The Old Road

by Hilaire Belloc

The Old Road runs here (as throughout nearly the whole of its course between Dorking and Canterbury) up on the bare hillside above the valley. The road appears, as one walks it, to run at the same level all along the hillside, but really it is rising as the floor of the valley rises, in order to keep continuously at the same distance above it. Its lowest point is not much under 300 feet, but its highest is just over 500.

Immediately below it lies that string of habitations which everywhere marks its course, and between which it was originally the only means of communication. Just as Bletchingly, Reigate, Limpsfield, Westerham, Brasted, and the rest stood below its earlier course, and just as in its further part we shall find Hollingbourne, Harrietsham, Lenham and Charing, so here there runs a little succession of hamlets, churches, and small towns, which are the centres of groupings of arable land in the valley floor, while above them the Pilgrim's Road follows just above the margin of cultivation. Their names are Kemsing, Heaverham, St. Clere, Yaldham, and at last Wrotham.

The section further gives an admirable example of the way in which the Old Road was gradually replaced.

These six miles of its length may, for the purpose of the illustration they afford, be divided into three nearly equal parts by the village of Kemsing, and the hamlet of Yaldham. Each of these divisions shows the Old Road in one of its three historical phases: first as the only artery of the country-side, then as an alternative way supplemented by a valley road, and finally as a decayed and unused path whose value has been destroyed by the more modern highway below it. It is astonishing to see with what precision each of these phases is shown, how exactly each division ends, and how thoroughly the character of each is maintained.

In the first, from Otford to Kemsing, a distance of about two miles, one can see the two valley villages below one, and the track one follows is the only good road between them, though it lies above them both and can only be reached from either by a short rising lane. A short cut across the fields connects the two places, but if one wishes to use a proper and made way, there is none to take but that which still represents the Old Road, and so to go up out of Otford and then down into Kemsing. One has to do, in other words, exactly what was done for centuries when the archbishops came up to London from Canterbury; wherever one may desire to halt one has to leave the Old Road and come down from it to the village below.

In the second part, between Kemsing and Yaldham, the modern influence has been sufficient to provide an alternative. The distance is somewhat more than two miles. The Pilgrim's Way runs up along the hillside, a metalled lane, while below in the valley the old footpaths and cart tracks have been united into a modern permanent road, and a man going from Kemsing through Heaverham to Yaldham need not take the Pilgrim's Road above as his ancestors would have had to do, but can go straight along the lower levels.

Finally, with Yaldham and on to Wrotham the more common condition of modern times asserts itself. The lower valley road becomes the only important one, the Pilgrim's Road above dwindles into, first, a lane very little used and falling into decay, then a path thick with brambles and almost impassable. A man going from Yaldham to Wrotham nowadays is bound to use the modern valley road. When we had pushed through the brambles of the deserted path for perhaps a mile and a half, the way broadened out again, crossed the London Road, and turning the corner of the hill overlooked the church and roofs of Wrotham a hundred feet below.

Of Wrotham, the second link in that chain of palaces which afforded shelter to the Archbishop and to the King, as the one journeyed to Lambeth, the other to the sea-coast, I have already spoken. I desire here to discuss rather the topographical interest of the corner upon which we stood and its connection with the prehistoric road which it was our principal business to examine.

And for that purpose, though it occupied but the last part of a day, I would devote to a separate division the passage of the Medway which was now at hand.