NINTH DAY--STREATLEY TO EAST HENDRED, BY UPTON AND HAGBOURNE
HILL FARM 270
XII. TENTH DAY--EAST HENDRED TO WANBOROUGH, BY LOCKINGE PARK,
WANTAGE, ASHBURY, AND BISHOPSTONE 284
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Streatley Mill and Church _Frontispiece_
PAGE
The Ridgeway, near Blowingstone Hill, Berkshire 11
Under Liddington Hill, Wiltshire 23
The Icknield Way and Old Parallel Tracks, near Newmarket 30
“Ickleton Meer,” Hagbourne Hill, near Upton, Berks 52
Wilbury Camp 59
Icknield Way, near Ipsden, Oxfordshire 64
Icknield Way, crossing Watling Street, Dunstable 69
Whiteleaf Cross 83
Castle Hill, Thetford 87
Bridge and Ford, Lackford 93
Near Cavenham 95
Kentford 97
Newmarket 99
Devil’s Ditch 105
Fleam Dyke 108
Ickleton 111
Approaching Royston 113
Icknield Way, crossing Ermine Street 117
Deadman’s Lane, Baldock 123
The Ford, Ickleford 126
Ickleford Church 128
On Telegraph Hill 130
Dunstable Downs 135
Beacon Hill, Ivinghoe 138
Wendover 151
Ellesborough Church 153
Near the “Leather Bottle” 155
Icknield Way, near Watlington 158
Sinodun Hills 160
Near Cleeve 162
The Bridge at Goring 172
Grand Junction Canal 177
Aston Clinton 181
Watlington 189
Watlington Town Hall 200
Ewelme Cow Common 204
Wallingford Bridge 205
By Lollingdon Farm 216
Blewbury 219
Ridgeway, near Streatley 230
Wayland’s Smithy 235
Letcombe Castle 251
White Horse Hill 256
The Blowingstone 263
Moulsford Bottom 271
East Hendred 277
Port Way, Wantage 287
Under White Horse Hill 291
Dragon Hill 293
Green Terrace, near Ashbury 295
Coombe at Bishopstone 299
Map _At end_
THE ICKNIELD WAY
CHAPTER I
ON ROADS AND FOOTPATHS
Much has been written of travel, far less of the road. Writers have
treated the road as a passive means to an end, and honoured it most
when it has been an obstacle; they leave the impression that a road is
a connection between two points which only exists when the traveller
is upon it. Though there is much travel in the Old Testament, “the
way” is used chiefly as a metaphor. “Abram journeyed, going on still
toward the south,” says the historian, who would have used the same
words had the patriarch employed wings. Yet to a nomadic people the
road was as important as anything upon it. The earliest roads wandered
like rivers through the land, having, like rivers, one necessity,
to keep in motion. We still say that a road “goes” to London, as we
“go” ourselves. We point out a white snake on a green hill-side, and
tell a man: “That is going to Chichester.” At our inn we think when
recollecting the day: “That road must have gone to Strata Florida.”
We could not attribute more life to them if we had moving roads with
platforms on the sidewalks. We may go or stay, but the road will go up
over the mountains to Llandovery, and then up again over to Tregaron.
It is a silent companion always ready for us, whether it is night or
day, wet or fine, whether we are calm or desperate, well or sick. It
is always going: it has never gone right away, and no man is too late.
Only a humorist could doubt this, like the boy in a lane who was asked:
“Where does this lane go to, boy?” and answered: “I have been living
here these sixteen years and it has never moved to my knowledge.” Some
roads creep, some continue merely; some advance with majesty, some
mount a hill in curves like a soaring sea-gull.
Even as towns are built by rivers, instead of rivers being conducted
past towns, so the first settlements grew up alongside roads which had
formerly existed simply as the natural lines of travel for a travelling
race. The oldest roads often touch the fewest of our modern towns,
villages, and isolated houses. It has been conjectured that the first
roads were originally the tracks of animals. The elephant’s path or
tunnel through the jungle is used as a road in India to-day, and in
early days the wild herds must have been invaluable for making a way
through forest, for showing the firmest portions of bogs and lowland
marshes, and for suggesting fords. The herd would wind according to
the conditions of the land and to inclinations of many inexplicable
kinds, but the winding of the road would be no disadvantage to men
who found their living by the wayside, men to whom time was not money.
