The Icknield Way E-Book

Edward Thomas

• Herausgeber: Publisher s11838
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The Icknield Way written by Edward Thomas who was a British poet, essayist, and novelist.  This book was published in 1913. And now republish in ebook format. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy reading this book.

Leseprobe

The Icknield Way

By

Edward Thomas

Illustrated by

A. L. Collins

Table of Contents

DEDICATION TO HARRY HOOTON

NOTE

CHAPTER I. ON ROADS AND FOOTPATHS

CHAPTER II. HISTORY, MYTH, TRADITION, CONJECTURE, AND INVENTION

CHAPTER III. FIRST DAY—THETFORD TO NEWMARKET, BY LACKFORD AND KENTFORD

CHAPTER IV. SECOND DAY—NEWMARKET TO ODSEY, BY ICKLETON AND ROYSTON

CHAPTER V. THIRD DAY—ODSEY TO EDLESBOROUGH, BY BALDOCK, LETCHWORTH, ICKLEFORD, LEAGRAVE, AND DUNSTABLE

CHAPTER VI. FOURTH DAY—EDLESBOROUGH TO STREATLEY, ON THE UPPER ICKNIELD WAY, BY WENDOVER, KIMBLE, WHITELEAF, GIPSIES’ CORNER, IPSDEN, AND CLEEVE

CHAPTER VII. FIFTH DAY—IVINGHOE TO WATLINGTON, ON THE LOWER ICKNIELD WAY, BY ASTON CLINTON, WESTON TURVILLE, CHINNOR, AND LEWKNOR

CHAPTER VIII. SIXTH DAY—WATLINGTON TO UPTON, BY EWELME, WALLINGFORD, LITTLE STOKE, THE PAPIST WAY, LOLLINGDON, ASTON, AND BLEWBURY

CHAPTER IX. SEVENTH DAY—STREATLEY TO SPARSHOLT, ON THE RIDGEWAY, BY SCUTCHAMER KNOB AND LETCOMBE CASTLE

CHAPTER X. EIGHTH DAY—SPARSHOLT TO TOTTERDOWN, ON THE RIDGEWAY, BY WHITE HORSE HILL AND WAYLAND’S SMITHY

CHAPTER XI. NINTH DAY—STREATLEY TO EAST HENDRED, BY UPTON AND HAGBOURNE HILL FARM

CHAPTER XII. TENTH DAY—EAST HENDRED TO WANBOROUGH, BY LOCKINGE PARK, WANTAGE, ASHBURY, AND BISHOPSTONE

FOOTNOTES

Streatley Mill and Church

DEDICATIONTO HARRY HOOTON

When I sat down at the “Dolau Cothi Arms” this evening I remembered my dedication to you. You said I could dedicate this book to you if I would make a real dedication, not one of my shadowy salutes befitting shadows rather than men and women. It seems odd you should ask thus for a sovereign’s worth of—shall I say—English prose from a writer by trade. But though I turn out a large, if insufficient, number of sovereigns’ worths, and am become a writing animal, and could write something or other about a broomstick, I do not write with ease: so let that difficulty give the dedication its value.

