Hilaire Belloc

“ A man who should leave the Straits with the object of reaching the Hampshire centres would find a moderately steep, dry, chalky slope, always looking full towards the southern sun, bare of trees, cut by but three river valleys (and but one of these of any width) , not often indented with combes or projecting spurs: this conspicuous range would lead him by the mere view of it straight on to his destination.
When you have turned the corner of the valley of the Stour, you can see for miles 26 and miles the Kentish Downs like a wall pointing on over the Medway to Wrotham and the villages beyond. ”

“ When you reach that projecting shoulder of Wrotham Hill you can still see on for miles and miles the straight, clean-cut embankment of chalk inviting you to pursue it westward at such a height as will clear the last cultivation of the valleys, and as will give you some view of your further progress. The end of each day's march is clearly apparent from the beginning of it, and the whole is seen to lie along this astonishingly homogeneous ridge. You do not lose that advantage for perhaps four days of going until you reach the valley of the Wey and the Guildford Gap ”

“ But of all the relics of antiquity the prehistoric road is the most difficult to establish.
These old tracks, British, and (if the word has any meaning) pre-British, though they must abound in the island, have become most difficult to reconstitute.
The wild, half-instinctive trail of men who had but just taken on humanity: later a known and common track, but a track still in the hands of savages for countless generations, a road of this kind is preserved by nothing stronger than habit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It stands steep up out of the sea, it is twice as high as Beachy Head, more than half as high again as Dover Cliff, and though it is but steep turf and not white chalk, it stands up so against the light looking southward, that one may see it at not much less than thirty 52 miles distance as one runs northward so, with the westerly wind just aft of the beam and making for the land. Even in a haze it will stand above the mist and indicate the shore with its head so lifted as to show quite plain in the clearer sky. All this argument will be evident to those who know what a land-fall means. ”

“ Every one brought up among the chalk pits remembers them more vividly than any other thing about his home, and when he returns from some exile he catches the feeling of his boyhood as he sees them far off upon the hills.
Therefore I would make it a test for every man who boasted of the South Country, Surrey men (if there are any left) , and Hampshire men, and men of Kent (for they must be counted in) : I would make it a test to distinguish whether they were just rich nobodies playing the native or true men to see if they could remember the pits. ”

“ Again, to hear two voices outside at night after a silence, even in crowded cities, transforms the mind. A Roof also, large and mothering, satisfies us here in the north much more than modern necessity can explain; so we built in beginning: the only way to carry off our rains and to bear the weight of our winter snows. A Tower far off arrests a man's eye always: it is more than a break in the sky-line ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is easy to re-create in oneself to-day a sense of what the Road means to living things on land: it is easy to do it even in this crowded country. Walk, for instance, on the neglected Pennines along the watershed of England, from Malham Tarn, say, to Ribblehead, or from Kirkby Stephen up along the crest to Crossfell and so to Alston, and you will learn at once what follows on an untouched soil from the absence of a track—of a guide. One ravine out of the many radiating from a summit will lead to the one valley you seek ”

“ There is more. It was along the green-sand ridge of south England that neolithic man had his principal seat. The getting of iron sprang up before history on the red 24 stone of the Sussex weald; it remained there till our grandfathers' time. The oaks that grew from Kent to Devon, along so many creeks from the Rother to the Tamar, built our first ships. They remained our resource for this industry till the Napoleonic wars. The Victory was launched in Beaulieu River, and the first eye-witness, Caesar, heard that in cultivation the south had preceded the north. ”

“ A man must not only eat, he must eat according to his soul: he must live among his own, he must have this to play with, that to worship, he must rest his eyes upon a suitable landscape, he must separate himself from men discordant to him, and also combat them when occasion serves. The south-west of England has had in this region of ideas from the earliest times a special character and a peculiar value. ”

“ At once, and as it always must, fool violence produced the opposite of what it had desired. All the West suddenly began to stream to Canterbury, and à Becket's tomb became, after Rome, the chief shrine of Christendom. ”

“ Consider a man starting from the continental shore to reach England; consider him sailing with a fresh breeze, for if the breeze was not fresh his chances of crossing in a reasonable time and of making any particular place of landing were small. Consider the fact that if he crossed in a fresh breeze that breeze would be, three times out of four, from the south or west. He runs under the lee of Gris Nez, and when he is beyond that point of rock, he gets into the short, sharp tumble of the sea which is raised by such a wind against the tide, for he has started at the ebb. ”

“ More than rivers and more than mountain chains, roads have moulded the political groups of men. The Alps with a mule-track across them are less of a barrier than fifteen miles of forest or rough land separating one from that track. Religions, which are the principal formers of mankind, have followed the roads only, leaping from city to city and leaving the 'Pagani,' in the villages off the road, to a later influence. Consider the series Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Athens, and the Appian Way: Rome, all the tradition of the Tuscan highway, the Ligurian coast, Marseilles and Lyons. ”

“ I note this as a characteristic of the Road, quite apart from the more obvious considerations; such as, that primitive man would seek a ford; that he would seek gravel rather than clay; that he would try to pass as high up a river as possible, and that, other things being equal, he would keep to the general alignment of his path as much as possible in crossing a river. All these are self-evident without the test of experience, but this characteristic of which I speak is one that would not occur to a traveller who had not tested it with his own experience. ”

