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 turns that great corner westward and proceeds along the rampart of the Downs.  But even in the ten miles twixt Canterbury and Boghton, that ancient way gives to him who follows it wonderful things.

To begin with, the valley of the Stour.  There can be few valleys in this part of England more lovely than this steep and wide vale, through the hop gardens, the woods and meadows of which, the Great Stour proceeds like a royal pilgrim, half in state to Canterbury, and on to the mystery of the marshes, and its death in the sea.  Above Canterbury certainly, and all along my way, there is not a meadow nor a wood, nor indeed a single mile of that landscape, which has not been contrived and created by man, by the love and labour of our fathers through how many thousand years.  And this is part of the virtue of England, that it is as it were a garden of our making, a pleasaunce we have built, a paradise and a home after our own hearts.  And in that divine and tireless making we, without knowing it, have so moulded ourselves that we are one with it, it is a part of us, a part of our character and nature.  There lie ever before us our beginnings, the earthworks we once defended, the graves we built, the defeats, the victories, the holy places.  By these a man lives, out of these he draws slowly and with a sort of confidence the uncertain future, glad indeed of this divine assurance that there is nothing new under the sun.

Such monuments of an antiquity so great that they have no history but what may be gathered from barrows and stones, accompany one upon any day’s journey in southern England, but it is only in one place that a man can stand and say:  Here began the history of my country.  That place as it happens lies as it should upon the Pilgrims’ Road.

Beyond Harbledown, some two miles from Canterbury, he Pilgrims’ Road along the hillside passes clean through earthwork of unknown antiquity.  Well, it was here the Seventh Legion charged:  here, indeed, we stand upon the very battlefield which saw the birth of civilisation in our island.  Lying there in the early morning sunshine I considered it all over again.