THE PILGRIMS' WAY
BIG white clouds lay tumbled over the crest of the Kentish Downs—like naked Titans sprawling in the blue. The light flashed from their limbs, and their shadows lay quiet on the hills beneath them. Cowls on the oast-houses churned discordantly here and there : by the roadside some late white campions (thunder- flowers, some call them) puffed out their bladders in the gritty sunlight. Turning out of the noisy street, I climbed, from Wrotham Station, to the nearest point on the Pilgrims' Way. Gradual as the ascent was, I was surprised, when I turned to the right into the track, how considerable was the extent of the view flung out below. Standing with my back to the crest of the Downs, I looked across one of the richest stretches of the Kentish 1Veald ; to my left the Way wound on to Birling and the Medway Valley, and, to my right, it passed on to Otford, some four or five miles distant. Since the longest stretch lay towards the Medway, I decided to trek that way.
The path forms a shelf along the length of the Downs (though only traceable now, as a really continuous way, from Otford to Canterbury) about a hundred feet from the top of the ridge. It is therefore sheltered from the north winds—no small comfort, I am sure, to the pilgrims who trod it in mediaeval days. From Wrotham to Birling, as from Wrotham back to Otford, it is little more than a bridle-track now, so scarcely trodden upon that tansy and mint, mallow and marjoram grow freely in the way. At Birling, where the Medway valley first cuts through the ridge of the Downs, the continuity of the path is broken ; and from that point onwards, despite the beauty of the panorama, the joy is out of the heart of the journey because the old track so often becomes identified with busy modern roads. But here, for some five or six miles east or west, the quiet is restful indeed. Now and then, perhaps, there will float up the voice of some child calling in the fields below—remote, strange ; or a school of rooks, startled in their foraging among the flinty slopes, will croak harshly, rise, and spread a mourning band across the sky. In such a quiet the mind is easily its own resting- place.
It was inevitable, then, that I should think of him who once lifted a handful of pilgrims out of the limbo of time and made of their journeying something typical, something symbolical. For there can be little on this shelving track, I thought, to distinguish the Then from the Now. Here an untended hazel-hedge made mystery of the view, framing it in a tender outline of leaves : there a low withy fence revealed a field of stubble, where one dark stook still stood, like a forgotten offering to Demeter : and far out in the green flat weald suddenly the summer shadows lifted and a speck of the river shone between the trees, like a Cyclopean eye at clash with the sun. Nothing was here to remind me of the passing of time. At my feet, Chaucer's own meek-eyed daisy spread a belated coronal in the grass. The illusion, was complete..
It was along this way that the merry company of Pilgrims fared. They havealways seemed best character. 'zed for me in Blake's engraving. You will say there is though realism in Chaucer's own detail ; but no one has really seen the gat-toothed Wife of Bath or the Pardoner " with beer as yelow as wex 2' who has not looked ,en Blake's 'portrayal of them. I suppose of all the twenty-nine few had any eye for beauty ; indeed, with the Good Wife for company (" and she was somdel defc ") few could have had any time to care about the country so lavishly spread out below them. Yet I like to think that somewhere in the rear of that " sondry folk" lurked the Poet himself, not all immersed in the latest ribaldry, halting perhaps by some such gaps as these, to drink his fill of the coloured landscape. And one other there was, I am sure, who ambled on the outer edge of the company, startled now and again from his reverie by the throaty laughter that greeted some lewd tale he had missed ; he was the Plowman—" lyvyng in pees and parfit charitee." Blake has rightly made him the finest type of them all ; to each of the others, except Chaucer himself, he has given some subtlety of feature, craftiness or avarice, lust or cruelty, fickleness or mock holiness ; but the Plowman he has made native, simple, guileless as the daisy, upright as the tree. Their shades, all of them, seemed to linger there as I passed, where the warm south blew up from the fields. Was it not here, I thought, by this rowan-tree, that they rested for a garrulous meal, while the cook boiled" the chikenes with the marybones " and carped at the makeshift methods, sighing for the steamy bustle of a kitchen and " blank-manger that made he with the best " ?
Well, we have not yet forgotten altogether what it is to long "to goon on pilgrimages." But we make them now by motor-car. Looking back I could see the shiningly wooded hills from Ightham to Sevenoaks,. where the way threaded quiet as this, where the Pilgrims once dallied as I am sure they dallied here. And with that view the illusion vanished ; for the portion of the path that stretches from Otford to Wrotham is threatened by a scheme the Sevenoaks Urban and Rural District Councils are proposing for the construction of a great motor-road through the Darenth Valley to the north of Sevenoaks, linking up with the proposed Sevenoaks by-pass road ; and powers are to be sought, in case of necessity, for widening and altering the Way at this juncture. This month a public inquiry is to be held into the matter. On the issue will depend the ultimate preservation of what is surely' one of the most hallowed pathways in all the land.
Is the proposed new roadway absolutely necessary ? There seem to be considerable doubts. If it is necessary, in view of the tremendously increased traffic that now passes through Kent (which traffic will be considerably augmented, by the way, if the suggested tunnel be built under the Thames from Erith to Purfleet), then what steps can be taken to safeguard the beauty of the track where it will be bisected ? Such questions the Inquiry will carefully examine ; but surely the preservation of the Pilgrims' Way should be ensured by powers that lie outside the jurisdiction of any local Council ? If we have lost much of the spiritual urge that lay behind all the other motives inducing those Canterbury Pilgrims to make the journey to the shrine of St. Thomas A Becket; must we lose, too, one of the best tangible reminders of that Vanished holiness ?
C. HENRY WARREN.
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