For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints of such ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the river-crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed to a shrine whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect, articulate, and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and the long accumulation of evil. It was perhaps a year ago that I determined to follow and piously to recover the whole of that doubtful trail whereby they painfully made their way from one centre of their common life to the sea, which was at once their chief mystery and their only passage to the rest of their race--from Hampshire to the Straits of Dover. Many, I knew, had written about that road; much of it was known, but much also was lost. No one, to my knowledge, had explored it in its entirety. First, therefore, I read what had been written about this most ancient way, I visited men who were especially learned in geology and in antiquarian knowledge, I took notes from them, and I carefully studied the maps of all sorts that could help me in my business. Then, taking one companion, I set out late in December to recover and map out yard by yard all that could be recovered and mapped out of The Old Road. No better task could be put before a man, and the way in which I accomplished it my readers shall judge in the essay which follows this introduction, and in the diary of my journey with which the book shall close. THE THEORY OF THE OLD ROAD THAT SUCH AND SUCH CAUSES DETERMINED THE TRACK OF THE OLD ROAD, AND THAT IT RAN FROM WINCHESTER TO CANTERBURY [Illustration] If one looks at a map of England in relief one sees that five great ridges of high land come, the first from just east of north, the second from the north-east, the third and fourth from the east, and the fifth from the south and west, to converge on Wilts and the Hampshire border. Roughly speaking, their area of convergence is Salisbury Plain, and it has been suggested that Avebury and Stonehenge drew the importance of their sites from this convergence; for these continuous high lands would present the first natural highways by which a primitive people could gather from all parts of the island. The advantages afforded in the matter of travel by such hills (which are called in great parts of their course the Cotswold, the Chilterns, the North Downs, the South Downs, and the Dorsetshire Downs) are still quite plainly apparent if a man will follow them on foot.