AN improvement on the British trackways, comparable almost to railways in relation to turnpikes, must have been the paved and embanked Roman roads, with their milestones and stations. Several of them are known, either as straight stretches of modern highway, or fallen into miry and grassy desuetude, or only guessed at as having shaped parish boundaries. Least forgotten are the main roads connecting London with provincial towns and camps. Our long and nearly straight Edgware Road was Watling Street, with its branches making the Midland or London and North-Western system of Roman travel. John Gilpin’s road out by Tottenham and Edmonton for several miles followed Ermyn Street, the Great Northern line of the Romans. They had a Great Western road also, running by Staines to Silchester, which has

preserved no familiar name. Watling Street, which originally, till diverted to London Bridge, came down by our west-end parks to cross the Thames at Westminster, in Surrey turned eastward into Kent as their Chatham and Dover route. From either this or from Ermyn Street, or rather as a continuation of both, “Stane” Street went south towards Chichester, the Roman Regnum, with a branch that might be styled the Brighton line of the period, when indeed Pevensey was the important terminus on this coast. From earliest days of commerce, Surrey could not but be crossed by ways from London to the southern ports; and perhaps here, as elsewhere, the Romans only adapted older tracks, as our generation may turn a canal into a railway.

More than one Roman road was made here, but what has been remembered as the Roman road, is the ancient Stone Street that ran right through the centre of the county. This name, still in parts familiar, is borne out by excavations made at different times, when flints and other stones laid alternately, to a thickness of four or five feet, were found bedded in sand and gravel or cement. As in the case of the Pilgrims’ Way, part of its line has been more or less closely followed by an actual road; part has become obliterated, the course only to be guessed by the rule of general straightness, unless where turned askew by insurmountable obstacles; but one stretch still remains clearly marked out, buried beneath a turf track that makes the joy of pedestrians. It begins just beyond the racecourse of Epsom, to which the Romans marched by much the same line as the cyclists’ road through Kennington, Clapham,—or Streatham,—Tooting, Morden, and Ewell. The name Newington Causeway is taken as a hint of Stone Street’s connection with London Bridge.

Before it gets clear of the suburbs, this road passes the remains of the once great Priory of Merton, hidden away behind a mill on the banks of the Wandle, and shut in by what may now be called a purlieu of Wimbledon, but could be described by Lackington, the autobiographical bookseller, as “the most rural village of the most beautiful county.” Here were educated Thomas À Becket, and the founder of Merton College; and here in 1236 a council of barons let their king know how they were unwilling to change the laws of England. What the Merton folk remember more clearly and proudly is the residence here of Nelson with his too intimate friends the Hamiltons, in a house the identification of which was made matter of recent newspaper controversy, so blurred are the records of a century back. Confusion seems to have arisen from the fact that the Hamiltons temporarily occupied Merton Abbey House; but their fixed home was Merton Place, to the south of the Abbey, which has disappeared along with the stream in the grounds, by Lady Hamilton christened the Nile, in honour of her hero. The “Nelson’s Arms” and Nelson Grove Road preserve his memory here. Close to Merton Abbey station there is a gateway to be seen as the finest fragment of the old monastery, reached from the high-road by a path up the Wandle. To our generation the Abbey has perhaps been best known as site of William Morris’s factory of artistic decorations. Merton has grown so fast that a manorial mansion might well seem an anachronism here, as was recognised by its squire, Mr. John Innes, bequeathing his property in generous endowment for local amenities and benefactions to what is now a London suburb, yet not without some rustic features.

