True, the pilgrims, and many generations before them, must have come down to this point to sleep, as they came down night after night to so many other points, stretched along the low land below the Old Road in its upland course from the Wey to the Stour. So common a halting-place was it in the later Middle Ages that the centre of Reigate town, the place where the Town Hall now stands, held the chapel of St. Thomas from perhaps the thirteenth century to the Reformation. But Reigate no more than Maidstone, another station of the medieval pilgrimage, could have stood on the Old Road itself. It may be another track which gives Reigate its name. Some Roman by-way which may have run from Shoreham (which the experts do not believe to have been a port), right through the Weald to Reigate, and so to London. [Illustration: AND BEYOND, THE WHOLE OF THE WEALD] It is possible that a way from the Portus Adurni[29] to London ran here by Reigate and climbed the hill above; one of those fingers reaching to the ports of the south coast, of which the Stane Street, the Watling Street, and perhaps the fragment further east by Marden, are the remnants: moreover, in the existence of such a road I think one can solve the puzzle of Gatton. Gatton, which is now some three or four houses and a church and a park, sent two members to Parliament, from the fifteenth century until the Reform Bill. It was therefore at some time, for some reason, a centre of importance, not necessarily for its population but as a gathering-place or a market, or a place from which some old town had disappeared. Indeed a local tradition of such a town survives. One may compare the place with that other centre, High Cross, where is now the lonely crossing of the Fosse Way and Watling Street in Leicestershire. Now, what would have given this decayed spot its importance long ago? Most probably the crossing of an east and west road (the Old Road) with another going north and south, which has since disappeared. The influence of vested interests (for Gatton Park fetched twice its value on account of this anachronism) preserved the representation in the hands of one man until the imperfect reform of seventy years ago destroyed the Borough. There is another point in connection with the Pilgrim's Way at Gatton. For the second time since it has left Winchester it goes to the north of a hill. At Albury it did so, as my readers have seen, for some reason not to be explained. In every other case between here and Canterbury the explanation is simple. It goes north to avoid a prominent spur in the range and a re-entrant angle at the further side. The map which I append will make this point quite clear. [Illustration] For precisely the same cause it goes north of the spur south of Caterham and much further on, some miles before Canterbury, it goes north of the spur in Godmersham Park.