LYCH GATE, PULBOROUGH
THE STANE STREET
the historians of the county have not hitherto remarked. It is this. If one stands upon the height of Gumber above Cold Harbour Hill and notes the direction of the Stane Street as it crosses the Downs, one finds it pointing straight at Pulborough Bridge. Or again, if one lays a ruler along the line of the Stane Street upon an Ordnance map so as to cover the section between Halnacker and Gumber, the prolongation of that line strikes to within a yard or two of Pulborough Bridge. It is, therefore, as certain as anything can be that the road made for this point, that the Roman causeway across the marsh ran directly from Hardham to the bridge, and that the Arun was crossed sixteen hundred years ago at the same place as it is to-day.
The point though new can hardly be questioned. Roads of this sort were necessarily laid down by a method of “sighting” from one distant point of the horizon to the other. In no other way could their straightness be achieved, and there can be no doubt that the first surveyor, in laying down the track from the south to the north side of the Downs, was guided by signals from the crest of the ridge; the line was given him by watchers upon the summit who could observe the parties on the southern slope below and the distant Arun to the north, and who had already determined from that vantage place the point at which the river could be most easily crossed.
At Pulborough Bridge the Stane Street again becomes a hard road, and with such slight deviations as the long centuries of its history have caused at Adversane and Parbook (they never leave the straight by so much as fifty yards) it takes its way right through the heart of the county. Billingshurst stands upon it, breaking its exact line by a growth of little encroaching freeholds. It does not cease to be a county road for many miles farther; it arrives at Five Oaks Green, there enters the heart of the Weald, where even to this day there are but very few houses; it dwindles to a lane, and so reaches its second crossing of the Arun at Alfordean Bridge, where traces of Roman fortification still appear. The remaining two and a half miles of its course through the county are either lost under the plough, overgrown in thickets (such as “Roman’s Wood”), or preserved as stretches of foot-path. It is here a deserted track, and enters Surrey at last near Ruckman’s Farm.
There may have been other Roman roads of the regular and military sort piercing the county.
PULBOROUGH