The next village, Morden, looks still not unfit to have a squire in its park; then two or three miles farther on, the cyclist spins unsuspecting by another name fallen from high estate. He approaches Ewell and the springs of the Hogsmill River, along the wall of Nonsuch Park, in which once stood a stately palace built by Henry VIII.; and on the other side of the road the name of Worcester Park recalls how this outlying residential suburb also made part of a royal demesne, the neighbourhood of which fostered Epsom in Tudor and Stuart days. Nonsuch Palace became a favourite residence of Elizabeth and James I., and seems to have set a fashion of the day in names. The Virginian colonists christened Powhattan’s lodge Nonsuch, as “the strongest and most pleasant place in the country,” when John Smith also complimented Pocahontas with the title “Nonpareil of Virginia.” The present mansion keeps no more than the name of Nonsuch, the site of which was near the modern mock antiquity styled Ewell Castle and the ivied tower of the old church, that makes such a picturesque monument beside its successor. Pictures and Camden’s description preserve the grandeur of that vanished palace, still standing in the plague year, to be used as a government office, when Pepys hints how it was falling into decay, but Evelyn could admire the manner in which its walls “were all so covered with scales of slate, that it seemed carved in the wood and painted, the slate fastened on the timber in pretty figures, that has, like a coat of armour, preserved it from rotting.”

So much for the high-road to Epsom. But if I were going there in no hurry and in dry weather, I once could walk almost all the way from Richmond Park or from Putney Heath over grass or green lanes, with only two bits of road tramping, one at Coombe, and one through the houses of Worcester Park: there has, indeed, been so much building hereabouts of late, that I should fear now to find the paths turning to streets. This way is mainly up the course of the Hogsmill River to Chessington, the parish where Fanny Burney visited the retreat of her “Daddy” Crispe. From the hillock on which the little church stands, more than one path leads on by the tower of the asylum at Horton and beneath the railway line into Epsom’s main thoroughfare.

Few able-bodied Londoners of our generation have not by one route or other visited Epsom, which has four railway lines from the capital, two of them indeed not taking the trouble to come beyond the famous racecourse on the Downs. The smart little town lies mainly along the Dorking high-road, in a dip between the Downs and the expanse of Epsom Common, which imperceptibly merges with the wooded swell of Ashstead Common, named Leatherhead Common on a map of a century ago, before it became a resort of school-feasting Londoners. A conspicuous building on the Downs side is Epsom College, founded for the sons of medical men. That tall tower at Horton makes a landmark on the flat to the other side. The London end of the town is more commonplace, but farther on, about the Clock Tower that replaces the old watch-house, roomy openings, venerable inns, solid dwelling-houses, and shaded walks hint at the amenities of Epsom in its days of watering-place fame. Beyond this south end are the notable mansions of the Durdans and Woodcote Park, each in their well-wooded grounds. Above all, shining on the top of the Downs, the Grand Stand, more than once enlarged since its building in 1829, makes the Capitol or Acropolis of this Surrey Olympia.

Racing upon Banstead Downs, as the name then was, is first heard of under patronage of James I. on his visits at Nonsuch. A horse-race here is said to have been the excuse for that gathering of Cavaliers that ended so ill outside of Kingston, when they would have revived the Civil War. Foot- as well as horse-races, with cudgelling and wrestling matches, drew spectators in simple days whereof Herrick tells us how—

The running footmen of the quality were in a manner professionals at the sport that made their duty. Pepys notes how one summer day the town talk among such quidnuncs as himself was “of nothing but the great foot-race run this day on Banstead Downs between Lee, the Duke of Richmond’s footman, and a tyler, a famous runner,” and how the athletic flunkey won, though the betting was three to four against him. Charles II. and his brother of York both lost money on this “event,” and let us hope they paid up.

These princes helped to make horse-racing fashionable, Newmarket being the chief scene of it, where the horses were ridden by noble sportsmen in person, our merry monarch himself acting the jockey. The Banstead gatherings were as yet not so celebrated, still Defoe in his Tour is quite enthusiastic about the spectacle on the Downs when “they are covered with Coaches and Ladies, and an innumerable Company of Horsemen, as well Gentlemen as Citizens, attending the Sport; and then, adding to the Beauty of the Sight, the Racers flying over the Course, as if they neither touched not nor felt not the Ground they run upon: I think no sight except that of a Victorious Army, under a Protestant King of Great Britain, could exceed it.” That unlamented Prince Fred, “who was alive and is dead,” lived for a time at the Durdans, and then gave a cup to be run for at Epsom, which brought its course into more note. But its real fame and fortune date from about 1778, when a sporting Earl of Derby and his friends founded the Oaks and the Derby stakes, to be run for at what ought to be the brightest time of our year, yet the “blue ribbon of the turf” has been won in a snow-storm.