It is right that I should remember you upon a walk, for I have walked more miles with you than with anyone else except myself. While I walked you very often danced, on the roads of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire. This evening when I went out on the Sarn Helen everybody was in chapel, I think, unless it was the Lord, for he also seemed to me to be walking in the cool. I was very much alone, and glad to be. You were a ghost, and not a man of fourteen stone, and I thought that perhaps after all that shadowy salute would be fittest. But I have put my pen to paper: I have set out and I will come to an end; for, as I said, I am a writing animal. In the days of those old walks I could have written a dedication in Norfolk jacket style, all about “the open road,” and the search for something “over the hills and far away”: I should have reminded you at some length how Borrow stayed at this inn, and that Dolau Cothi is the house where he could have lived with satisfaction “if backed by a couple of thousands a year.” To-day I know there is nothing beyond the farthest of far ridges except a signpost to unknown places. The end is in the means—in the sight of that beautiful long straight line of the Downs in which a curve is latent—in the houses we shall never enter, with their dark secret windows and quiet hearth smoke, or their ruins friendly only to elders and nettles—in the people passing whom we shall never know though we may love them. To-day I know that I walk because it is necessary to do so in order both to live and to make a living. Once those walks might have made a book; now they make a smile or a sigh, and I am glad they are in ghostland and not fettered in useless print. This book for you was to have been a country book, but I see that it has turned out to be another of those books made out of books founded on other books. Being but half mine it can only be half yours, and I owe you an apology as well as a dedication. It is, however, in some ways a fitting book for me to write. For it is about a road which begins many miles before I could come on its traces and ends miles beyond where I had to stop. I could find no excuse for supposing it to go to Wales and following it there into the Ceidrych Valley, along the Towy to Caermarthen, and so to St. David’s which is now as holy as Rome, though once only a third as holy. Apparently no special mediæval use revived it throughout its course, or gave it a new entity like that of the Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury that you and I walked on many a time—by the “Cock” at Detling, the “Black Horse” at Thurnham, the “King’s Head” (once, I believe, the “Pilgrims’ Rest”) at Hollingbourne, above Harrietsham, past Deodara Villas, above Lenham and Robert Philpot’s “Woodman’s Arms,” and so on to Eastwell; always among beech and yew and Canterbury bells, and always over the silver of whitebeam leaves. I could not find a beginning or an end of the Icknield Way. It is thus a symbol of mortal things with their beginnings and ends always in immortal darkness. I wish the book had a little more of the mystery of the road about it. You at least will make allowances—and additions; and God send me many other readers like you. And as this is the bottom of the sheet, and ale is better than ink, though it is no substitute, I label this “Dedication,” and wish you with me inside the “Dolau Cothi Arms” at Pumpsaint, in Caermarthenshire.

EDWARD THOMAS.

NOTE

I have to acknowledge the very great kindness of Mr. Hilaire Belloc, Mr. Harold T. E. Peake, and Mr. R. Hippisley Cox while I was writing this book, though I do so with some hesitation, because I may seem to make them responsible for some of my possible mistakes and certain shortcomings. A man could hardly have three better guides than Mr. Belloc for his grasp and sympathy with roads, Mr. Peake for his caution and curiosity, and “documents, documents!” and Mr. Cox for his ardour and familiarity with trodden turf; and I must add my testimony to that of my betters to the merits of Mr. Belloc’s Old Road, Mr. Peake’s chapter on prehistoric roads in Memorials of Old Leicestershire, and Mr. Cox’s Avebury. To Mr. Peake I am indebted not only for suggestions that were invaluable to me, notably in the matter of the Ridgeway and the Bishop of Cloyne’s pernicious theory, but for the use of his copies of the greater part of the materials of my second chapter. I have also had great kindness from the Rev. E. H. Goddard and Mr. W. Gough.

EDWARD THOMAS.

Llaugharne,Caermarthenshire.

CHAPTER I.ON ROADS AND FOOTPATHS

Much has been written of travel, far less of the road. Writers have treated the road as a passive means to an end, and honoured it most when it has been an obstacle; they leave the impression that a road is a connection between two points which only exists when the traveller is upon it. Though there is much travel in the Old Testament, “the way” is used chiefly as a metaphor. “Abram journeyed, going on still toward the south,” says the historian, who would have used the same words had the patriarch employed wings. Yet to a nomadic people the road was as important as anything upon it. The earliest roads wandered like rivers through the land, having, like rivers, one necessity, to keep in motion. We still say that a road “goes” to London, as we “go” ourselves. We point out a white snake on a green hill-side, and tell a man: “That is going to Chichester.” At our inn we think when recollecting the day: “That road must have gone to Strata Florida.” We could not attribute more life to them if we had moving roads with platforms on the sidewalks. We may go or stay, but the road will go up over the mountains to Llandovery, and then up again over to Tregaron. It is a silent companion always ready for us, whether it is night or day, wet or fine, whether we are calm or desperate, well or sick. It is always going: it has never gone right away, and no man is too late. Only a humorist could doubt this, like the boy in a lane who was asked: “Where does this lane go to, boy?” and answered: “I have been living here these sixteen years and it has never moved to my knowledge.” Some roads creep, some continue merely; some advance with majesty, some mount a hill in curves like a soaring sea-gull.