“ In a fog or at night, if one has not such a path, there is nothing to help one but the lay of the snow or the trend of the vegetation under the last gale. In climbing, the summit is nearly always hidden, and nothing but a track will save you from false journeys. In descent it alone will save you a precipice or 6 an unfordable stream. It knows upon which side an obstacle can be passed, where there is firm land in a morass, and where there is the best going; sand or rock—dry soil. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was not enough in this revolution that the Church should perish. The private lands of the most subservient were not safe—Kemsing, for example. It was the Manor of Anne Boleyn's father: it may be imagined what happened to such land. I know of no district in England where the heavy, gross, and tortured face of Henry in his decline haunts one more. Sacredness is twofold—of pleasure and pain—and this, the sacred end of our oldest travel, suffered in proportion to its sanctity. ”

“ And with religions all that is built on them: letters, customs, community of language and idea, have followed the Road, because humanity, which is the matter of religion, must also follow the road it has made. ”

“ To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfil a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. ”

“ It is never so hard as to resist the wearing down of feet and of vehicles. Moreover, those who are acquainted with chalk countries must have noticed how a road is not only naturally cut into the soil by usage, but forms of itself a kind of embankment upon a hillside from the plastic nature of the soil. The platform of the road is pressed outward, and kneaded, so to speak, into an outer escarpment, which would make such a track, for generations after it was abandoned, quite plain along the hillside. ”

“ The arts, the fierce air of patriotism, in whose heat alone the gems of achievement can form, the solution of abstract problems, the expression of the soul in letters—for all these things seclusion provides a special opportunity. It protects their origins from the enemies of seeds, it nurtures their growth with the advantage of a still air, it gives them a resting-place for their maturity. ”

“ The lower valley road becomes the only important one, the Pilgrim's Road above dwindles into, first, a lane very little used and falling into decay, then a path thick with brambles and almost impassable. A man going from Yaldham to Wrotham nowadays is bound to use the modern valley road. When we had pushed through the brambles of the deserted path for perhaps a mile and a half, the way broadened out 230 again, crossed the London Road, and turning the corner of the hill overlooked the church and roofs of Wrotham a hundred feet below. ”

“ Southern and eastern England, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex, south Berkshire, were the most open and the best cultivated areas, enjoyed the best climate, and were most in touch with the civilisation of the Continent. It is true to say that right down to the industrial revolution the centre of gravity of England lay south of the Thames. In the actual fighting the south always conquered the north, and whereas influence monastic and constitutional would spread from either end of the island, it was the southern which ultimately survived. ”

“ Now of all that study the chief charm lies 10 in mere antiquity. No one truly loves history who is not more exalted according to the greater age of the new things he finds. Though things are less observable as they are farther away, yet their appeal is directly increased by such a distance in a manner which all know though none can define it. It is not illusion; perhaps an ultimate reality stands out when the details are obscured. ”

“ We take it so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men, indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. ”

“ The Medway, perhaps because it is the relic of some 232 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 pilgrims of the Middle Ages probably went straight up the hill from Merstham by an existing track, got on to this clay, and followed Pilgrim's Lane along the crest—some shrine or house of call attracted them. The prehistoric road would certainly not have taken the clay in this fashion. On every analogy to be drawn from the rest of its course it would climb the hill at a slow slant, keeping to the chalk till it should reach the summit at some point where the clay had stopped and the slope below had 206 begun to be steep. ”

“ But, take the problem as a whole, whether applied to the commonest example, that of forming an hypothesis and then finding whether it could be sustained, or to the most exceptional (as where we found the Road making straight for a point in a river where there was no ford) , the general method was always the same: to consider the geographical and geological conditions, the analogy of existing trails of the same sort, the characters we had found in the Road itself throughout its length as our research advanced, and to apply these to the parts where we were in doubt. ”

“ The word Stoke here, as elsewhere in the South Country, is associated with the crossing of a stream. It 128 stands for the 'staking' which made firmer the track down through the marshy valley, and supported on either side the wattles and faggots by which an approach to a river was consolidated. Moreover, to this day, a ford exists at Itchen Stoke, and it is an obvious place for passing the river; not only is the water shallow, but the bottom is firm, and the banks are not widely separated, as is so often the case where the depth of a river is lessened. ”

“ The force of merely natural tendencies increased as the consciousness of civilisation faded, and when after the defeat of the pagans in the ninth century Christendom had just been saved and the light slowly began to grow, these forces remained (though with gradually diminishing power) and moulded Europe until the Angevine and the Capetian, the reinvigorated Papacy, the adventure of the Crusades, and the study of the Code, had created once more the fixity of a true civilisation: a civilisation whose institutions and philosophy are our own to-day. ”

“ The chalk, which I have spoken of coldly when I discussed the preservation of the Old Road, should somewhere be warmly hymned and praised by every man who belongs to south England, for it is the 190 meaning of that good land. The sand is deserted since men learnt to plough; the Weald, though so much of its forest has fallen, is still nothing but the Weald—clay, and here and there the accursed new towns spreading like any other evil slime. But the chalk is our landscape and our proper habitation. ”

“ It was then our business to seek for some remaining evidences, apparent to the eye, whereby the track could be recovered. Such evidences were the well-known fact that a line of very old yews will often mark such a road where it lies upon the chalk; the alignment of some short path with a known portion behind, and a known portion before one; while, of course, the presence of a ridge or platform upon such an alignment we regarded (in the absence of any other lane) as the best guide for our search. ”

“ By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on body—are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed. Reverence and knowledge and security and the love of a good land—all these are increased or given by the pursuit of this kind of learning. ”

“ There is but one small section of the continental coast whence England, the sun shining on the chalk cliffs, can be clearly seen; and it can be so seen but upon certain days, say one day out of three. The little section lies between Sangatte and Ambleteuse. Here a great hill, whose seaward projection is the cape of Gris Nez, affords a good look-out, and hence I say that at least 120 days out of the year the further shore is visible. On rarer occasions it may be got beyond Calais on the east, and as far as the high sandhills near Etaples on the south and west. ”