Roads which grew thus by nature and by necessity appear to be almost
as lasting as rivers. They are found fit for the uses of countless
different generations of men outside cities, because, apart from cities
and their needs, life changes little. If they go out of use in a new
or a changed civilization, they may still be frequented by men of the
most primitive habit. All over England may be found old roads, called
Gypsy Lane, Tinker’s Lane, or Smuggler’s Lane; east of Calne, in
Wiltshire, is a Juggler’s Lane; and as if the ugliness of the “uggle”
sound pleased the good virtuous country folk, they have got a Huggler’s
Hole a little west of Semley and south of Sedgehill in the same county:
there are also Beggar’s Lanes and roads leading past places called Mock
Beggar, which is said to mean Much Beggar. These little-used roads are
known to lovers, thieves, smugglers, and ghosts. Even if long neglected
they are not easily obliterated. On the fairly even and dry ground of
the high ridges where men and cattle could spread out wide as they
journeyed, the earth itself is unchanged by centuries of traffic, save
that the grass is made finer, shorter, paler, and more numerously
starred with daisies. But on the slopes down to a plain or ford the
road takes its immortality by violence, for it is divided into two or
three or a score of narrow courses, trenched so deeply that they might
often seem to be the work rather of some fierce natural force than
of slow-travelling men, cattle, and pack-horses. The name Holloway,
or Holway, is therefore a likely sign of an old road. So is Sandy
Lane, a name in which lurks the half-fond contempt of country people
for the road which a good “hard road” has superseded, and now little
used save in bird’s-nesting or courting days. These old roads will
endure as long as the Roman streets, though great is the difference
between the unraised trackway, as dim as a wind-path on the sea, and
the straight embanked Roman highway which made the proverb “Plain as
Dunstable Road,” or “Good plain Dunstable”--for Watling Street goes
broad and straight through that town. Scott has one of these ghostly
old roads in _Guy Mannering_. It was over a heath that had Skiddaw and
Saddleback for background, and he calls it a _blind road_--“the track
so slightly marked by the passengers’ footsteps that it can but be
traced by a slight shade of verdure from the darker heath around it,
and, being only visible to the eye when at some distance, ceases to be
distinguished while the foot is actually treading it.”
The making of such roads seems one of the most natural operations of
man, one in which he least conflicts with nature and the animals. If
he makes roads outright and rapidly, for a definite purpose, they may
perish as rapidly, like the new roads of modern Japanese enterprise,
and their ancient predecessors live on to smile at their ambition.
These are the winding ways preferred by your connoisseur to-day. “Give
me,” says Hazlitt, “the clear blue sky over my head and the green turf
beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three-hours’ march
to dinner--and then to thinking!” These windings are created by the
undulating of the land, and by obstacles like those of a river--curves
such as those in the High Street of Oxford, which Wordsworth called
“the stream-like windings of that glorious street.” The least obstacle
might bring about a loop, if nothing more, and as even a Roman road
curled round Silbury Hill, so the path of the Australian savage
is to be seen twisting round bush after bush as if it enjoyed the
interruption, though it cannot purl like the river at a bend. Probably
these twists, besides being unconsciously adapted to the lie of the
land, were, as they are still, easeful and pleasant to the rover who
had some natural love of journeying. Why go straight? There is nothing
at the end of any road better than may be found beside it, though there
would be no travel did men believe it. The straight road, except over
level and open country, can only be made by those in whom extreme haste
and forethought have destroyed the power of joy, either at the end or
at any part of its course. Why, then, go straight? The connoisseur had
something of the savage in him when he demanded a winding road.
It is not, however, to a man walking for pleasure that we shall go for
a sense of roads, but to one like Bunyan. _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is full
of the sense of roads. See Christian going to Mr. Legality’s house.
It is a mountain road, and the hill overhangs it so much that he is
afraid to venture further “lest the hill should fall on his head.”
When Goodwill points out the narrow way, he says it was “cast up by
the patriarchs, prophets, Christ, and his Apostles,” i.e. made into a
raised track bounded by ditches from which the earth was cast up to
form the embankment. When Christian comes to the Hill Difficulty you
see the primitive man deciding to go straight uphill, turning not to
the left by the way called Danger into a great wood, nor to the right
to Destruction and the “wide field full of dark mountains.” How full
of plain English country wayfaring is the passage where Hopeful and
Christian take a road by a river-side, and then when it turns away
from the water they see a stile leading into a path which keeps on, as
a path would do, along the bank through By-path Meadow: only, as it
happens, the river is in flood and they must turn back again towards
the stile. This man knew roads, and one of his temptations after
conversion was to try his faith by bidding the puddles on the road
between his own village and Bedford to be dry. Cervantes had the sense
of roads. He begins, indeed, by making Don Quixote sally forth “upon
the plain” like any knight of chivalry “pricking o’er the plain” and
taking the way chosen by his horse because thus would adventures best
be compassed; but it is upon a road that he and most of his knights,
ladies, and enchanters travel. Malory’s book would have less vitality
in its marvel if it were not for the roads: the three highways, for
example, where Sir Marhaus and Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine were to
separate for their adventures each with his damosel; and the wild ways
of Sir Launcelot when he “rode many wild ways, throughout marches
and many wild ways,” until he came to a valley and a knight therein
with a naked sword chasing a lady. _Cymbeline_ again, and some of the
historical plays of Shakespeare, give a grand impression of wide tracts
of country traversed by roads of great purpose and destiny.
