The Old Road (11 page)

By daylight we had come down Whitehill Lane, the steep pitch into Bishop Sutton, and were tramping up that vale
which makes for the watershed, and so leads to the corresponding vale of Alton upon the further side.

Here, at least as far as the Anchor Inn, and somewhat further, the modern highway corresponds to the Old Road. It thus follows the lowest of the valley, but there is no reason at first why it should not do so. The rise is fairly steady, the ground dry (an insignificant stream gradually disappears beneath the chalk), and the direction points straight to the shortest approach for the ridge which cuts off the basin of the Channel from that of the Thames.

This direction, does not, however, long continue. The valley curves somewhat to the north, and it might be presumed that the original way, making more directly for the saddle of the watershed, would gradually climb the southern hillside. By so doing it would find two advantages: it would take a shorter cut, and it would conquer at one stretch, and rapidly, the main part of the 360 feet between the Anchor Inn and the summit.

It was but a guess that the Old Road would probably take a straight line upwards.
The curve of the modern road does not carry it more than half a mile from the direct alignment. The Old Road might quite well have suffered such a deviation, and we were in some doubt when we proceeded to gather our evidence. That evidence, however, proved fairly conclusive.

There is a tradition, which Mrs. Adie has justly recognised, that the pilgrims of the Middle Ages passed through Ropley.
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What is more important to our purpose, Ropley has provided a discovery of British antiquities, Celtic torques, near the track which the more direct line to the watershed would presuppose.

We had further the place-name 'Street' to guide us: it is a word almost invariably found in connection with a roadway more or less ancient; later on we found many examples of it upon this same road.
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Here
the hamlet of Gilbert Street lay to the south of our hypothetical alignment, and another, named North Street, just to the north of it.

We further noted upon our map that a very considerable portion of the exact alignment drawn from the main road at the Anchor Inn to the saddle of the watershed would coincide precisely with a lane, which, when we came to examine it, gave every evidence of high antiquity.

Possessed of such evidence, it was our business to see whether investigation upon the spot would confirm the conclusion to
which they pointed. There was enough discovered so to confirm it, though the Old Road at this point has disappeared in several places under the plough.

The course of our discovery will be best followed with the aid of this rough map, whereon are sketched the contour-lines, the trace of the Old Road, and the watershed.

About half a mile from the 'Anchor' at the end of the avenue of trees which here dignifies the turnpike and just after the cross-roads,
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in a meadow which lay to the right of the road, my companion noticed an embankment, perfectly straight, slightly diverging southward from the main road as the line we were seeking should diverge, and (as we found by standing upon it and taking its direction) pointing directly at the saddle of the watershed. Whether it was continued through the garden of the Chequers Inn (a very few yards) I would not trespass to inquire: in the three fields
beyond, it had entirely disappeared.
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After this gap, however, there is a boundary, with an old hedge running along it and a path or cartway of a sort.
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These carry us exactly the same direction down a short slope, across a lane called Cow Lane, and on to the Manor Farm at North Street. During this stretch of a mile there was nothing more to guide us. The division between fields and properties very often follows the line of some common way: one could not say more.

But the significant fact which, as we believe, permitted us to bridge the gap was this: that the embankment we had first discovered, and the hedge and path (which proceeded in the same line after the loss of the road over the two fields) each pointed directly towards the lane (Brisland Lane) which we entered close to the Manor Farm,
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which presented, as we found, such marks
of antiquity, which takes the hill steeply, and which, on the plateau above, continues to aim straight at the saddle of the watershed.

It is difficult to express in a written description the sentiment of conviction which the actual view of such an alignment conveyed. When we had followed the lane up the steep hill and stood by Brisland farmhouse, looking back from that height we could see the lane we had been following, the hedge, the corner of the garden of the 'Chequers,' the embankment beyond, all in one, stretched out like parti-coloured sections of one string, and the two gaps did but emphasise the exactitude of the line.

Turning again in the direction which we were to follow, the evidence of ancient usage grew clearer.

We were upon one of those abandoned grassy roads, which are found here and there in all parts of England; it ran clear away before us for a couple of miles.

It was very broad—twenty yards perhaps. The hedges stood upon either side, guarding land that had been no man's land since
public protection first secured the rude communications of the country. No one who had seen portions of the Icknield Way upon the Chilterns, or of this same Old Road where it has decayed upon the Kentish hills, could doubt the nature of what we saw. Long fallen into disuse, it had yet escaped the marauding landlords during three centuries of encroachment. They had not even narrowed it. So much of its common character remained: it was treeless, wide, and the most of it neglected; never metalled during all the one hundred and fifty years which have transformed English highways. It was the most desolate, as it was the most convincing, fragment of the Old Road we had set out to find.

It had an abominable surface; we had to pick our way from one dry place to another over the enormous ruts which recent carts had made. For generations the lane had been untenanted; but there is a place where, in the last few years, an extraordinary little town of bungalows and wooden cottages had arisen upon either side of the lane.