Even as towns are built by rivers, instead of rivers being conducted past towns, so the first settlements grew up alongside roads which had formerly existed simply as the natural lines of travel for a travelling race. The oldest roads often touch the fewest of our modern towns, villages, and isolated houses. It has been conjectured that the first roads were originally the tracks of animals. The elephant’s path or tunnel through the jungle is used as a road in India to-day, and in early days the wild herds must have been invaluable for making a way through forest, for showing the firmest portions of bogs and lowland marshes, and for suggesting fords. The herd would wind according to the conditions of the land and to inclinations of many inexplicable kinds, but the winding of the road would be no disadvantage to men who found their living by the wayside, men to whom time was not money. Roads which grew thus by nature and by necessity appear to be almost as lasting as rivers. They are found fit for the uses of countless different generations of men outside cities, because, apart from cities and their needs, life changes little. If they go out of use in a new or a changed civilization, they may still be frequented by men of the most primitive habit. All over England may be found old roads, called Gypsy Lane, Tinker’s Lane, or Smuggler’s Lane; east of Calne, in Wiltshire, is a Juggler’s Lane; and as if the ugliness of the “uggle” sound pleased the good virtuous country folk, they have got a Huggler’s Hole a little west of Semley and south of Sedgehill in the same county: there are also Beggar’s Lanes and roads leading past places called Mock Beggar, which is said to mean Much Beggar. These little-used roads are known to lovers, thieves, smugglers, and ghosts. Even if long neglected they are not easily obliterated. On the fairly even and dry ground of the high ridges where men and cattle could spread out wide as they journeyed, the earth itself is unchanged by centuries of traffic, save that the grass is made finer, shorter, paler, and more numerously starred with daisies. But on the slopes down to a plain or ford the road takes its immortality by violence, for it is divided into two or three or a score of narrow courses, trenched so deeply that they might often seem to be the work rather of some fierce natural force than of slow-travelling men, cattle, and pack-horses. The name Holloway, or Holway, is therefore a likely sign of an old road. So is Sandy Lane, a name in which lurks the half-fond contempt of country people for the road which a good “hard road” has superseded, and now little used save in bird’s-nesting or courting days. These old roads will endure as long as the Roman streets, though great is the difference between the unraised trackway, as dim as a wind-path on the sea, and the straight embanked Roman highway which made the proverb “Plain as Dunstable Road,” or “Good plain Dunstable”—for Watling Street goes broad and straight through that town. Scott has one of these ghostly old roads in Guy Mannering. It was over a heath that had Skiddaw and Saddleback for background, and he calls it a blind road—“the track so slightly marked by the passengers’ footsteps that it can but be traced by a slight shade of verdure from the darker heath around it, and, being only visible to the eye when at some distance, ceases to be distinguished while the foot is actually treading it.”

The making of such roads seems one of the most natural operations of man, one in which he least conflicts with nature and the animals. If he makes roads outright and rapidly, for a definite purpose, they may perish as rapidly, like the new roads of modern Japanese enterprise, and their ancient predecessors live on to smile at their ambition. These are the winding ways preferred by your connoisseur to-day. “Give me,” says Hazlitt, “the clear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three-hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking!” These windings are created by the undulating of the land, and by obstacles like those of a river—curves such as those in the High Street of Oxford, which Wordsworth called “the stream-like windings of that glorious street.” The least obstacle might bring about a loop, if nothing more, and as even a Roman road curled round Silbury Hill, so the path of the Australian savage is to be seen twisting round bush after bush as if it enjoyed the interruption, though it cannot purl like the river at a bend. Probably these twists, besides being unconsciously adapted to the lie of the land, were, as they are still, easeful and pleasant to the rover who had some natural love of journeying. Why go straight? There is nothing at the end of any road better than may be found beside it, though there would be no travel did men believe it. The straight road, except over level and open country, can only be made by those in whom extreme haste and forethought have destroyed the power of joy, either at the end or at any part of its course. Why, then, go straight? The connoisseur had something of the savage in him when he demanded a winding road.

It is not, however, to a man walking for pleasure that we shall go for a sense of roads, but to one like Bunyan. Pilgrim’s Progress is full of the sense of roads. See Christian going to Mr. Legality’s house. It is a mountain road, and the hill overhangs it so much that he is afraid to venture further “lest the hill should fall on his head.” When Goodwill points out the narrow way, he says it was “cast up by the patriarchs, prophets, Christ, and his Apostles,” i.e. made into a raised track bounded by ditches from which the earth was cast up to form the embankment. When Christian comes to the Hill Difficulty you see the primitive man deciding to go straight uphill, turning not to the left by the way called Danger into a great wood, nor to the right to Destruction and the “wide field full of dark mountains.” How full of plain English country wayfaring is the passage where Hopeful and Christian take a road by a river-side, and then when it turns away from the water they see a stile leading into a path which keeps on, as a path would do, along the bank through By-path Meadow: only, as it happens, the river is in flood and they must turn back again towards the stile. This man knew roads, and one of his temptations after conversion was to try his faith by bidding the puddles on the road between his own village and Bedford to be dry. Cervantes had the sense of roads. He begins, indeed, by making Don Quixote sally forth “upon the plain” like any knight of chivalry “pricking o’er the plain” and taking the way chosen by his horse because thus would adventures best be compassed; but it is upon a road that he and most of his knights, ladies, and enchanters travel. Malory’s book would have less vitality in its marvel if it were not for the roads: the three highways, for example, where Sir Marhaus and Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine were to separate for their adventures each with his damosel; and the wild ways of Sir Launcelot when he “rode many wild ways, throughout marches and many wild ways,” until he came to a valley and a knight therein with a naked sword chasing a lady. Cymbeline again, and some of the historical plays of Shakespeare, give a grand impression of wide tracts of country traversed by roads of great purpose and destiny.

