BARHAM DOWNS.
The camp which Cæsar constructed along Barham Downs is still to be seen. On this wild and worthless tract of land which has never known cultivation, the marks of the spade will exist for many centuries if left undisturbed by new-comers. And although many historic gatherings have taken place here, no entrenchments have been made since the defeat of the Britons in B.C. 54. King John’s army of sixty thousand men encamped here in 1213, to withstand the French invasion, and Simon de Montfort, somewhat later, at the head of disaffected Barons; Henrietta Maria held her first Drawing Room here in a tent, while on her way to be married to Charles the First at Canterbury; and, centuries afterwards, a great army encamped on Barham Downs in readiness for Napoleon’s projected invasion. But on none of these occasions were any earthworks thrown up, and the fosses and ditches that still remain to be explored are of undoubted Roman construction.
COLDHARBOURS
Here, amid these long lines of Roman entrenchments, occurs again the mysterious name of “Coldharbour,” a perplexing place-name that is found no less than 170 times in England, in situations the most diverse and in districts widely scattered. At least twenty-six of these Coldharbours are to be found on the ordnance maps of Kent, and six of them on, or closely adjoining, the Dover Road. Their situation, scattered thus along the old military viâ of Watling Street, adds greatly to the force of the argument that this singular name has some connection with Roman times, but what connection, and what is the real meaning of the name, not all the acumen and ingenuity of archæologists has ever been able to satisfactorily explain. The fact of the great majority of Coldharbours lying by the site of Roman roads or camps has led to the ingenious theory that they first acquired their name in Saxon times when, the country being wasted with ruthless and decimating wars, the Roman villas still remaining were destroyed, and great desolate tracts of country created. Travellers (this theory goes on to say) could find no other shelter on their journeys save the ruined walls of the once magnificent palaces that the Romans had left; and as they crouched, shivering, to leeward of these ruinated and roofless remains of a decayed civilization, and tried to warm themselves at fires painfully and laboriously made of leaves and sticks, they called them “cold harbours.” Unhappily for this theory, the places called “Coldharbour” are by no means always situated in exposed situations, and no remains of buildings have been discovered on their actual site, although their neighbourhood is frequently found to be rich in Roman remains. A suggestion has been made that “cold” is a variant of “cool,” and that, far from being the miserable refugees of forlorn travellers, the Coldharbours were really the “Mount Pleasants” and “Belle Vues” of ancient times, to which our remote forbears resorted for “a breath of air.” We should probably be within our rights in deriding this suggestion as a theory made to fit a fertile imagination, but it is not safe, in the presence of such an apparently insoluble problem, to do more than present a few of the derivations advanced. It would be equally rash to assume that the stations of the “colubris arbor,” the Roman serpent-standard, gave their name to these places, although the idea is plausible enough.
Many Coldharbours are in exceedingly exposed places, as indeed here, on Barham Downs,[8] and many more are in quite sheltered situations, in places where dense woodlands once spread, giving work and shelter to charcoal-burners. This fact has led to the formulation of another theory, one which holds that these strangely named places were, prosaically enough, “coal-harbours,” or storage-places for charcoal. It is much to be desired that some leisured antiquary would devote himself to the elucidation of the name and the rescuing of the purpose of these Coldharbours from the mists of a remote and romantic antiquity. The other Kentish Coldharbours to be found near the Watling Street are at Bishopsbourne, Bridge, Newington, Northfleet, Sittingbourne, and Woolwich, and all—so close is the connection between the name and ancient dwellings—near the site of undoubted Roman stations or villas. Alike with the equally mysterious name of “Mockbeggar,” which also occurs with great frequency, the meaning of “Coldharbour” will probably never be discovered.[9]
Standing here beside the road at evening when the sun is going down and these bleak unenclosed uplands grow dark and mysterious, the centuries pass away like a fevered dream. Here and there the solemn expanse of the barren land is diversified by a few trees; here and there a few yards of hedge, beginning nowhere in particular and ending with equal strangeness, skirt the way; weather-beaten sign-posts start suddenly out of the moorland, and occasional haycocks take on a dead and awful blackness as the evening light dies out of the sky in long and angry streaks of red. When the moon rises and casts her cold beams upon the road and plays strange pranks with the shadows of trees and bushes, then the days of the Romans are come once more, and the legionaries live again. They rise from their camp of nineteen hundred years ago; they march along the Watling Street that was made by their descendants; and the sheen of their armour, the glitter of the pale moonlight on their eagle standards, and the tramp of many feet are as real to the imaginative traveller, if not of a greater reality, than the moaning telegraph that runs on countless poles in a diminishing procession beside the road as far as eye can reach.
