The Icknield Way: Portraits the English Countryside. Edward Thomas
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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