England -- Antiquities; England -- Description and travel; Roads -- Great Britain
Immediately below it lies that string of habitations which everywhere
marks its course, and between which it was originally the only means
of communication. Just as Bletchingly, Reigate, Limpsfield, Westerham,
Brasted, and the rest stood below its earlier course, and just as in
its further part we shall find Hollingbourne, Harrietsham, Lenham and
Charing, so here there runs a little succession of hamlets, churches,
and small towns, which are the centres of groupings of arable land in
the valley floor, while above them the Pilgrim's Road follows just
above the margin of cultivation. Their names are Kemsing, Heaverham,
St. Clere, Yaldham, and at last Wrotham.
The section further gives an admirable example of the way in which the
Old Road was gradually replaced.
[Illustration]
These six miles of its length may, for the purpose of the illustration
they afford, be divided into three nearly equal parts by the village
of Kemsing, and the hamlet of Yaldham. Each of these divisions shows
the Old Road in one of its three historical phases: first as the only
artery of the country-side, then as an alternative way supplemented by
a valley road, and finally as a decayed and unused path whose value
has been destroyed by the more modern highway below it. It is
astonishing to see with what precision each of these phases is shown,
how exactly each division ends, and how thoroughly the character of
each is maintained.
In the first, from Otford to Kemsing, a distance of about two miles,
one can see the two valley villages below one, and the track one
follows is the only good road between them, though it lies above them
both and can only be reached from either by a short rising lane. A
short cut across the fields connects the two places, but if one wishes
to use a proper and made way, there is none to take but that which
still represents the Old Road, and so to go up out of Otford and then
down into Kemsing. One has to do, in other words, exactly what was
done for centuries when the archbishops came up to London from
Canterbury; wherever one may desire to halt one has to leave the Old
Road and come down from it to the village below.
In the second part, between Kemsing and Yaldham, the modern influence
has been sufficient to provide an alternative. The distance is
somewhat more than two miles. The Pilgrim's Way runs up along the
hillside, a metalled lane, while below in the valley the old footpaths
and cart tracks have been united into a modern permanent road, and a
man going from Kemsing through Heaverham to Yaldham need not take the
Pilgrim's Road above as his ancestors would have had to do, but can go
straight along the lower levels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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