Before the height of its racing renown, Epsom had, we know, had a spell of prosperity as a spa. The mineral water, charged with sulphate of magnesia, is said to have been discovered early in the seventeenth century, through a countryman noticing how his cows—or his ass in a variant story—would not drink it, a reversal of the usual legend, as shown in the leading case of Bladud’s pigs at Bath. In Fuller’s day “Ebsham” was a resort of citizens coming from what even then

might be styled “the worst of smokes into the purest of airs.” By the middle of the century the waters had won a name; and a little later Pepys found the place so full that he could not get a lodging. Nell Gwynne was another patron at this period. The height of its vogue seems to have been under Queen Anne, whose husband came to drink the waters. Nearness to London must have helped Epsom’s favour; and its people were not backward in laying themselves out to accommodate strangers, for whose entertainment were provided the usual gaieties of a watering-place, set off by its situation in what seemed “a great Park filled with little Groves, Lodges, and Retreats for coolness of Air and Shade from the Sun.” But it is only in summer, says Defoe, that visitors can be expected, the clays of the lowlands making ill roads for winter jaunts.

Defoe declares Tunbridge Wells then the more fashionable place, favoured by “the Nobility and Gentry, as Epsom rather by Merchants and Rich Citizens”; both frequented rather for “the Mirth and Company, for Gaming or Intriguing or the like,” than for “meer Physick”; and he states that Londoners of a lower class who sought serious treatment found it by walking out to the wells of Dulwich and Streatham, so much beset on holidays by “an unruly and unmannerly” crowd that the “better sort” kept aloof from such Cockney haunts. One notes how a contemporary French Guide du Baigneur advertises Dulwich and Streatham as well as Epsom among our spas, though other more famous British resorts have not yet swum into the ken of this authority. The sulphur water of Streatham, indeed, may still be tasted, pumped up behind the counter of a dairy by a dispenser who has informed me that he finds it excellent as “supper beer”—de gustibus, etc.

John Toland in 1711 gives the wordiest account of Epsom spa and its company, lodged in a group of hamlets about the main street, with the paved Terrace, Assembly Room, and two rival bowling-greens as centres of intercourse. The writer himself had a “Hermitage” at Woodcote Green, from which he thus describes, is his Letter to Eudoxa:—

Epsom’s credit appears to have been lost through the trickery of a certain apothecary, who set up “New Wells” with Assembly and gambling-rooms, which took for a time, till it leaked out how the virtue of this rival spring was only matter of imagination. That humbug had bought up the original well, and went so far as to close it by way of protecting his own dishonest enterprise. Then Epsom fell off as a resort; and though attempts were made to galvanise its repute, it never got back those throngs of visitors, while the artificial Epsom salts came to be a popular remedy. The once famous well is now obscurely enclosed in the grounds of a private mansion on the Common, to be seen above a row of cottages beside the railway, just outside the town. Among the Ashstead oaks, higher up on the Common, there is a still more neglected spring known as the “Roman Well,” the highest point of this open woodland having apparently been the site of a Roman camp.

The Roman Road is on the other side of the town, beginning at the south-west corner of the racecourse, to be followed in a nearly straight line from an inn below the Grand Stand. On the Ordnance Maps it is marked Ermyn Street, but Stone Street is the traditional name, though it seems anything but stony in our macadamising days. An easy and pleasant way of striking into it from the town is to turn up left at the “Spread Eagle,” then presently right by a flagged path and a lane forking to the right, which brings one below Lord Rosebery’s seat, the Durdans, where a road goes straight up-hill to the inn above mentioned. One might, however, keep another in the same direction as the lane, presently bending up left round Woodcote Park, and past Ashstead Park on the right, till at the top of the ascent is struck the Roman Road.

