In the section north of Pulborough the Roman road still served a few scattered homesteads in the Dark Ages up to Billingshurst at least, but again it led nowhere because the bridge at Romans Wood was broken down and the high weald beyond was a mass of scrub growing on stiff clay. The road petered out and began again with harder going near Ockley. But it was not used over the shoulder of Leith Hill, because that trace subserved no local use and yet compelled the traveller to steep gradients. Travel was deflected round the base of the hills to Dorking, linking up the more populated part where the water springs were. This new trace, growing up obviously out of the Roman road, opens up to the eastward for a mile or two of the way until it joins up in the heart of Dorking itself, where the third camp was, out of which the town of Dorking has grown, and where in the churchyard the Roman road can still be traced passing through. From Dorking onwards one might have imagined that it would have survived all the way to London. Why did it not do so? It was a matter of gradients and of centres of population. In the Dark Ages, when there was little necessity for making a direct line between Dorking and London--no continual marching of great Roman forces, no conveying of orders from a centralized government--men took the easier way. They abandoned the up-and-down of the spur of land lying immediately north of Dorking and went round by its base to save the trouble of the little climb. They used the Roman bridge (which apparently survived at Burford), but the very steep leap up on to the Epsom Downs they abandoned, especially as the further progress of the road over the chalk connected no centres of population. The way curled round by Michelham and Leatherhead and came round to Epsom--all places suitable for centres of population with low water levels and no heavy gradients in between. The Roman road on the high waterless chalk above was left abandoned. What happened between Epsom and Merton has been already described. There is only one divergence in this section, which is where the road of the Dark Ages deflected somewhat to the left and was used to avoid the low wet ground below Clapham Common. For the rest it maintained its use. [Illustration: ERMINE STREET NEAR ROYSTON] (3) The best example I know, as I have said, of a Roman road the evidences of which have nearly disappeared, but round which local roads have grown and which can still be identified as the core of these, is the short cut between Penkridge and Chester. It is very puzzling why the Roman road should here have disappeared. It is perhaps best to be explained by the continual fighting between the Eastern and the Western troops, which must have ravaged all that country between the first of the raids and the full conversion of England to civilization and the Christian religion which was the work of the seventh century.