Hilaire Belloc - Premium Collection: Historical Works, Writings on Economy, Essays & Fiction. Hilaire Belloc
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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.
Nevertheless, its line was quite easy to recover, across these Betchworth pits, though they are the largest cuttings in the county; later on we found no difficulty across the smaller ones near Otford and at Merstham. It is even true that the pits afforded a guide in one or two cases where we were in doubt what path to follow, and that our hypothesis according to which the pits naturally arose upon the track of the Old Road confirmed itself by discovering the way to us in more than one ambiguity.
Portions of the road remain even along the great Betchworth pits. These portions reappear at the same level, wherever the pits have left a crag of the old hillside standing, and when one gets to the point just above Betchworth station and to the cottages of the workmen, the path reappears quite plainly. It follows the hillside at a level of about 400 feet, falls slightly below this contour-line to round the projecting spur of Brockham Hill, comes down to the high-road (the main road to London through Tadworth), follows it a couple of hundred yards, and leaves it to climb the hill at a point just south of the place where the 1-inch Ordnance map marks the height of 353 feet.26
Here there is a combe known as 'Pebble Combe.' The Old Road does not go round the combe but straight across its mouth, and begins to assume a character so new as to perplex us for a considerable time in our search. We did not understand the nature of the change until we had very carefully traced the path for more than another mile.
I will explain the difficulty.
The escarpment of the hills is here extremely steep. It falls at an angle which could not conveniently support a road, or at least could not support it without such engineering work as primitive men would have been incapable of performing, and this steep bit lasts without interruption from just east of Pebble Combe right away to the height above Reigate which is known as Quarry Hill.
Now, if the road could not be supported upon the bank of the escarpment, and yet desired—as it always must—to escape the damp land of the lower levels, it was bound to seek the crest. Nowhere hitherto in all this march from Winchester had we found it attempting the summits of the hills, but there were here unmistakable evidences that it was going to approach those summits and to keep to them as long as the steepness of the escarpment lasted.
Our inexperience made us hesitate a long while; but at last we saw, in a line of old yews above us, an indication that the hill was to be climbed, and on going up close to those yews we found that they ran along a platform which was the trodden and levelled mark of the Old Road, running here in a form precisely similar to that which we had found round Box Hill.
Once we had thus recovered it, it did not fail us. Within half a mile it climbed sideways along the hillside from that point, 353 feet above the sea, which I have mentioned, to the neighbourhood of the 600-feet contour-line which here marks the edge of the range; and this line it follows with a slight rise corresponding to the rise of the crest all the way to what are known as the Buckland Hills, and the high knot which just tops the 700 feet near Margery Wood.27
To the north and to the south of this, at Walton Heath on the plateau above, and at Colley Farm in the valley below, there had been discoveries of Roman and of pre-Roman things; but though they pointed to its neighbourhood, these relics would not of themselves have given us the exact line of the road; that was furnished by the broad and unmistakable track which it had itself impressed upon the chalk from the usage of so many hundred years.
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