It was very broad--twenty yards perhaps. The hedges stood upon either side, guarding land that had been no man's land since public protection first secured the rude communications of the country. No one who had seen portions of the Icknield Way upon the Chilterns, or of this same Old Road where it has decayed upon the Kentish hills, could doubt the nature of what we saw. Long fallen into disuse, it had yet escaped the marauding landlords during three centuries of encroachment. They had not even narrowed it. So much of its common character remained: it was treeless, wide, and the most of it neglected; never metalled during all the one hundred and fifty years which have transformed English highways. It was the most desolate, as it was the most convincing, fragment of the Old Road we had set out to find. It had an abominable surface; we had to pick our way from one dry place to another over the enormous ruts which recent carts had made. For generations the lane had been untenanted; but there is a place where, in the last few years, an extraordinary little town of bungalows and wooden cottages had arisen upon either side of the lane. Not satisfied with the map, we asked of a man who was carrying milk what local name was given to this venerable street. He told us that the part in which we were walking was called Blackberry Lane, but that it had various names at different parts: and as he could tell us nothing more, we left him. At the very summit this way joined a modern, well-made lane, called Farringdon Lane, turned to the left and north, and immediately fell into the main London road, which had been climbing from the valley below and was here at the thirteenth milestone. The Old Road, suffering no deviation, plunged into a wood, and reappeared just at the summit of the pass, perhaps a quarter of a mile further. It is the point where the Ordnance map marks a height of 683 feet, and where one finally leaves the valley of the Itchen to enter that of the Wey. The complexity of this corner is best understood in the sketch-map on the following page. At the point where the Old Road leaves the wood, it merges again into the London turnpike, which turns its direction (as the map shows) so as to correspond with the direction of the Old Road. This identity between the prehistoric and the modern is maintained nearly as far as Alton, and, if we except a short gap before that town, the coincidence of the Old Road and some existing highway may be said to continue right on to Puttenham, a distance of seventeen miles. [Illustration] The valley which now opened eastward under the dull morning light reminded me of one of those noble dales which diversify the long slope of the Chiltern Hills. Like them it had the round sweep of the Chalk; beeches, the trees of the Chalk, adorned it; its direction was the same, its dryness, its neat turf; but it lacked the distant horizons.