The Old Road

by Hilaire Belloc

We had already come across the first working of this kind shortly after we had recovered the Old Road beyond Gomshall, but that and the whole succeeding chain of pits were now disused, grown over with evergreens and damp enormous beeches. We had found a more modern excavation of the sort at the end of Denbies Park: it was called the Dorking Lime Works. Here, however, in these enormous pits, we came to something different and new. I looked up at their immensity and considered how often I had seen them through the haze: two patches of white shining over the Weald to where I might be lying on the crest of my own Downs, thirty miles away.

It is the oldest, perhaps, of the industries of England. Necessary for building, an excellent porous stratum in the laying of roads, the best of top-dressings for the stiff lands that lie just beneath in the valley, chalk and the lime burnt from it were among the first of our necessities.

Its value must have come even before stone building or made roads or the plough; it furnished the flints which were the first tools and weapons; it ran very near by the healthy green-sand where our earliest ancestors built their huts all along the edges of their hunting-ground, the Weald, on ridges now mostly deserted, and dark for the last three hundred years with pines.

The chalk, which I have spoken of coldly when I discussed the preservation of the Old Road, should somewhere be warmly hymned and praised by every man who belongs to south England, for it is the meaning of that good land. The sand is deserted since men learnt to plough; the Weald, though so much of its forest has fallen, is still nothing but the Weald—clay, and here and there the accursed new towns spreading like any other evil slime. But the chalk is our landscape and our proper habitation. The chalk gave us our first refuge in war by permitting those vast encampments on the summits. The chalk filtered our drink for us and built up our strong bones; it was the height from the slopes of which our villages, standing in a clear air, could watch the sea or the plain; we carved it—when it was hard enough; it holds our first ornaments; our clear streams run over it; the shapes and curves it takes and the kind of close rough grass it bears (an especial grass for sheep), are the cloak of our counties; its lonely breadths delight us when the white clouds and the flocks move over them together; where the waves break it into cliffs, they are the characteristic of our shores, and through its thin coat of whitish mould go the thirsty roots of our three trees—the beech, the holly, and the yew. For the clay and the sand might be deserted or flooded and the South Country would still remain, but if the Chalk Hills were taken away we might as well be the Midlands.

These pits which uncover the chalk bare for us show us our principal treasure and the core of our lives, and show it us in grand façades, steep down, taking the place of crags and bringing into our rounded land something of the stern and the abrupt. Every one brought up among the chalk pits remembers them more vividly than any other thing about his home, and when he returns from some exile he catches the feeling of his boyhood as he sees them far off upon the hills.

Therefore I would make it a test for every man who boasted of the South Country, Surrey men (if there are any left), and Hampshire men, and men of Kent (for they must be counted in): I would make it a test to distinguish whether they were just rich nobodies playing the native or true men to see if they could remember the pits. For my part I could draw you every one in my country-side even now. Duncton, where the little hut is, surrounded by deep woods, Amberley, Houghton, which I have climbed with a Spaniard, and where twice the hounds have gone over and have been killed, Mr. Potter's pit, down which we hunted a critic once, the pit below Whiteways, Bury Pit, and Burpham, and all the older smaller diggings, going back to the beginning, and abandoned now to ivy and to trees.

I know them and I love them all. The chalk gives a particular savour to the air, and I have found it good to see it caked upon my boots after autumn rains, or feel it gritty on my hands as I spread them out, coming in to winter fires.

All this delays me on the Old Road, but the pits can be given a meaning, even in research such as that upon which we were engaged.

The chalk hills, from Betchworth here right on to the Medway, have many such bites taken out of them by man, and there is this peculiarity about them, that very many of them cut into and destroy the Old Road.

I think it not fantastic to find for such a repeated phenomenon an explanation which also affords a clue to difficult parts of the way. The Old Road being originally the only track along these hills was necessarily the base of every pit that should be dug. Along it alone could the chalk be carried, or the lime when it was baked, and it was necessary for the Britons, the Romans, and their successors to make the floor of the lime pit upon a level with this track. Later when the valley roads were developed and the Old Road was no longer continuously used, it was profitable to sink the cutting further, below the level of the Old Road, and, indeed, as far as the point where the chalk comes to mix with the sand or clay of the lower level. As the Old Road grew more and more neglected the duty of protecting it was forgotten, and the exploitation of the pits at last destroyed it at these points.