More often in books we move, as I have said, from place to place as
in a dream. But it is a dream in the _Mabinogion_ which gives one of
the most majestic scenes of travel. I mean the dream of the Emperor
Maxen. He dreamed that he was journeying along a river valley towards
its source, and up over the highest mountain in the world until he saw
mighty rivers descending to the sea, and one of them he followed to a
great city at its mouth and a vast castle in the city. At the end of
his journey the dreaming Emperor found a girl so beautiful that when
he awoke he could think of naught else, while years went by, except
her beauty. He sent out pioneers to discover the road of his dream,
and at last they brought him to the castle and the same girl Helen
sitting in the hall of it. She became his bride, and he gave her three
castles--one at Arvon in North Wales, one at Caerleon, and one at
Caermarthen in the South. Then, says the tale, “Helen bethought her to
make high-roads from one castle to another throughout the Island of
Britain. And the roads were made. And for this cause are they called
the roads of Helen Luyddawc, that she was sprung from a native of
this island, and the men of the Island of Britain would not have made
these great roads for any save her.” It is natural to connect with this
Helen the great ancient roads leading north and south across Wales
known as Sarn Helen or Elen. Nothing could be more noble as the name
of a mountain road than Sarn Helen or Helen’s Causeway. It suggests to
the ordinary fanciful and unhistoric mind the British Helena, mother
of the Emperor Constantine, and that it suggested this long ago is
clear from the old identification of Helen Luyddawc with the only
child of King Cole of Colchester. The name has more recently been
explained as Sarn y Lleng, the Road of the Legions. Sir John Rhys[1]
insists upon Elen instead of Helen, and believes her to be one of the
pagan goddesses of the dusk. “There is,” he says, “a certain poetic
propriety in associating the primitive paths and roads of the country
with this vagrant goddess of dawn and dusk.” These wandering paths are
to the hard white highways what dusk is to the full blaze of day. First
perhaps trodden by the wild herd and still without terrors for it, they
might well be protected by a sort of Artemis, goddess of wildernesses
and of forked ways, kind both to human hunters and the wild quarry.
They belong to the twilight of the world. No doubt the sun shines no
brighter at noon than it did then on a perfectly wild earth, on flowers
that were never gathered, on bright plumage that no man had coveted.
But all the forest and marsh of primeval earth form in the imagination
mists to which the lack of history adds yet another veil. These mists
lie over the world, to my mind, exactly as the white mist of summer
lies, turning into a sea most of what once was land and making islands
of the woods on the steep, uncultivated tracts. The islands rising
out of the mists of time are the hills and mountains, and along their
ridges ran the first roads, and by them are the squares and circles of
the first habitations and the mounds of the first solemnized graves,
used sometimes, it is thought, as guides for travellers.
[1] Hibbert Lectures, 1889, p. 16.
It is particularly easy to think of Southern England as several chains
of islands, representing the Downs, the Chilterns and Gog Magogs, the
Mendips, Cotswolds and Quantocks. I have more than once caught myself
thinking of the broad elephantine back of Butser Hill heaving up,
spotted with gorse but treeless, between Petersfield and Portsmouth,
as Ararat, though my unfaithful eyes fail to imagine the ark. There
are days now when the clear suddenly swelling hills like Tarberry or
Barrow Hill in Hampshire, or Cley Hill or the Knolls of Maiden Bradley
in Wiltshire, or the abrupt promontories like Chanctonbury or Noar
Hill near Selborne, or the long trooping ranges, seem to be islands
or atolls looming dimly through the snowy still mists of morning or
the clouds of rainstorm. Even without mist some of the isolated green
hills rise out of the pale levels of cornland as out of sea; and I have
seen, from near Bruton, the far-distant mass of Cadbury, the hill some
call Camelot in Somerset, look like a dark precipitous isle. When the
early roads along the ridges were made, the hills still more closely
resembled islands emerging out of the forest and out of the marsh. The
watersheds created the roads, as they still do over hundreds of miles
in Africa. The roads keep to the highland, and if this highland were
to form a circle they would follow it; and hunters say, as Mr. H. W.
Nevinson tells us in _A Modern Slavery_, that the elephants do “move
in a kind of rough zone or circle--from the Upper Zambesi across the
Cuando into Angola and the district where they passed me, and so across
the Cuanza northward and eastward into the Congo, and round towards
Katanga and the sources of the Zambesi again.” Somewhere too I have
met the tradition, probably a Welsh one, that this island of Britain
was girdled by a road above its shores. The early nomads would descend
from the ridges only with reluctance, for fear of the marsh and the dim
forest. Doubtless their travelling oxen, especially if burdened, had
the same horror of mud--when they are not free to wallow in it--as they
have to-day. In a very early age it is likely that men would go down to
the rivers only to water their cattle, and then return to the heights.
