From here the road gradually rises to the crest of Polhill, on the commanding range of the North Downs. The “Polhill Arms,” standing on the left hand, marks the beginning of the long descent into the Weald, very thoroughly masked and the magnificent view down to Sevenoaks hidden by a dense screen of beeches and firs. Something else is masked by those trees: a great modern fort, with emplacements for heavy guns, built up here for the defence of London, as part of a scheme comprising some sixteen forts forming an irregular circle around the metropolis at a radius of about twenty miles, and designed to check a sudden descent of any possible enemy upon the capital. London has been held by military experts to be peculiarly open to such a danger; hence the forts of Polhill, Farningham, Dartford, Merstham, Box Hill, Pewley Hill, Esher, and others. But Englishmen, official or otherwise, are so used to considering the likelihood of invasion remote that, although many of the sites for forts have been purchased, it has been found impracticable to obtain sufficient money from Parliament to complete the ring and to thoroughly fortify these approaches. Parliament looks with suspicion upon Service proposals, and since the scandals of the great Boer War those suspicions have been very generally shared by the nation at large, which looks upon the methods of the War Office as those of a war office in comic opera. It is a tawny-coloured roadway that swoops down from the summit of Polhill, between the sandy banks of a wooded cutting, to Dunton Green. Half-way down, the trees and the cutting give place to open country, and the hill itself goes by another name: that of Sepham Hill. Down by Dunton Green, looking backwards, the hills, those noble North Downs, are seen to go terracing away beautifully east and west, their great, green, rounded shoulders dimpled with folds and gullies, shaggy here and there with belts of trees, or scarred outrageously with great gashes of chalk-pits, where the lime-burners every day demolish yet another fragment of picturesque scenery and roast it in limekilns, to the end that it may go towards the making of mortar and mean streets. There goes Old England, in mortar, to feed the spreading tentacles of the towns.