XXI
And so, farewell Knole, mausoleum of a departed condition of things, treasure-house of art and tradition, puppet-show for the summer throng. One looks for it, topping the sky-line, expectantly, and leaves it with regret; unlike those two tramps seen and heard on this very road by the present writer. One of them listlessly noticed its towers and gables. “Wot’s thet?” he asked his mate: not that he was interested, but for the sake of something to say. How can you be interested in anything when you are footsore but your feet?
“Corsel,” replied the other, shortly; “carm on.” But he need not have bidden his fellow “come on,” for he had not given the “castle” another glance, and had never halted a moment.
THE SEVEN OAKS.
The road descending steeply from Sevenoaks and having Knole Park on its left is the coaching highway, improved upon the ancient road. It is steep now, but how much steeper, how rugged and how narrow may be seen towards the bottom of the dip, where a little gate admits through the oaken palings of the park, and leads down a hollow lane whose banks are thickly set with ancient thorns and other trees. It is, or was before the embanked road was made, known locally by the names of “Shangden,” “Shand End,” or “Chene Dene,” in delightful incertitude.
This is the original road, preserved for the last seventy years or so in the bottom, where the modern highway was slightly deviated and constructed at a higher level. It is a surviving portion of that road Archbishop Islip, travelling horseback to Tonbridge in 1362, found so extremely bad. He struggled persistently, but at last fell from his horse and became “wet through all over.” In that pitiable condition he mounted again and rode on, without any change of clothes, and so was seized with paralysis.
An archway under the modern road, seen even more distinctly from a bye-road branching off to the right, was made for the especial purpose of maintaining unbroken the old line of an even more ancient cross-road—a pack-horse way—which crossed the old road from Sevenoaks to Tonbridge in the hollow, at right angles. The arch, however, has long been blocked up with timbering, and the pack-horse route is scarcely discernible in the park and the meadows.
Coming to the next rise, crowned by the “White Hart” inn, a line of seven trees is seen in the hedgerow on the right hand. These are the comparatively modern seven oaks planted at some uncertain time to commemorate those that are supposed to have originated the name of the neighbouring town. There is considerable difference in the size of the trees, and it is thus to be presumed that some of the seven were, from some cause or other, destroyed, and replaced later. The oldest may date back two centuries, the others sixty years or so later. No information exists as to who planted them, or when; even the site of the old original seven oaks that gave the town of Sevenoaks its name, away back in the dark ages, is unknown.
THE “WHITE HART” INN.
This is the summit of River Hill: a place which figures in an early sixteenth-century trust-fund that offers some entertaining history.