More often in books we move, as I have said, from place to place as in a dream. But it is a dream in the Mabinogion which gives one of the most majestic scenes of travel. I mean the dream of the Emperor Maxen. He dreamed that he was journeying along a river valley towards its source, and up over the highest mountain in the world until he saw mighty rivers descending to the sea, and one of them he followed to a great city at its mouth and a vast castle in the city. At the end of his journey the dreaming Emperor found a girl so beautiful that when he awoke he could think of naught else, while years went by, except her beauty. He sent out pioneers to discover the road of his dream, and at last they brought him to the castle and the same girl Helen sitting in the hall of it. She became his bride, and he gave her three castles—one at Arvon in North Wales, one at Caerleon, and one at Caermarthen in the South. Then, says the tale, “Helen bethought her to make high-roads from one castle to another throughout the Island of Britain. And the roads were made. And for this cause are they called the roads of Helen Luyddawc, that she was sprung from a native of this island, and the men of the Island of Britain would not have made these great roads for any save her.” It is natural to connect with this Helen the great ancient roads leading north and south across Wales known as Sarn Helen or Elen. Nothing could be more noble as the name of a mountain road than Sarn Helen or Helen’s Causeway. It suggests to the ordinary fanciful and unhistoric mind the British Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, and that it suggested this long ago is clear from the old identification of Helen Luyddawc with the only child of King Cole of Colchester. The name has more recently been explained as Sarn y Lleng, the Road of the Legions. Sir John Rhys[1] insists upon Elen instead of Helen, and believes her to be one of the pagan goddesses of the dusk. “There is,” he says, “a certain poetic propriety in associating the primitive paths and roads of the country with this vagrant goddess of dawn and dusk.” These wandering paths are to the hard white highways what dusk is to the full blaze of day. First perhaps trodden by the wild herd and still without terrors for it, they might well be protected by a sort of Artemis, goddess of wildernesses and of forked ways, kind both to human hunters and the wild quarry. They belong to the twilight of the world. No doubt the sun shines no brighter at noon than it did then on a perfectly wild earth, on flowers that were never gathered, on bright plumage that no man had coveted. But all the forest and marsh of primeval earth form in the imagination mists to which the lack of history adds yet another veil. These mists lie over the world, to my mind, exactly as the white mist of summer lies, turning into a sea most of what once was land and making islands of the woods on the steep, uncultivated tracts. The islands rising out of the mists of time are the hills and mountains, and along their ridges ran the first roads, and by them are the squares and circles of the first habitations and the mounds of the first solemnized graves, used sometimes, it is thought, as guides for travellers.