There is no mistaking this deserted highway, here a broad stretch of turf, on which practical farmers must cast a covetous eye. At a height of about 400 feet, it makes a delightful walk, crossed by tempting pathways, on one side to the Dorking road through Ashstead and Leatherhead, on the other to Headley and Walton, by which one might cut across to the Reigate road. Pebble Lane is a local name, suggested by traces of the Roman construction that have been exposed to view; and there are hints of the old embankment, where to the careless eye nothing may appear but a swathe of waste land. The Church in Ashstead Park is believed to occupy the site of a Roman villa, such as often stood a little way off these roads, like a modern gentleman’s house behind its avenue.

Among the divagations suggested by guide-posts, one might choose the mile or so’s walk behind Ashstead to the church of Headley-on-the-Hill, whose spire is a far seen landmark and a focus of several such footways, another of which would lead back to the Roman Road farther on. If one keep straight along it, after half an hour’s soft walking it grows narrower, rougher, and shadier, crooking its way through a wood as it comes upon the yew-dotted and tumulus-swollen slopes of the Downs above Leatherhead. All this part of Surrey is particularly rich in yews, such as we saw in the Druid’s Grove of Norbury across the Mole, which our road now approaches. Beneath it, beside the valley high-road, the grounds of Cherkley Court contain a mass of yews packed together over some ninety acres, some of the trees very large and beautiful in form. Dr. John Lowe, in his monograph on the Yew-trees of Great Britain and Ireland, speaks of this as “perhaps the finest collection of yews in existence.”

Leatherhead Downs run into the neighbour name of Mickleham Downs, which in part are still much as they were described by Aubrey, but their clumps of ancient yews and thorn-trees are relieved by more artificial parks and woods, below which opens the lovely valley of the Mole, with Norbury Park on its opposite slope. The Roman Road seems to have dropped down into the hollow below Juniper Hill before crossing the Mole; but then its line becomes lost, though fragments of it are said to have been made out in living memory. Let us be content to take two or three miles of turnpike by Burford Bridge to Dorking, whose tall spire, reared in memory of Bishop Wilberforce, marks the traditional course of Stone Street by its churchyard.

As it left the chalk formation to mount upon the greensand, this old road must have crossed the central scene of that “Battle of Dorking” that has escaped mention by grave historians, who might indeed note the national characteristic which turns such a fable into the form of a wholesome warning, whereas the prophets of foreign fiction are more in the way of tickling their readers with glorious victories of imagination. The name thus used to point a moral and adorn a tale from Blackwood, was suggested by the position of Dorking at the foot of the steep Downs, making a natural line of defence for the south side of London. In Domesday the town figures as Dorkinges, a name authentically famed through a breed of fowls said to have been introduced by the Romans. There can be no doubt about its antiquity, and its importance in good old days is vouched for by the size and number of its inns, the “White Horse” and “Red Lion” still flourishing, and others turned into shops in our own time. The curious stranger searches in vain for the sign of the “Marquis of Granby,” for the tomb of Mrs. S. Weller, sen., or for the chapel at which Mr. Stiggins ministered; but an actual coachman named Weller is said to have lived at Dorking in Mr. Pickwick’s time, and his chronicler seems to have had in view the “Old King’s Head,” which became the Post Office.