There would be several drinking-places, and at one of them they would
discover a ford, unless the animals had already marked one, and then if
the river had not become a boundary they might cross and continue their
wanderings along a road upon the next island of hills. Thus island
would be joined to island. The paths ran along the back of each one
and branched over the spurs, and the linking up of these would tend
to form highways of great length, like that trodden by Launcelot, “far
o’er the long backs of the bushless downs” to Camelot. It were easy
to take such a route to-day from anywhere in Berkshire or Hampshire,
travelling high and away from cities, except cities of the dead like
Avebury, far from towns and villages, through Wiltshire into Somerset
or Dorset, on roads which are altogether turf or have so goodly a
border of grass and blossom that the wayfarer need never touch the hard
white grit which is the same on a metalled road whether in London or in
wild country.
[Illustration: The Ridgeway, near Blowingstone Hill, Berkshire.]
Down from the realm-long bridge of islands above the world the
traveller descended to cities of men. Thus Sir Launcelot after long
riding in a great forest came into a low country of fair rivers and
meadows and saw before him the long bridge and the three pavilions on
it, “of silk and sendal of divers hue.” Thus Sir Bevis of Hampton,
cheated of his patrimony by a cruel mother and keeping sheep on the
Downs, looked and saw below him the town and the tower that should have
been his. Thus Cobbett, looking from Portsdown Hill above Portsmouth,
saw the sea for the first time and the English fleet riding at anchor
at Spithead and his heart “was inflated with national pride,” and
though he had walked thirty miles that day he slept not a moment,
but rose at daylight and offered himself for the sea on board the
_Pegasus_. Thus we descend on Winchester or Salisbury out of the hills,
glad to get there what we want as we have for many days gladly wanted
what we could get. It has been, let us say, a day that should be
spring, and in the dark, wet copses there were thousands of primroses.
All day the wind, and often rain and wind together, roared in the
trees. The pale flowers were soaked and frayed and speckled with dust
from the trees, and they hung down or were broken from their soft
stalks. But the high land and the neighbouring sky exalt us. Even the
sight of these tender-blubbering petals ruined in the drenched grass
was pleasant. We should have liked better to see them unspoiled and
wide in the sun; but we did not wish them to be so, and their distress
did but add to the glory of the storm and to our defiance, just as did
the cowering of birds, of bowed trees, of whole woods, under the wild,
shadowy swoop of the mist and rain, and the valleys below us humbled,
their broad fields, their upthrust churches and clustered villages
overwhelmed and blotted out, and everything annihilated save the wind,
the rain, the streaming road, and the vigorous limbs and glowing brain
and what they created. Not that we did not welcome freely the minutes
of dimly shining stillness that were as a secluded garden in a city,
when the storm paused; for then we drank in the blue sky and the dark
revealed tracts of plain and hill that lay stunned and astonished like
a dreamer opening his eyelids after tumultuous dreams; we drank them
with easy joy as of a man reading a great adventure when the heroes of
it have long been dead, for we ourselves were so much above all that
expanse which, powerless and quiet, might almost seem to belong to the
past or to a tale. We and the storm were one and we were triumphant;
and in mid triumph we came down to the lighted streets.
As the first roads were made by men following herds, either as hunters
or as herdsmen, so ox and sheep have long helped to keep them up. The
great road of pilgrimage from Damascus to Mecca is not a made road,
but composed of the parallel strands of old hollow camel paths. These,
says Mr. Charles M. Doughty in _Arabia Deserta_, “one of the ancient
Arabian poets has compared to the bars of the rayed Arabic mantle.” To
our own day in England drovers took the cattle lazily along the old
roads of the watersheds and ridges. “Ox Drove” is the name in several
places of an old green road. Travellers in Wiltshire have noticed on
the one-inch Ordnance Survey Map a “British Trackway” running W.S.W.
out of the road from the Deverills to Maiden Bradley. A large tumulus
stands in the first field, as if for a sign at the beginning of the
track. Locally this is known as the “Ox Road,” and is said to have been
used by droves coming from Mid and East Somerset. It is a continuation
of the hard road which it leaves at the tumulus, and following it and
its continuations you may travel through Kilmington, and between the
Jack’s Castle tumulus and King Alfred’s tower, down Kingsettle Hill,
and on close to Cadbury Castle, to Ilchester, and, joining the Foss
Way, reach Devon and Cornwall. Only one mile of its course is marked
in Old English letters “British Trackway,” and this is apparently not
even a path, but a protracted unevenness of the ground, sometimes
almost amounting to a ridge or terrace in the grass, for the most part
following the hedges, and in one place entering a short, nettly lane.
The road, in spite of its romantic Old English lettering, is at this
point a very humble specimen of an ancient road and ox drove; for it
goes through meadows which are low compared with the fine waves of
Down--White Sheet Downs and the Maiden Bradley Hills--on either side of
it. A far better one is the ox drove which this joins at Kilmington.
It is said to have been used as a road from London to Exeter. Farmers
will tell you that the Ox Drove “never touched water,” which they will
qualify by saying you could go from Monkton Deverill to Marlborough
without touching water or crossing it, and if that also is impossible,
at any rate they have the tradition of the road’s character in their
heads, seldom as they may use it. Along it, says Mr. J. U. Powell,[2]
came “fat cattle from the Somerset pastures to London,” and once
he thinks it was a road leading to the lead of Somerset and tin of
Cornwall.