It is particularly easy to think of Southern England as several chains of islands, representing the Downs, the Chilterns and Gog Magogs, the Mendips, Cotswolds and Quantocks. I have more than once caught myself thinking of the broad elephantine back of Butser Hill heaving up, spotted with gorse but treeless, between Petersfield and Portsmouth, as Ararat, though my unfaithful eyes fail to imagine the ark. There are days now when the clear suddenly swelling hills like Tarberry or Barrow Hill in Hampshire, or Cley Hill or the Knolls of Maiden Bradley in Wiltshire, or the abrupt promontories like Chanctonbury or Noar Hill near Selborne, or the long trooping ranges, seem to be islands or atolls looming dimly through the snowy still mists of morning or the clouds of rainstorm. Even without mist some of the isolated green hills rise out of the pale levels of cornland as out of sea; and I have seen, from near Bruton, the far-distant mass of Cadbury, the hill some call Camelot in Somerset, look like a dark precipitous isle. When the early roads along the ridges were made, the hills still more closely resembled islands emerging out of the forest and out of the marsh. The watersheds created the roads, as they still do over hundreds of miles in Africa. The roads keep to the highland, and if this highland were to form a circle they would follow it; and hunters say, as Mr. H. W. Nevinson tells us in A Modern Slavery, that the elephants do “move in a kind of rough zone or circle—from the Upper Zambesi across the Cuando into Angola and the district where they passed me, and so across the Cuanza northward and eastward into the Congo, and round towards Katanga and the sources of the Zambesi again.” Somewhere too I have met the tradition, probably a Welsh one, that this island of Britain was girdled by a road above its shores. The early nomads would descend from the ridges only with reluctance, for fear of the marsh and the dim forest. Doubtless their travelling oxen, especially if burdened, had the same horror of mud—when they are not free to wallow in it—as they have to-day. In a very early age it is likely that men would go down to the rivers only to water their cattle, and then return to the heights. There would be several drinking-places, and at one of them they would discover a ford, unless the animals had already marked one, and then if the river had not become a boundary they might cross and continue their wanderings along a road upon the next island of hills. Thus island would be joined to island. The paths ran along the back of each one and branched over the spurs, and the linking up of these would tend to form highways of great length, like that trodden by Launcelot, “far o’er the long backs of the bushless downs” to Camelot. It were easy to take such a route to-day from anywhere in Berkshire or Hampshire, travelling high and away from cities, except cities of the dead like Avebury, far from towns and villages, through Wiltshire into Somerset or Dorset, on roads which are altogether turf or have so goodly a border of grass and blossom that the wayfarer need never touch the hard white grit which is the same on a metalled road whether in London or in wild country.

The Ridgeway, near Blowingstone Hill, Berkshire.

Down from the realm-long bridge of islands above the world the traveller descended to cities of men. Thus Sir Launcelot after long riding in a great forest came into a low country of fair rivers and meadows and saw before him the long bridge and the three pavilions on it, “of silk and sendal of divers hue.” Thus Sir Bevis of Hampton, cheated of his patrimony by a cruel mother and keeping sheep on the Downs, looked and saw below him the town and the tower that should have been his. Thus Cobbett, looking from Portsdown Hill above Portsmouth, saw the sea for the first time and the English fleet riding at anchor at Spithead and his heart “was inflated with national pride,” and though he had walked thirty miles that day he slept not a moment, but rose at daylight and offered himself for the sea on board the Pegasus. Thus we descend on Winchester or Salisbury out of the hills, glad to get there what we want as we have for many days gladly wanted what we could get. It has been, let us say, a day that should be spring, and in the dark, wet copses there were thousands of primroses. All day the wind, and often rain and wind together, roared in the trees. The pale flowers were soaked and frayed and speckled with dust from the trees, and they hung down or were broken from their soft stalks. But the high land and the neighbouring sky exalt us. Even the sight of these tender-blubbering petals ruined in the drenched grass was pleasant. We should have liked better to see them unspoiled and wide in the sun; but we did not wish them to be so, and their distress did but add to the glory of the storm and to our defiance, just as did the cowering of birds, of bowed trees, of whole woods, under the wild, shadowy swoop of the mist and rain, and the valleys below us humbled, their broad fields, their upthrust churches and clustered villages overwhelmed and blotted out, and everything annihilated save the wind, the rain, the streaming road, and the vigorous limbs and glowing brain and what they created. Not that we did not welcome freely the minutes of dimly shining stillness that were as a secluded garden in a city, when the storm paused; for then we drank in the blue sky and the dark revealed tracts of plain and hill that lay stunned and astonished like a dreamer opening his eyelids after tumultuous dreams; we drank them with easy joy as of a man reading a great adventure when the heroes of it have long been dead, for we ourselves were so much above all that expanse which, powerless and quiet, might almost seem to belong to the past or to a tale. We and the storm were one and we were triumphant; and in mid triumph we came down to the lighted streets.

