but for two very different events, the first of which was the
Martyrdom of St Thomas, and the other the practice of demanding tolls
upon the great new system of turnpike-roads we owe to the end of the
eighteenth century. For this ancient British track leading half across
England of my heart, a barbarous thing, older than any written word
in England, was used and preserved, when, with the full blossoming of
the Middle Age in the thirteenth century, it might have disappeared.
It was preserved by the Pilgrims to St Thomas's Shrine. All those men
who came out of the West to visit St Thomas, all those who came from
Brittany, central and southern France and Spain, gathered at
Winchester, the old capital of the Kingdom, and when they set out
thence for Canterbury this was the way they followed across the
counties; this most ancient way which enters Canterbury hand in hand
with the Watling Street by the West Gate.

To describe a thing so ancient is impossible. It casts a spell upon
the traveller so that as he follows under its dark yews across the
steep hop gardens of Kent from hillside to hillside, up this valley or
that, along the mighty south wall of the North Downs to the great ford
of the Medway, and beyond and beyond through more than a hundred miles
to Winchester he loses himself; becomes indeed one with his
forefathers and looks upon that dear and ancient landscape, his most
enduring and most beautiful possession as a child looks upon his
mother, really with unseeing eyes, unable to tell whether she be fair
or no, understanding indeed but this that she is a part of himself,
and that he loves her more than anything else in the world.

But that glorious way in all its fulness was not for me. I had
determined to follow the Pilgrims' Road but a little way, indeed but
for one long day's journey, so far only as Boghton Aluph, where it