The Old Road |
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Common terms and phrases
alignment Alresford Alton ancient antiquity Aylesford bank Bishop Sutton Boxley bridge Canterbury Catherine's centre century chalk Charing Chilham church civilisation climb conjecture contour-line corner crest crossing Cuxton Darent Dorking east eastward embankment England evidence Farnham follow ford further Gatton Godmersham Grey Wethers harbours Headbourne Worthy height high-road hill hillside hundred island Itchen Stoke journey Kent Kentish King's Worthy Kit's Coty House Knockholt known portion land lane Lenham London marked marshy Medway Merstham miles modern road Mole Old Road Ordnance map Otford Park passage passed path Pilgrim's pilgrimage pits plain plough ports prehistoric road preserved primitive Puttenham reached Reigate ridge river round Shalford side slope Snodland soil southern spur steep Stonehenge stood Stour straight Straits of Dover stream Street summit things tide town track trail traveller valley village watershed Weald Winchester Wood Wrotham yards yews
Popular passages
Page 4 - They feel a meaning in it ; it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has arisen along its way. But for the mass The Road is silent ; it is the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest and the most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest pioneers of our race. It was the most imperative and the first of our necessities. It is older than building and than wells ; before we were quite men we knew it,...
Page 9 - ... a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives, which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on body— are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed.
Page 62 - Cambrensis, who lived at the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth century, states that in his time the bodies of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere were exhumed at Glastonbury.
Page 9 - ... lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on body— are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed. Reverence and knowledge and security and the love of a good land— all these are increased or given by the pursuit of this kind of learning. Visions or intimations are confirmed...
Page 90 - It is at the peril of the pilgrimage that you neglect this stone, whose virtue saved our fathers in the great battle.' . . . ' The church you will next see upon your way is entered from the southern porch sunward by all truly devout men ; such has been the custom here since custom began.
Page 11 - For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints of such ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the river-crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed to a shrine whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should forget the vileness of my own time, and renew...
Page 191 - The Old Road being originally the only track along these hills, was necessarily the base of every pit that should be dug. Along it alone could the chalk be carried or the lime when it was baked, and it was necessary for the Britons, the Romans, and their successors to make the floor of the mine just upon a level with this track. Later when the valley roads were developed and the Old Road was no longer continuously used, it was profitable to sink the cutting further, below the level of the Old Road,...
Page 106 - Wherever the Road goes right up to the site of a church it passes upon the southern side of that site.
Page 110 - street' nor the angularity of the medieval road. It is direct, yet not unswerving; a wavy line represents its course; it 'never turns a sharp corner save under such necessity as is presented by a precipitous rock or a sudden bend in a river...
Page 278 - In the inn, in the main room of it, I found my companions. A gramophone fitted with a monstrous trumpet roared out American songs, and to this sound the servants of the inn were holding a ball. Chief among them a woman of a dark and vigorous kind danced with an amazing vivacity, to the applause of her peers. With all this happiness we mingled. INDEX A Becker,, St. Thomas. See