As the first roads were made by men following herds, either as hunters or as herdsmen, so ox and sheep have long helped to keep them up. The great road of pilgrimage from Damascus to Mecca is not a made road, but composed of the parallel strands of old hollow camel paths. These, says Mr. Charles M. Doughty in Arabia Deserta, “one of the ancient Arabian poets has compared to the bars of the rayed Arabic mantle.” To our own day in England drovers took the cattle lazily along the old roads of the watersheds and ridges. “Ox Drove” is the name in several places of an old green road. Travellers in Wiltshire have noticed on the one-inch Ordnance Survey Map a “British Trackway” running W.S.W. out of the road from the Deverills to Maiden Bradley. A large tumulus stands in the first field, as if for a sign at the beginning of the track. Locally this is known as the “Ox Road,” and is said to have been used by droves coming from Mid and East Somerset. It is a continuation of the hard road which it leaves at the tumulus, and following it and its continuations you may travel through Kilmington, and between the Jack’s Castle tumulus and King Alfred’s tower, down Kingsettle Hill, and on close to Cadbury Castle, to Ilchester, and, joining the Foss Way, reach Devon and Cornwall. Only one mile of its course is marked in Old English letters “British Trackway,” and this is apparently not even a path, but a protracted unevenness of the ground, sometimes almost amounting to a ridge or terrace in the grass, for the most part following the hedges, and in one place entering a short, nettly lane. The road, in spite of its romantic Old English lettering, is at this point a very humble specimen of an ancient road and ox drove; for it goes through meadows which are low compared with the fine waves of Down—White Sheet Downs and the Maiden Bradley Hills—on either side of it. A far better one is the ox drove which this joins at Kilmington. It is said to have been used as a road from London to Exeter. Farmers will tell you that the Ox Drove “never touched water,” which they will qualify by saying you could go from Monkton Deverill to Marlborough without touching water or crossing it, and if that also is impossible, at any rate they have the tradition of the road’s character in their heads, seldom as they may use it. Along it, says Mr. J. U. Powell,[2] came “fat cattle from the Somerset pastures to London,” and once he thinks it was a road leading to the lead of Somerset and tin of Cornwall.

It goes through the orchards of Somerset as a good hard road, but often deprived of its right green borders. When these have been lost they have not always disappeared, and its old breadth is shown probably by a long, narrow field lying first on one side and then, after a zigzag, on the other, as near the “Bull” to the east of Bruton. Sometimes with a green space beside the road, or a depression behind the hedge, or an aimless avenue of oak trees as at Redlynch, marking the old course, it is a narrow road going in a determined manner up and down, but with few deviations and having a purpose obviously unconnected with the few cottages on its edge. Here it is called the Hardway. The “hard road” is the countryman’s admiring term for a made road; but it is suggested that the Hardway is the Har- or Harrow-Way, and is a continuation of a road running east and west through Hampshire and Wiltshire. It crosses the little shaded river Brue and ascends Kingsettle Hill between high banks of beech and oak and bluebell. It mounts, like a savage who does not mind being out of breath, straight up the steep wooded wall of the hill until at the top it is eight hundred and fifty feet high instead of four hundred, and takes you into Wiltshire. On the right is the huge square tower of brick erected by one of the Colt Hoare family in honour of King Alfred. The name Kingsettle Hill was thought by Colt Hoare to mark the pass of King Alfred when, with the chief men of Somerset, he issued from Athelney “after Eastertide,” in 878, and marched to Egbert’s stone in the east part of Selwood Forest. This “stone” or “cliff” has been supposed to be White Sheet Hill, a very conspicuous and noble place for the King to gather the people of Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire before leading them to the victory of Edington. On the right and, like Alfred’s Tower, at the brink of the hill is the big tumulus known as Jack’s Castle; and from either you command Somersetshire nearly as far as the curvature of the earth allows. From the oaks and bluebells of the slopes beneath you stretches a low subdivided country of many oaks—and cuckoos calling from them—and the Hardway penetrating it from the south-west. Colt Hoare calls the tumulus “Selwood Barrow,” a beacon above the great Forest of Selwood and possibly a direction post for travellers from the west to Old Sarum. In the north-west the land rises up to a ridge with a comb of beech trees, which is Creech Hill above Bruton, and at its feet the masses of Pink Wood and Norridge Wood. The Mendips are a dim cloud beyond it on the right, the Quantocks a dimmer cloud on the left; and in the low land between them is Athelney, and near it Glastonbury, standing above the full-grown Brue. Sometimes the wind-like sound of an invisible train ascends.