[2] _Wiltshire Archæological Magazine_, XXXIV.
It goes through the orchards of Somerset as a good hard road, but often
deprived of its right green borders. When these have been lost they
have not always disappeared, and its old breadth is shown probably by
a long, narrow field lying first on one side and then, after a zigzag,
on the other, as near the “Bull” to the east of Bruton. Sometimes with
a green space beside the road, or a depression behind the hedge, or an
aimless avenue of oak trees as at Redlynch, marking the old course, it
is a narrow road going in a determined manner up and down, but with
few deviations and having a purpose obviously unconnected with the few
cottages on its edge. Here it is called the Hardway. The “hard road”
is the countryman’s admiring term for a made road; but it is suggested
that the Hardway is the Har- or Harrow-Way, and is a continuation of a
road running east and west through Hampshire and Wiltshire. It crosses
the little shaded river Brue and ascends Kingsettle Hill between high
banks of beech and oak and bluebell. It mounts, like a savage who
does not mind being out of breath, straight up the steep wooded wall
of the hill until at the top it is eight hundred and fifty feet high
instead of four hundred, and takes you into Wiltshire. On the right
is the huge square tower of brick erected by one of the Colt Hoare
family in honour of King Alfred. The name Kingsettle Hill was thought
by Colt Hoare to mark the pass of King Alfred when, with the chief
men of Somerset, he issued from Athelney “after Eastertide,” in 878,
and marched to Egbert’s stone in the east part of Selwood Forest.
This “stone” or “cliff” has been supposed to be White Sheet Hill, a
very conspicuous and noble place for the King to gather the people of
Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire before leading them to the victory
of Edington. On the right and, like Alfred’s Tower, at the brink of
the hill is the big tumulus known as Jack’s Castle; and from either
you command Somersetshire nearly as far as the curvature of the earth
allows. From the oaks and bluebells of the slopes beneath you stretches
a low subdivided country of many oaks--and cuckoos calling from
them--and the Hardway penetrating it from the south-west. Colt Hoare
calls the tumulus “Selwood Barrow,” a beacon above the great Forest of
Selwood and possibly a direction post for travellers from the west to
Old Sarum. In the north-west the land rises up to a ridge with a comb
of beech trees, which is Creech Hill above Bruton, and at its feet the
masses of Pink Wood and Norridge Wood. The Mendips are a dim cloud
beyond it on the right, the Quantocks a dimmer cloud on the left; and
in the low land between them is Athelney, and near it Glastonbury,
standing above the full-grown Brue. Sometimes the wind-like sound of an
invisible train ascends.
The road takes you through the remains of Selwood Forest. Now it has
a fair green border, often of considerable breadth. That you are in
Wiltshire there can be no doubt on emerging from the trees. For in
front upon the left are those gentle monsters, the smooth Long and
Little Knolls above Maiden Bradley, smooth, detached green dunes
crested and fringed with beeches. Under this side of the Long Knoll
is the tower of Kilmington Church among its trees. Lying across the
road a few miles ahead are the bare White Sheet Downs, which are to be
mounted, and farther to the right the wooded beacons above Fonthill
Gifford and East Knoyle. The road makes for the scar of a high quarry
on the nearest slope of White Sheet, a little to the left of a lesser
isolated hill, a smooth, wooded knoll or islet. The road is gently
and evenly rising, a hard, white road almost straight, between grassy
borders with thorns and brambles under beeches that overhang from
behind the hedge. They are good trees standing on a strip of turf
furrowed as if it had once been the road or part of it; and some
young ones have been lately planted, so that all is not yet over with
English country, though landlords say so. The road crosses another to
Kilmington and Yarnfield, and at once it is older-looking, hard, but
winding slightly among bushy and lush steep banks. You see flowers and
ash trees, and a linnet on the tip of one, but nothing distant save
white clouds and the blue. Here it is called Long Lane, and among its
herbage is an old London milestone. Long Lane is often the title of a
lane coming from somewhere afar off: there is one south of Hermitage,
giving its name to a village, in Berkshire, and one near Cucklington
in Somerset, where there is a Tinker’s Hill also. In another mile Long
Lane crosses the Maiden Bradley road by a smithy and a “Red Lion”;
its name becomes White Sheet Lane, and it goes straight in sight of
the high white quarry and the deep tracks up to White Street Castle.
Like Long Lane, it is a parish boundary. Both are without a house: the
road has hardly passed a house since Redlynch, save at a crossing, and
those living in the houses use the road only for a mile or so on the
way to a village on either side. Slanting uphill under the quarry, with
a parallel green way hollowed beside it, goes the road’s bolder self.
