Free The Old Road by Hilaire Belloc

which the Road betrayed, was much larger than would at first have appeared probable, and that we could discover them was in the main the cause of our success, as the reader will see when I come to the relation of the various steps by which wereconstituted, as I hope, the whole of the trail.
    The principal characteristics or 'habits' are as follows:—
    I. The Road never turns a sharp corner save under such necessity as is presented by a precipitous rock or a sudden bend in a river.
    In this it does precisely what all savage trails do to-day, in the absence of cultivated land. When you have a vague open space to walk through at your choice you have no reason for not going straight on.
    We found but one apparent exception to this rule in the whole distance: that at the entry to Puttenham; and this exception is due to a recent piece of cultivation. [4] This alignment, however, is not rigid—nothing primitive ever is—the Road was never an absolutely straight line, as a Roman road will be, but it was always direct.
    II. The Road always keeps to the southern slope, where it clings to the hills, and to the northern bank ( i.e. the southward slope) of a stream. The reason ofthis is obvious; the slope which looks south is dry.
    There are but four exceptions to this rule between Winchester and Canterbury, and none of the four are so much as a mile in length. [5]
    III. The road does not climb higher than it needs to.
    It is important to insist upon this point, because there is nothing commoner than the statement that our prehistoric roads commonly follow the very tops of the hills. The reason usually given for this statement is, that the tops of the hills were the safest places. One could not be ambushed or rushed from above. But the condition offear is not the only state of mind in which men live, nor does military necessity, when it arises, force a laden caravan to the labour of reaching and following a high crest. The difficulty can be met by a flanking party following the top of the ridge whose lower slope is the platform for the regular road. In this way the advantage of security is combined with the equally obvious advantage of not taking more trouble than you are compelled to take. There are several excellent examples of the flanking road on this way to Canterbury, notably the ridge-way along the Hog's Back, [6] which has become the modern high-road; but nowhere does the Old Road itself climb to the top of a hill save when it has one of two very obvious reasons: ( a ) the avoidance of a slope too steep to bear the traveller with comfort, or ( b ) the avoidance of the ins and outs presented by a number of projecting ridges. On this account at Colley Hill, before Reigate, and later, above Bletchingly, nearRedhill, the Road does climb to the crest: and so it does beyond Boughton Aluph to avoid a very steep ravine. Once on the crest, it will remain there sometimes for a mile or so, especially if by so doing it can take advantage of a descending spur later on: as after Godmersham Park down to Chilham. But, take the Road as a whole, its habit when a convenient southerly bank of hills is present, is to go up some part of the slope only, and there to run along from 50 to 100 feet above the floor of the valley. If it be asked why the earlier traveller should have been at the pains of rising even so much as this, it may be noted that the reason was threefold: it gave the advantage of a view showing what was before one; it put one on the better drained slope where the land would be drier; and it lifted one above the margin of cultivation in later times when men had learned to plough the land. In the particular case of this Road it had the further advantage that it usually put one on the porous chalk and avoided the difficult clay of the lower levels.
    IV. Wherever the Road goes right up tothe site of a church it passes upon the southern side of that site.
    It is necessary to digress here for a moment upon the archæological importance of