The road takes you through the remains of Selwood Forest. Now it has a fair green border, often of considerable breadth. That you are in Wiltshire there can be no doubt on emerging from the trees. For in front upon the left are those gentle monsters, the smooth Long and Little Knolls above Maiden Bradley, smooth, detached green dunes crested and fringed with beeches. Under this side of the Long Knoll is the tower of Kilmington Church among its trees. Lying across the road a few miles ahead are the bare White Sheet Downs, which are to be mounted, and farther to the right the wooded beacons above Fonthill Gifford and East Knoyle. The road makes for the scar of a high quarry on the nearest slope of White Sheet, a little to the left of a lesser isolated hill, a smooth, wooded knoll or islet. The road is gently and evenly rising, a hard, white road almost straight, between grassy borders with thorns and brambles under beeches that overhang from behind the hedge. They are good trees standing on a strip of turf furrowed as if it had once been the road or part of it; and some young ones have been lately planted, so that all is not yet over with English country, though landlords say so. The road crosses another to Kilmington and Yarnfield, and at once it is older-looking, hard, but winding slightly among bushy and lush steep banks. You see flowers and ash trees, and a linnet on the tip of one, but nothing distant save white clouds and the blue. Here it is called Long Lane, and among its herbage is an old London milestone. Long Lane is often the title of a lane coming from somewhere afar off: there is one south of Hermitage, giving its name to a village, in Berkshire, and one near Cucklington in Somerset, where there is a Tinker’s Hill also. In another mile Long Lane crosses the Maiden Bradley road by a smithy and a “Red Lion”; its name becomes White Sheet Lane, and it goes straight in sight of the high white quarry and the deep tracks up to White Street Castle. Like Long Lane, it is a parish boundary. Both are without a house: the road has hardly passed a house since Redlynch, save at a crossing, and those living in the houses use the road only for a mile or so on the way to a village on either side. Slanting uphill under the quarry, with a parallel green way hollowed beside it, goes the road’s bolder self. The hedges and banks are low, and the cornland or meadow is open round about. The lane turns to climb White Sheet Hill, and beeches and some whitebeam trees cool the beginning of the ascent; there are myriads of primroses in their season and chaffinches singing. You pass a thatched house and the lime-kiln of “Tom Gatehouse, Lime Burner,” by the quarry, and another milestone showing twenty-three miles to Sarum and a date like 1757—when Blake was born. Looking back, the Knolls are on the right and Alfred’s Tower on the left among the woods. There are tumuli on the right as the road comes clear out on to the hill-top and travels between the wired fences of the downland pasture. Here stand cows who do not often see a pencil sharpened. Pewits wheel over and before and behind; all along the high course of the road the pewits cry and wheel. The road is at first rutted, but is soon a green smooth track on the highest land, skirting the upper ends of coombes dappled dusky gold by gorse, and commanding bare downland on the left and wooded hills on the right, and looking along a great bottom to the church tower of Mere, and Mere’s beautiful “Long Hill,” and the wide-arboured vale stretching away to the long ridge of Dorset. It is a high way and a proud way. After crossing an ancient ditch it is labelled “British Trackway,” and ahead it is seen going between a wire fence and a dark line of tussocks. Then it is divided into three or four parallel terraces grooved by wheels, but with a lark’s nest in the green rut. It crosses the Mere road as two hollow ways side by side, but in a little while is only a green track with single thorns on the left. Here is the twenty-first milestone from Sarum, the ninety-ninth from London, inscribed 1750, and it is called the London Drove Road; it is still in sight of Alfred’s Tower, now protruding above White Sheet ramparts. In one place it is so wide that the milestone stands out in the middle, like a traveller asleep or turned to stone among mole-heaps that have blotted the signs of other travellers. On the left, as far as the main Wincanton road, part of the track is embanked; entering the hard motor road to Amesbury and London, the old way is outlined chiefly by the thorns of Old Willoughby Hedge on the left. The road going hedgeless across the downland is but the thin backbone of the old green way. For a time the line of thorns diverges, and then, soon after the crossing of the Warminster road, they come slanting from the right to meet the road and cross it just before another milestone. Hereby are three milestones on different roads, all close together, which has caused the easy winning of merry wagers to run past three milestones in three minutes. The drove crosses several roads going to Hindon, as a broad green track with or without a hedge, marked by its greater profusion of daisies and its paleness and lack of tussocks. Still there are pewits, and somewhere not far away a Pewit Castle. It is joined again by the main Amesbury road beyond Cold Berwick Hill, but presently deserted, the busier white way going boldly off over the ridge, and down to the Wylye River and up again on to Salisbury Plain by Yarnbury, and so past Stonehenge to Amesbury. The green road winds along the south slope of the ridge. Now two lines of thorns show the course far ahead, or the white weals of an ascent are seen; now gorse encroaches on it, and at a crossway corned-beef tins and grey embers mark an encampment of nomads. It passes thickets of thorn and wayfaring trees burying an old milestone to Sarum. Turf or corn lies on either hand or on both. It keeps along the edge of Groveley Woods and within sound of the nightingales until it bends down to Salisbury; once probably it or a higher parallel course went over a ford to Old Sarum, and evidently it is vastly older than the eighteenth-century milestones, perhaps old enough to have guided the Hampshire men and some of the Wiltshiremen to Alfred, a road such as Cobbett loved for the hammering of horses’ hoofs on flints.