The hedges and banks are low, and the cornland or meadow is open round
about. The lane turns to climb White Sheet Hill, and beeches and some
whitebeam trees cool the beginning of the ascent; there are myriads of
primroses in their season and chaffinches singing. You pass a thatched
house and the lime-kiln of “Tom Gatehouse, Lime Burner,” by the quarry,
and another milestone showing twenty-three miles to Sarum and a date
like 1757--when Blake was born. Looking back, the Knolls are on the
right and Alfred’s Tower on the left among the woods. There are tumuli
on the right as the road comes clear out on to the hill-top and travels
between the wired fences of the downland pasture. Here stand cows
who do not often see a pencil sharpened. Pewits wheel over and before
and behind; all along the high course of the road the pewits cry and
wheel. The road is at first rutted, but is soon a green smooth track
on the highest land, skirting the upper ends of coombes dappled dusky
gold by gorse, and commanding bare downland on the left and wooded
hills on the right, and looking along a great bottom to the church
tower of Mere, and Mere’s beautiful “Long Hill,” and the wide-arboured
vale stretching away to the long ridge of Dorset. It is a high way and
a proud way. After crossing an ancient ditch it is labelled “British
Trackway,” and ahead it is seen going between a wire fence and a dark
line of tussocks. Then it is divided into three or four parallel
terraces grooved by wheels, but with a lark’s nest in the green rut. It
crosses the Mere road as two hollow ways side by side, but in a little
while is only a green track with single thorns on the left. Here is
the twenty-first milestone from Sarum, the ninety-ninth from London,
inscribed 1750, and it is called the London Drove Road; it is still in
sight of Alfred’s Tower, now protruding above White Sheet ramparts. In
one place it is so wide that the milestone stands out in the middle,
like a traveller asleep or turned to stone among mole-heaps that have
blotted the signs of other travellers. On the left, as far as the main
Wincanton road, part of the track is embanked; entering the hard motor
road to Amesbury and London, the old way is outlined chiefly by the
thorns of Old Willoughby Hedge on the left. The road going hedgeless
across the downland is but the thin backbone of the old green way. For
a time the line of thorns diverges, and then, soon after the crossing
of the Warminster road, they come slanting from the right to meet the
road and cross it just before another milestone. Hereby are three
milestones on different roads, all close together, which has caused
the easy winning of merry wagers to run past three milestones in three
minutes. The drove crosses several roads going to Hindon, as a broad
green track with or without a hedge, marked by its greater profusion of
daisies and its paleness and lack of tussocks. Still there are pewits,
and somewhere not far away a Pewit Castle. It is joined again by the
main Amesbury road beyond Cold Berwick Hill, but presently deserted,
the busier white way going boldly off over the ridge, and down to
the Wylye River and up again on to Salisbury Plain by Yarnbury, and
so past Stonehenge to Amesbury. The green road winds along the south
slope of the ridge. Now two lines of thorns show the course far ahead,
or the white weals of an ascent are seen; now gorse encroaches on it,
and at a crossway corned-beef tins and grey embers mark an encampment
of nomads. It passes thickets of thorn and wayfaring trees burying an
old milestone to Sarum. Turf or corn lies on either hand or on both.
It keeps along the edge of Groveley Woods and within sound of the
nightingales until it bends down to Salisbury; once probably it or a
higher parallel course went over a ford to Old Sarum, and evidently
it is vastly older than the eighteenth-century milestones, perhaps old
enough to have guided the Hampshire men and some of the Wiltshiremen to
Alfred, a road such as Cobbett loved for the hammering of horses’ hoofs
on flints.
Another fine ox drove, and dignified by that name and by old lettering
on the Ordnance Map, ran clear for a long stretch along the high land
south of the Ebble River, from a point four miles south of Salisbury
and westwards by Winkelbury to the south of Shaftesbury. It may some
day be proved that one of the most famous of ancient roads, the
Icknield Way itself, was an ox drove. There is said to be a charter
mentioning the Icknield Way as “the way the cattle go”; and one writer
has boldly derived the very name from the British Yken, or Ychen,
meaning oxen. Every district in the chalk country has its tradition of
an old road, now surviving in a footpath or in broken vertebræ of lane
and footpath to provide walkers with endless theories. At Swindon, for
example, it is said[3] that the Holy Well stood on a road coming from
the east and going westward past Bradenstoke Abbey into Somerset, and
on another used by pilgrims to the shrine of St. Anne’s in the Wood,
at Brislington in Somerset, which went by Elcombe, Hay Lane Bridge,
Bushton, Clyffe, Calne, Studley, Chippenham, Pewsham Forest, Bradford,
Keynsham Abbey, and Whitchurch, to Brislington, which is in the
south-east of Bristol and has now a station called St. Ann’s Park. But
this is not the place to give way to the fascination of a roll-call of
country names.
[3] _Swindon Fifty Years Ago_, by William Morris.
