The Old Road

by Hilaire Belloc

At Charing the great hills begin to turn a corner. The Stour also turns, passes through a wide gap, and from east and south begins to make north and east straight for Canterbury; henceforward the spirit of Canterbury and the approach to it occupies the road.

We had reached the end of that long, clean-cut ridge which we had followed all the way from Farnham, the ridge which the four rivers had pierced in such well-defined gaps. Charing is the close of that principal episode in the life of the Way.

THE SHEEP IN THE NARROW LANES, OR THE LEANING CONES OF THE HOP-KILNS AGAINST THE SKY

Charing again was the last convenient halt in any rich man's journey until, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. It is something under sixteen miles from Canterbury, following the track of the Old Road, and even the poor upon their pilgrimages would have halted there; though the slow progress of their cumbersome caravans may have forced them to a further repose at Chilham before the city was reached.

Charing, therefore, was designed by its every character to be a place of some importance, and was a very conscious little town.

It counts more in Domesday than any other of the valley villages between Maidstone and the cathedral; it possessed the greatest and the first of those archiepiscopal palaces, the string of which we came on first at Otford; it has a church once magnificent and still remarkable after its rebuilding, and it maintains to this day an air of prosperity and continued comfort. The inn is one of the best inns to be found on all this journey; the whole village may be said, in spite of its enemies,[39] to be livelier in the modern decay than the other remote parishes of that plain.

We had imagined, before seeing the ground, that, after Charing, we should have some difficulty in tracing the Old Road.

The Ordnance map, which has given it the traditional name of the Pilgrim's Road all through this valley, not only drops the title immediately after Charing, but, for some reason I do not understand, omits to mark it at all along the skirts of Longbeech wood.