England -- Antiquities; England -- Description and travel; Roads -- Great Britain
To the north and to the south of this, at Walton Heath on the plateau
above, and at Colley Farm in the valley below, there had been
discoveries of Roman and of pre-Roman things; but though they pointed
to its neighbourhood, these relics would not of themselves have given
us the exact line of the road; that was furnished by the broad and
unmistakable track which it had itself impressed upon the chalk from
the usage of so many hundred years.
It was slow work here. Much of it ran through dense brushwood, where
one had to stoop and push aside the branches, and all of it was damp,
shaded from the sun by the mass of old yews, and less well drained on
this flat edge and summit than it is on the hillside where it usually
hangs. But though it is a difficult two miles, the path is
discoverable all the way.
With Margery Wood it reaches the 700-feet line, runs by what I fear
was a private path through a newly-enclosed piece of property. We
remembered to spare the garden, but we permitted ourselves a trespass
upon this outer hollow trench in the wood which marked our way.
A magnificent bit of open ground, from which we saw below us the sandy
hills, and beyond, the whole of the Weald, led us on to a point where
the Old Road once again corresponds with a modern and usable, though
unmetalled and very dirty lane. This is the lane which runs to the
south of the park of Margery Hall. It skirts to the north the property
recently acquired by the War Office, and when it has passed the War
Office boundary-stone it is carried across the high-road from Reigate
to London by a suspension bridge, which must surely be the only
example in Europe of so modern an invention serving to protect the
record of so remote a past. Nor would there be any need for such a
suspension bridge had not the London Road in the early part of the
nineteenth century been eased in its steepness by a deep cutting, to
cross which the suspension bridge was made. That bridge, once passed,
the road pointed straight to the lodge of Gatton, and pursued its way
through that park to the further lodge upon the eastern side.[28]
Here should be submitted some criticism of the rather vague way in
which the place-names of this district have been used by those who had
preceded us in the reconstruction of the Pilgrim's Way.
Reigate, which was Churchfell at the Conquest, has been imagined to
take its later title from the Old Road. Now the name, like that of
Riggate in the north country, means certainly the passage near the
road; but Reigate lay well below in the valley.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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