Another fine ox drove, and dignified by that name and by old lettering on the Ordnance Map, ran clear for a long stretch along the high land south of the Ebble River, from a point four miles south of Salisbury and westwards by Winkelbury to the south of Shaftesbury. It may some day be proved that one of the most famous of ancient roads, the Icknield Way itself, was an ox drove. There is said to be a charter mentioning the Icknield Way as “the way the cattle go”; and one writer has boldly derived the very name from the British Yken, or Ychen, meaning oxen. Every district in the chalk country has its tradition of an old road, now surviving in a footpath or in broken vertebræ of lane and footpath to provide walkers with endless theories. At Swindon, for example, it is said[3] that the Holy Well stood on a road coming from the east and going westward past Bradenstoke Abbey into Somerset, and on another used by pilgrims to the shrine of St. Anne’s in the Wood, at Brislington in Somerset, which went by Elcombe, Hay Lane Bridge, Bushton, Clyffe, Calne, Studley, Chippenham, Pewsham Forest, Bradford, Keynsham Abbey, and Whitchurch, to Brislington, which is in the south-east of Bristol and has now a station called St. Ann’s Park. But this is not the place to give way to the fascination of a roll-call of country names.

Except that bridges superannuated fords, the conditions for the travelling of cattle cannot have changed much from Alfred’s time until the day of railway trucks carrying thickets of moaning horns and square blocks of sheep. The turnpike system helped to preserve the old roads because drovers using them could avoid the tolls; their cattle could also feed by the wayside. Canon Jackson,[4] in 1862, said that the Ridgeway of Berkshire and Wiltshire was part of the road used for ages and to this day for driving cattle from Anglesey into Kent. Mr. Walter Money, in a note to Miss Gossett’s Shepherds of Britain, said much the same thing. Unfortunately neither has told us anything of their route. I have no doubt they could have covered most of the distance on grass. I should like to have travelled with them. You will find “Welsh Ways” all over England. Walkers or Workaway Hill, where the Ridgeway descends southward from Wansdyke to the Pewsey Valley, is said to be a corruption of Weala-wege, and to have been called Walcway (or Welshway) by a shepherd not long ago. There is a “Welshway” in Northamptonshire making past Northampton for Wales by way of Banbury and the Cotswolds, and said to have been the route of Welsh drovers. There is a “Welsh Lane” in the Cotswolds turning out of the Gloucester road, three or four miles from Cirencester, and going up the hill by Four Mile Bottom towards Barnsley. I met an old man who remembered helping the Welsh drovers with their black cattle there sixty years ago. They were putting up near by for the night, and they liked the boy because his name was David. In the downland these roads would be practicable for the most part all the year round; but Defoe tells us that the clay roads of the Midlands used to be so bad that graziers sold their stock in September and October: they could then be taken to the neighbourhood of London and kept until mid-winter to be sold at a high price. Cheshire men used to send their cheese to London either all the way by sea or overland to Burton, and so by the river to Hull and thence by sea. Gloucester men sent their goods by land to Lechlade or Cricklade, and then onward by the Thames; but their flocks doubtless could travel by Bath and go along the down ways eastward. But he says that now the roads are good, and mutton comes straight from the country in December, and almost as cheap as in summer.

Under Liddington Hill, Wiltshire.

I have not had the fortune to meet drovers from Wales, but where the Icknield Way through Buckinghamshire rounds the promontory Beacon of the Ivinghoe Hills I have seen men with sheep from Berkshire or Dorset journeying towards Dunstable, Royston, and the farms of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. They have to go much on the hard grit to-day, and I have heard that they are kept off the unfenced Ridgeway lest the flock should eat too much of the pastures in their passage. The sheep dislike the grit as much as Mr. Burroughs loves it and I hate it, and what with the traffic and the harshness of the road it is not surprising to hear of a Welsh flock taking a week to get from Warminster to Monckton Deverill.