Except that bridges superannuated fords, the conditions for the
travelling of cattle cannot have changed much from Alfred’s time until
the day of railway trucks carrying thickets of moaning horns and square
blocks of sheep. The turnpike system helped to preserve the old roads
because drovers using them could avoid the tolls; their cattle could
also feed by the wayside. Canon Jackson,[4] in 1862, said that the
Ridgeway of Berkshire and Wiltshire was part of the road used for ages
and to this day for driving cattle from Anglesey into Kent. Mr. Walter
Money, in a note to Miss Gossett’s _Shepherds of Britain_, said much
the same thing. Unfortunately neither has told us anything of their
route. I have no doubt they could have covered most of the distance on
grass. I should like to have travelled with them. You will find “Welsh
Ways” all over England. Walkers or Workaway Hill, where the Ridgeway
descends southward from Wansdyke to the Pewsey Valley, is said to be a
corruption of Weala-wege, and to have been called Walcway (or Welshway)
by a shepherd not long ago. There is a “Welshway” in Northamptonshire
making past Northampton for Wales by way of Banbury and the Cotswolds,
and said to have been the route of Welsh drovers. There is a “Welsh
Lane” in the Cotswolds turning out of the Gloucester road, three or
four miles from Cirencester, and going up the hill by Four Mile
Bottom towards Barnsley. I met an old man who remembered helping the
Welsh drovers with their black cattle there sixty years ago. They were
putting up near by for the night, and they liked the boy because his
name was David. In the downland these roads would be practicable for
the most part all the year round; but Defoe tells us that the clay
roads of the Midlands used to be so bad that graziers sold their stock
in September and October: they could then be taken to the neighbourhood
of London and kept until mid-winter to be sold at a high price.
Cheshire men used to send their cheese to London either all the way by
sea or overland to Burton, and so by the river to Hull and thence by
sea. Gloucester men sent their goods by land to Lechlade or Cricklade,
and then onward by the Thames; but their flocks doubtless could travel
by Bath and go along the down ways eastward. But he says that now the
roads are good, and mutton comes straight from the country in December,
and almost as cheap as in summer.
[4] _Wiltshire Archæological Magazine_, VII, 125.
[Illustration: Under Liddington Hill, Wiltshire.]
I have not had the fortune to meet drovers from Wales, but where the
Icknield Way through Buckinghamshire rounds the promontory Beacon
of the Ivinghoe Hills I have seen men with sheep from Berkshire
or Dorset journeying towards Dunstable, Royston, and the farms of
Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. They have to go much on the hard grit
to-day, and I have heard that they are kept off the unfenced Ridgeway
lest the flock should eat too much of the pastures in their passage.
The sheep dislike the grit as much as Mr. Burroughs loves it and I
hate it, and what with the traffic and the harshness of the road it
is not surprising to hear of a Welsh flock taking a week to get from
Warminster to Monckton Deverill.
Where the high down roads are fenced there could be no better
wayfaring. The track is twenty or thirty yards wide or more. It
is untouched by wheels, and grows nothing but grass and the most
delicate flowers. Along similar droves doubtless the sheep go up to
the alpine grass in summer, as the shepherd in California told Miss
Mary Austin.[5] “We went between the fenced pastures, feeding every
other day and driving at night. In the dark we heard the bells ahead
and slept upon our feet. Myself and another herdboy, we tied ourselves
together not to wander from the road.... Whenever shepherds from the
Rhone are met about camps in the Sierras they will be talking of how
they slept upon their feet and followed after the bells.” The best time
to meet travelling sheep is after one of the fortnightly markets at
East Ilsley among the Berkshire Downs, or at the time of the Ram Fair
there on August 1st, or at the time of Tan Hill Fair on August 6th,
or Yarnbury Fair on October 4th. Tan Hill and Yarnbury fairs are both
held within the circuit of an old camp on the high chalk. Yarnbury is
a meeting-place of trackways over Salisbury Plain. Tan Hill is close
to the great Ridgeway and other trackways. Tan is supposed by some to
be connected with the Celtic “tan,” meaning fire, and with Celtic
religious festivals having ceremonies of fire. This fair was held at
a very early hour, and there is an obvious temptation to suggest a
religious origin for the beacons said to have been lighted to guide the
drovers.[6] I do not know what number of sheep would be sold at this
fair. Defoe says that as many as five hundred thousand were sold at
Weyhill Fair, one farmer attending to represent ten or twenty in his
own county of Sussex or Oxfordshire. If this number came to Tan Hill
it was worth a night’s drenching to see the beacons and the multitudes
arriving, to hear the bells and the sea of tired bleating and the sharp
chiding of the overstrung dogs and the curses of the sleepy drovers
upon that smooth, bare mountain without house or hut or a white road,
or anything much newer than Wansdyke except the square of mustard that
began to dawn through the mist like a banner not far away.
[5] _The Flock_, by Mary Austin.
[6] _Wiltshire Archæological Magazine_, XXXIV.
The Arab’s answer to Mr. Doughty’s[7] question whether he knew all the
strange spires, pinnacles, and battlements of the wind-worn sand rock
in the desert was that he knew, “as good as every great stone” in all
his marches over three or four thousand square miles; and there were
drovers who could have said as much of the landmarks on the downs, the
tumulus and camp, the furze thicket, the hawthorns, solitary or in
line, the beech or fir clump, the church tower, the distant white wall
or scallop of a chalk-pit, the white horse carved through the turf into
the chalk, the church towers of the valley, the long coombes.
