The present road to Sevenoaks from Pratt’s Bottom is closely neighboured by the South Eastern Railway, running in a deep chalk cutting and then disappearing in the grim mouth of Polhill Tunnel, one and-a-half mile long. The mephitic breath of the tunnel, bellying sulphureously out and flying in noisome wisps over the road, would be a good converting agent for those who, believing in eternal punishment and the Pit, have not yet ordered their lives accordingly; and you who look down there think it rather surprising that railways with dreadful tunnels have not yet been pressed into missionary service by those who will not renounce the traditional Hell of sulphur and fire. Believers, convey your awful examples hither. Bring them to a belief in an Eternity of that, only hotter, and you shall have them instantaneously on their knees, earnestly making resolutions to turn from their wickedness, and live.
A station, now called “Knockholt,” is planted here. It was formerly styled “Halstead,” from the village of that name, half a mile away; but, to avoid any possibility of confusion with another Halstead, in Essex, it was given this name, although Knockholt is nearly three miles distant.
The felled trees, wooden shanties, and sawmills here beside the road, at May’s Farm, give the place rather the air of some scene of backwoods activity in America.
From here the road gradually rises to the crest of Polhill, on the commanding range of the North Downs. The “Polhill Arms,” standing on the left hand, marks the beginning of the long descent into the Weald, very thoroughly masked and the magnificent view down to Sevenoaks hidden by a dense screen of beeches and firs. Something else is masked by those trees: a great modern fort, with emplacements for heavy guns, built up here for the defence of London, as part of a scheme comprising some sixteen forts forming an irregular circle around the metropolis at a radius of about twenty miles, and designed to check a sudden descent of any possible enemy upon the capital.
London has been held by military experts to be peculiarly open to such a danger; hence the forts of Polhill, Farningham, Dartford, Merstham, Box Hill, Pewley Hill, Esher, and others. But Englishmen, official or otherwise, are so used to considering the likelihood of invasion remote that, although many of the sites for forts have been purchased, it has been found impracticable to obtain sufficient money from Parliament to complete the ring and to thoroughly fortify these approaches. Parliament looks with suspicion upon Service proposals, and since the scandals of the great Boer War those suspicions have been very generally shared by the nation at large, which looks upon the methods of the War Office as those of a war office in comic opera.
It is a tawny-coloured roadway that swoops down from the summit of Polhill, between the sandy banks of a wooded cutting, to Dunton Green. Half-way down, the trees and the cutting give place to open country, and the hill itself goes by another name: that of Sepham Hill.
Down by Dunton Green, looking backwards, the hills, those noble North Downs, are seen to go terracing away beautifully east and west, their great, green, rounded shoulders dimpled with folds and gullies, shaggy here and there with belts of trees, or scarred outrageously with great gashes of chalk-pits, where the lime-burners every day demolish yet another fragment of picturesque scenery and roast it in limekilns, to the end that it may go towards the making of mortar and mean streets. There goes Old England, in mortar, to feed the spreading tentacles of the towns.
Just such a chalk-pit is that huge scar, beside the hill we have just descended, where who shall say how many tons are excavated weekly? What would Ruskin have said of it? Something superlative, without doubt. I think I hear him: “accursed,” “damnable,” he says, and Dr. Samuel Johnson, in the spirit-world, discussing the question with him, decides magisterially, after his wont: “The point is, sir, whether you are to use the materials Nature has given us for the improvement of man’s condition in the world, or to neglect them in order to preserve the savage wastes of a desolate country-side, to gratify the diseased fancies of people who call themselves artists. Sir, let us take a walk down the Elysian equivalent of Fleet Street!”
AN OLD WAYSIDE COTTAGE, BELOW POLHILL.