There is a tradition that the pilgrims of the later Middle Ages went through Chilham and then turned back along these northern lanes, passing through Old Wives' Lees. This tradition may be trusted. They may have had some special reason, probably some devotional reason, for thus going out of their way, as we found them to have had at Compton. If their action in this is a good guide (as their action usually is) to the trace of the Old Road, well and good; there is then no appreciable gap, for a path leads to Knockholt and could only correspond to the Old Road; but I should imagine that here, as at Merstham, the pilgrims may have deceived us. They may have made a detour for the purpose of visiting some special shrine, or for some other reason which is now forgotten. It is difficult to believe that a prehistoric trail would turn such sharp corners, for the only time in all this hundred and twenty miles, without some obvious reason, and that it should choose for the place in which to perform this evolution the damp and northern side of a rather loamy hill. I cannot but believe that the track went over the side of the hill upon the southern side, but I will confess that if it did so there is here the longest and almost the only unbridged gap in the whole of the itinerary. I am confirmed in my belief that it went over the southern side from the general alignment, from the fact that the known path before Chilham goes to the south of the castle mound, that this would lead one to the south of the church, and so over the southern shoulder of the hill; but, if it did so, ploughed land and the careful culture of hop-gardens have destroyed all traces of it. I fancied that something could be made of an indication about a quarter of a mile before Knockholt Farm, but I doubt whether it was really worth the trouble of examining.[43] From the farm, right up through Bigberry Wood, we were on a track not only easy to recognise, but already followed, as I have said, by the first of authorities upon the subject. We came after a mile of the wood to the old earthwork which was at once the last and the greatest of the prehistoric remains upon the Old Road, and the first to be connected with written history. * * * * * It was a good place to halt: to sit on the edge of the gravelly bank, which had been cast up there no one knows how many centuries ago, and to look eastward out towards Canterbury. The fort was not touched with the memory of the Middle Ages: it was not our goal, for that was the church of St. Thomas, but it was the most certain and ancient thing of all that antiquity which had been the meaning of the road, and it stood here on the last crest of so many heights from which we had seen so many valleys in these eight days. History and the prehistoric met at this point only.