It was slow work here. Much of it ran through dense brushwood, where one had to stoop and push aside the branches, and all of it was damp, shaded from the sun by the mass of old yews, and less well drained on this flat edge and summit than it is on the hillside where it usually hangs. But though it is a difficult two miles, the path is discoverable all the way.
With Margery Wood it reaches the 700-feet line, runs by what I fear was a private path through a newly-enclosed piece of property. We remembered to spare the garden, but we permitted ourselves a trespass upon this outer hollow trench in the wood which marked our way.
A magnificent bit of open ground, from which we saw below us the sandy hills, and beyond, the whole of the Weald, led us on to a point where the Old Road once again corresponds with a modern and usable, though unmetalled and very dirty lane. This is the lane which runs to the south of the park of Margery Hall. It skirts to the north the property recently acquired by the War Office, and when it has passed the War Office boundary-stone it is carried across the high-road from Reigate to London by a suspension bridge, which must surely be the only example in Europe of so modern an invention serving to protect the record of so remote a past. Nor would there be any need for such a suspension bridge had not the London Road in the early part of the nineteenth century been eased in its steepness by a deep cutting, to cross which the suspension bridge was made. That bridge, once passed, the road pointed straight to the lodge of Gatton, and pursued its way through that park to the further lodge upon the eastern side.[28]
Here should be submitted some criticism of the rather vague way in which the place-names of this district have been used by those who had preceded us in the reconstruction of the Pilgrim's Way.
Reigate, which was Churchfell at the Conquest, has been imagined to take its later title from the Old Road. Now the name, like that of Riggate in the north country, means certainly the passage near the road; but Reigate lay well below in the valley.
True, the pilgrims, and many generations before them, must have come down to this point to sleep, as they came down night after night to so many other points, stretched along the low land below the Old Road in its upland course from the Wey to the Stour. So common a halting-place was it in the later Middle Ages that the centre of Reigate town, the place where the Town Hall now stands, held the chapel of St. Thomas from perhaps the thirteenth century to the Reformation. But Reigate no more than Maidstone, another station of the medieval pilgrimage, could have stood on the Old Road itself. It may be another track which gives Reigate its name. Some Roman by-way which may have run from Shoreham (which the experts do not believe to have been a port), right through the Weald to Reigate, and so to London.
AND BEYOND, THE WHOLE OF THE WEALD