Can we discover any explanation for this coincidence of a prehistoric track with the high-road of our own time, which is almost indifferent to soil? for the crossing of the clay? for the neighbourhood of the river?
A little consideration will enable us to do so. The hills which everywhere else afford so even a platform for the prehistoric road are here of a contour which forbids their use. To-day, as a thousand years ago, any road down this valley must have run upon this lowest line.
The contour-lines, of which a rough sketch is here appended, are enough to prove it.
There is a deep combe at Holybourne Down, two more on either side of Froyle, a fourth beyond Bentley, a fifth—smaller—before Farnham. All these gullies cut up into a hopeless tangle what in Surrey and Kent will become one unbroken bank of chalk. Any path attempting these hillsides would either have doubled its length in avoiding the hollows, or would—had it remained direct—have been a succession of steep ascents and falls; all the dry slopes which bound the vale to the north are a succession of steep and isolated projections, thrust out from the distant main chain of the chalk; many of them are crowned with separated summits. The road is therefore compelled to follow the valley floor with all the consequences I have noted.
As far as Froyle, two and a half miles from Alton, it never leaves the river by more than a quarter of a mile, but the valley is here dry, the soil gravelly and sandy, the height considerable (above three hundred feet), and there is no reason why it should go further from the stream than it did in the valley of the Itchen. After Froyle you get the clay, and then right on through Bentley the road does attempt to get away northward from the stream, avoiding the marshy levels and keeping to the 300-feet contour-line. It does not approach the river again till firmer ground is found near the Bull Inn. Thence to within two miles of Farnham it has to negotiate a good deal of clay, but it picks out such patches of gravel as it can find,21 and it must be remembered that the valley of the Wey, in this early part, drains more rapidly, and has a less supply of water than that of the Itchen. Near Farnham, somewhat beyond Runwick House, it finds the sand again, and can follow along the low level without difficulty.
The Old Road keeps throughout this passage to the sunny northern bank of the river, so that, while it is compelled to keep to the bottom of the valley, it attempts at least to get the driest part of it.
Farnham, at the mouth of this valley, the point of junction between the Old Road and its still older predecessor from Salisbury Plain, was always a place of capital importance, especially in war. The Roman entrenchment, two miles up the valley, the Roman dwellings to the south, tell us only a little of its antiquity; and though our knowledge of the castle extends no further than the eleventh century, the fact that it was the meeting-place of the roads that came from Salisbury Plain, from the Channel, from London, and from the Straits of Dover, necessarily made it a key to southern England.
We have seen how the western roads converge there, first the Harrow Way, then our own road from Southampton Water and Winchester (a road which probably received the traffic of all the south beyond Dorsetshire), then the road from Portsmouth and the Meons, which came in at Chawton.
The accident of the Surrey hills made all men who wished to get to the south-western ports from the Thames valley and the east pass through Farnham. Travellers going west and north from the Weald were equally compelled, if they would avoid the ridge, to pass through Farnham. The former had to come down north of the Hog's Back, the latter from the south of it, and it was ever at Farnham that they met.
At Farnham, therefore, the first political division of our road may be said to end; and after Farnham the western tracks, now all in one, proceed to the Straits of Dover, or rather to Canterbury, which is the rallying-point of the several Kentish ports.
Just outside the town the road begins to rise: it is an indication that the road is about to take the flank of the hills, a position which it holds uninterruptedly (save for four short gaps occasioned by four river valleys) from this point until the Camp above Canterbury.
Hitherto, for reasons which I have explained, the road has had no opportunity of this kind. The hills of the Itchen valley were not sufficiently conspicuous, those of the upper Wey too tortuous, for the trail to take advantage of a dry, even, and well-drained slope. The height to which it rises between Ropley and Alton is not a height chosen for its own purpose, but a height which had to be overcome of necessity to cross the watershed. Henceforward, until we were within a few miles of Canterbury, there stretched before us, on and on, day after day, the long line of the northern heights, whose escarpment presented everything the Old Road needed for its foundation, and of which I have written at such length in the earlier portion of this book.
The rise continued gently until the inn at Rumbold was passed, and the fork at Whiteways was reached. Here the old flanking road went up along the ridge of the Hog's Back in the shape of the modern turnpike, while our track was left to continue its eastward way, two hundred feet below, upon the side of the hill.
Its soil was here a thin strip of the green-sand which continued to support us, until next day we crossed the Tillingbourne, just above Shere. It runs, therefore, firmly and evenly upon a dry soil, and the villages and the churches mark its ancient progress.
The afternoon was misty, even the telegraph poles, which at first marked the ridge of the Hog's Back above us, disappeared in the first half mile. We went unhappily and in the fog regretting the baker's cart which had taken us along many miles of road so swiftly and so well: a cart of which I have not spoken any more than I have of the good taverns we sat in, or of the curious people we met (as for instance, the warrior at Farnham), because they are not germane to such an historical essay as is this.
We went, I say, regretting the baker's cart, and came to the wonderful church of Seale standing on its little mound. We noted that the track passed to southward of it, not right against its southern porch, but as near as it could get, given the steep accident of the soil just beyond. We noted this (but dully, for we were very tired), and we plodded on to Shoelands.
We were in the thick of the memories which are the last to hang round the Old Road, I mean the memories of those pilgrims, who, after so many thousand years of its existence, had luckily preserved the use and trace of the way.
Seale was built at the expense of Waverley, right in the enthusiasm that followed the first pilgrimages, just after 1200. The names also of the hamlets have been held to record the pilgrimage. How Seale (a name found elsewhere just off the Old Road) may do so I cannot tell. 'Shoelands' has been connected with 'Shooling'—almsgiving. Compton church itself was famous. Even little Puttenham had its pilgrim's market, and Shalford its great fair, called Becket's fair. We left Seale then, and at last, two miles on and very weary, we approached Puttenham, where, for the first time since Alton, something of exploration awaited us.
There was, indeed, just before reaching Puttenham, a small difficulty, but it is not of this that I am writing. The Old Road, which had for miles coincided with the lane, turned a sharp corner, and this, as I have already remarked, is so much against its nature in every known part of it, that I could only ascribe it to a cultivated field22 which has turned the road. Once tillage had begun, the road would be led round this field, and the old track, crossing it diagonally, would disappear under the plough; the original way must have run much as is suggested at the point marked X upon the map, and the suggestion has the greater force from the presence of a footpath following this line.
But