[7] _Travels in Arabia_, by Charles M. Doughty.
Even when deserted, these old roads are kept in memory by many signs.
The grass refuses to grow over the still stream of turf in the same
way as at either side of it. A line of thorn trees follows their
course, or the hedge or fence or wall dividing two fields. They
survive commonly and conspicuously as boundaries between fields,
between estates, parishes, hundreds, and counties. It is one of the
adventurous pleasures of a good map thus to trace the possible course
of a known old road or to discover one that was lost. A distinct chain
of footpath, lane, and road--road, lane, and footpath--leading across
the country and corresponding in much of its course with boundaries is
likely to be an ancient way. By this means much of the line of a road
like the Icknield Way might be recovered if document and tradition had
not preserved it. Without these signs few men to-day could tell an old
from a new road, though, in fact, there are not many great lengths
of entirely new road except in new towns and newly drained regions;
elsewhere the new roads have been made by linking up or improving
old ones. The life of cities has destroyed at once the necessity and
the power to judge the expanse of earth under our eyes, and few but
soldiers educate whatever gift they have for this kind of judgment. If
we learn to use a map, it is without fundamental understanding, without
the savage’s or the soldier’s or the traveller’s grasp; we must have
inherited glimmerings of the old power, but they help us chiefly to an
æsthetic appreciation of landscape. Let a man take an old map--not a
very old one, which may be faulty or deficient--of his own district,
and see if he can really grasp the system of the hills and rivers, and
the bones of the land and the essential roads, and not be long baffled
merely by the absence of certain new roads and familiar names; for few
old ones will have entirely disappeared. If he is not so baffled he has
cause for pride. Many are to be found who can hardly read a map when
going from north to south, i.e. down the map instead of up it, with
the east on the left and the west on the right and the north behind;
and their difficulty is increased by being in a railway train. Such
men may be very good walkers and very good men, though they be walking
for exercise, or to improve body or soul, which is a reason that has
lately been condemned by Mr. Belloc. “The detestable habit of walking
for exercise,” he tells us, “warps the soul.”[8] He is perhaps assuming
that the man always keeps this one object in view, and is always
looking at his watch or feeling his pulse. But even a man walking for
exercise may forget his object and unexpectedly profit; he may surprise
happiness by the wayside or beyond the third stile, and no man can do
more, whether he have the best and the most Bellocian object in the
world. Then he condemns also men who ride along the road and into an
inn yard and feel that they are “like some one in a book.” This is a
rather serious matter. Authors have unintentionally persuaded simple
men to suffer many blisters for the chance of drinking ale in the
manner of Borrow and meeting adventures, in the hope of being heartily
and Whitmanesquely democratic. Even Leslie Stephen half-seriously
lamented that he was unworthy of Borrovian adventures; for they never
fell to him. A writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ has made a good
piece of prose in which he speaks of himself reading the _Essays of
Elia_ in an old inn at Llandovery--as Hazlitt read _La Nouvelle Heloise_
at Llangollen on his birthday. A great many must be walking over
England nowadays for the primary object of writing books: it has not
been decided whether this is a worthy object. Mr. John Burroughs also
condemns a walk taken as a prescription, but goes so far as to regard
walking itself as a virtue. He says that his countrymen “have fallen
from that state of grace which capacity to enjoy a walk implies”;
that they pride themselves on small feet, though “a little foot never
yet supported a great character.” He says they could “walk away from
all their ennui, their worldly cares, their uncharitableness, their
pride of dress; for these devils always want to ride, while the simple
virtues are never so happy as on foot.” He concludes by singing “the
sweetness of gravel and good sharp quartz-grit.” He must be singing
the grit of yester-year, or he never walked all day in the full blaze
of summer upon the grit between Newmarket and Hitchin. Leslie Stephen
thought the true walker one to whom walking “is in itself delightful”;
he regarded walking as a panacea for authors, and believed that it
could have cured Johnson and made Byron like Scott. A year or two ago
Mr. Harold Munro took a month across France into Italy, for a part of
the time putting himself out of reach of letters--to prove to himself
that he could do it. There are plenty of adventures in modern life,
but we still crave for the conspicuous ones which look so splendid
when their heroes are distant or in the grave. These are the only
adventures which we deign to recognize as such, and walking being a
primitive act “natural to man,” as Mr. Belloc says, we feel restored
to a pristine majesty, or Arcadianism at least, when we undertake it.
Perhaps if we walk long enough we shall discover something about roads.
There could be few better objects for walking, unless it be to meet a
mistress or to fetch a doctor. We walk for a thousand reasons, because
we are tired of sitting, because we cannot rest, to get away from towns
or to get into them, or because we cannot afford to ride; and for
permanent use the last is perhaps the best, as it is the oldest.
[8] See his Introduction to _The Footpath Way: an Anthology for
Walkers_.
[Illustration: The Icknield Way and Old Parallel Tracks, near
Newmarket.]