Not satisfied with the map, we asked of a man who was carrying milk what local name was given to this venerable street. He told us that the part in which we were walking was called Blackberry Lane, but that it had various names at different parts: and as he could tell us nothing more, we left him.

At the very summit this way joined a modern, well-made lane, called Farringdon Lane, turned to the left and north, and immediately fell into the main London road, which had been climbing from the valley below and was here at the thirteenth milestone. The Old Road, suffering no deviation, plunged into a wood, and reappeared just at the summit of the pass, perhaps a quarter of a mile further. It is the point where the Ordnance map marks a height of 683 feet, and where one finally leaves the valley of the Itchen to enter that of the Wey.

The complexity of this corner is best understood in the sketch-map on the following page.

At the point where the Old Road leaves the wood, it merges again into the London
turnpike, which turns its direction (as the map shows) so as to correspond with the direction of the Old Road. This identity between the prehistoric and the modern is maintained nearly as far as Alton, and, if we except a short gap before that town, the coincidence of the Old Road and some existing highway may be said to continue right on to Puttenham, a distance of seventeen miles.

The valley which now opened eastward under the dull morning light reminded me of one of those noble dales which diversify the long slope of the Chiltern Hills. Like them it had the round sweep of the Chalk;
beeches, the trees of the Chalk, adorned it; its direction was the same, its dryness, its neat turf; but it lacked the distant horizons.

For two miles the road, magnificent in surface and in breadth, one of the finest in England, followed the bottom of the valley, falling in that distance some 300 feet; and in all this part it was most evidently the oldest of ways across these hills. There could be repeated of it what has been said above with regard to the road between Bishop Sutton and Ropley, and what will appear further on in the valley of the Wey: that any track, ancient or modern, was bound to follow the same course. For the dry and porous soil permitted a journey even under the earliest conditions along the lowest points, and, so permitted, such a journey had the advantage of descending by the easiest gradient. Had it taken to the hillside it would have fallen at last upon Alton by way of a steep spur. Moreover, the bottom of the valley is here constant in direction, not curving as we had found it on the far side of the watershed, and this direction deviates little from the straight line to Alton.

These characters do not attach to the London turnpike after the fifteenth milestone is passed; it turns somewhat sharply to the right (or southward) and falls by a corner into the road from the Meon valley at the entry of Chawton village. Such a course one may be certain was not followed by the Old Road. It could not but have preserved the alignment which the valley had already given it, and which corresponds, moreover, with the High Street of Alton itself. For these seven furlongs there can be no doubt that it continued straight along the dip of the valley, and entered Alton on the northern side
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of the triangular common called 'The Butts,' by which one approaches the town from the south-west.

We were unable to prove this by direct examination; the main line of railway has here obliterated much by an embankment, and to this has been added all the new work of the Meon valley line, and the junction. The ground has therefore lost all its original character, and its oldest marks have disappeared. We made no
attempt to follow the direct path for this short mile. We descended the high-road round by Chawton to Alton, and the first division of our task, the division in which a greater proportion of uncertainty would exist than in any other, was accomplished.

Comforted by such a thought, we drank mild ale at the 'Three Tuns' for about half an hour.

Alton to Shalford

Twenty-one miles

At Alton, with the green by which one enters the town from the west, begins a stretch of the Old Road, which stands by itself.

It may be roughly called the division between Alton and Farnham, but it stretches for a mile or two beyond Farnham to the pond at Whiteways, where the main road climbs the summit of the Hog's Back, and leaves the Pilgrim's Way a few hundred yards to the south.

This section, just over thirteen miles in length, has several peculiarities which distinguish it from the rest of the Road.

First
—It follows the river Wey for miles, not as it followed the river Itchen, on a dry ledge above the stream, but right along the low land of the waterside. This is a feature
in the Old Road not to be discovered in any other part of its course. It takes care to be within easy reach of water for men and horses, but it avoids the low level of a stream, and thick cover and danger of floods which such a level usually threaten. We had not found it (save for a very few yards) in immediate touch with the Itchen, nor should we find it later on running by the Mole, the Darent, or the Medway. Even the Stour, whose valley it is compelled to follow, it regards from heights well above the river.

Secondly
—It runs for a part of this division upon clay, a soil which elsewhere it carefully avoids as being about the worst conceivable for a primitive and unmetalled road. Elsewhere (after Wrotham, for instance), it will make a detour rather than attempt any considerable stretch of gault; but here, for several miles along this valley of the Wey, it faces the danger.

Thirdly
—In every other portion of its long journey it passes along the
edge
of habitations and tilled land; it was brought to do so by the same economic tendency which makes our railways to-day pass by
the edges, not the centre of most towns; but here it must often have run right through whatever cultivation existed; at Alton, at Farnham, and in one village between, Bentley, it forms the high street of the place. A track which carefully just avoids Guildford, Dorking, Reigate, Westerham, Wrotham, Charing, and a dozen smaller places here touches and occasionally passes through the earliest groups of houses, the earliest pastures and ploughed fields.