Cathedrals -- England; England -- Description and travel
Caesar, however, cannot have been in any way daunted save perhaps by
the memory of the time already lost and the advancing season. He at
once began his march into Britain. We may well ask by what route he
went, and to that question we shall get no certain answer. But it
would seem he must have marched by one of two ways for he had to cross
the Stour, the Medway and the Thames. We may be sure then that his
route lay either along the old trackway which, straightened and built
up later by the Romans, we know as the Watling Street, which fords the
Medway at Rochester, and the Thames at Lambeth and Westminster, or by
the trackway we call the Pilgrims' Way along the southern slope of the
North Downs, in which case he would have forded the Medway at
Aylesford and the Thames at Brentford. The question is insoluble,
Caesar himself giving no indications.
Now, when I had well considered all this, I went on to that loveliness
which is Chilham; passing as I went, that earthwork older than any
history called Julaber's Grave, marked by a clump of fir trees. Here
of old they thought to find the grave of that Quintus Laberius, who
fell as Caesar relates, at the head of his men, on the march to the
Thames; but it was probably already older when Caesar passed by, than
it would have been now if he had built it.
No one can ever have come, whether by the Pilgrims' Road or another,
into the little hill-village of Chilham, into the piazza there, which
is an acropolis, without delight. It is one of the surprises of
England, a place at once so little, so charming and so unexpected that
it is extraordinary it is not more famous. It stands at a point where
more than one little valley breaks down into the steep valley of the
Stour and every way to it is up hill, under what might seem to be old
ramparts crowned now with cottages and houses, till suddenly you find
yourself at the top in a large piazza or square closed at the end by
the church, at the other by the castle, and on both sides by old lines
of houses; really a walled _place_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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