A peculiar custom of Dorking must probably be spoken of in the past tense, now that staid citizens have been resolute in putting it down, as happened earlier at Kingston and other towns. Here lasted longest in Surrey what seems a survival of Carnival roistering, a triple game of football played through the main streets on Shrove Tuesday, between sides living east and west of the church. On this afternoon, all shops being closed, three balls,

red, white, and blue, were carried out in procession to the music of a traditional tune, to be kicked off by the town crier at the Church passage. The red ball having been first worried by the boys, at 3 P.M. the blue ball was taken in foot by the men; and at 4 P.M. a grand final struggle, hundreds strong, began with the white ball, going on till the chimes rang at 6 P.M. These Saturnalian scrimmages proved as hard to extinguish as the bonfire-revels at Lewes on Guy Fawkes Day; but this year a dozen extra policemen appear to have been too many for young Dorking’s half-hearted conservatism; and for an illustration of the old Shrove Tuesday sports, one must go all the way to St. Colomb in Cornwall, where the ceremonial Hurling Match between “Town” and “Country” is still honoured in the observance.

These footballs were inscribed with the legend, “Wind and water is Dorking’s glory.” From some winds Dorking is well sheltered; but the lower part of the town has only too much water in the ponds filled by the Pipp Brook, at one time an attraction of the place, being stocked with perch, carp, and tench, that supplied the dish called “water souchy,” a stew of fish in esteem with London citizens. Sanitarians now shake their heads over this damp and misty flat, and Dorking’s recent growth is rather upon the high ground behind the long, spacious main street. In point of picturesqueness its situation is most admirable, shut in among such heights as Ranmore Common, Box Hill, and the broken swell of parks and woods rising southwards to Leith Hill.

Much of this beautiful country is enclosed in renowned demesnes; most famous of them Deepdene, lying close behind the town. That paradise of almost European reputation takes in the adjoining Betchworth and Chart Parks; and the wood on the opposite face of Box Hill also belongs to the property, that in a circumference of a dozen miles makes a magnificent collection of English and exotic timber. The nucleus of it was the deep hollow or “Long Hope,” which Mr. Charles Howard, in Cromwell’s time, laid out as an amphitheatre of garden terraces, an open-air conservatory of flowers and rare plants, visited with due admiration by his neighbour John Evelyn, and also by Aubrey, who declared the sight “worthy of Cowley’s Muse.” At the beginning of last century the estate was bought and extended by “Anastasius” Hope, author of a celebrated Eastern romance, and liberal patron of such artists as Flaxman and Thorwaldsen, with whose works he stored the mansion begun by him. As a guest here, Disraeli is understood to have written Coningsby. Another owner of note was Mr. Beresford Hope, the proprietor of the Saturday Review. In the hands of his heirs the estate fell among the Philistines, and after a succession of tenancies this lordly demesne has been turned into an hÔtel de luxe. But if strangers cannot gain the lofty beech terrace, commanding such a rich woodland prospect, and from a lane outside must be content with a tantalising peep of the rhododendron show within, they may take a public path to the Glory Wood behind the town; or, on its east side, in the valley of the Mole, they find the avenues of Betchworth Park open as a way to Brockham; while the grounds of Box Hill, and some of the finest outskirts of Leith Hill, such as the Nower park-slopes, offer free rambles.

To follow the Roman Road’s course southwards from Dorking, one takes the Horsham Road over Holmwood Common below the eastern flanks of Leith Hill. On the right hand of this highway, a straight line under the Redland Woods is marked on the O.S. map as Stone Street, which here, indeed, needs an antiquary’s eye to trace it over private enclosures. Above it, by lanes winding through the woods, is reached the lofty village of Coldharbour. This name, often occurring on or near an old road, is believed to denote an inn, like the caravanserais of the East, that supplied only bare walls. Evelyn reviles a poor Alpine inn as a “cold harbour, though the house had a stove in every room.” It is not improbable that a deserted Roman villa or military station would be turned to account as such a place of more or less imperfect shelter. Ruskin, in one of his rashest excursions ultra crepidam, opined that the Camberwell Coldharbour Lane might have been called after coluber, from its snake-like windings; but he seems not to know how many Coldharbours there are in England, and that several of them stand near Roman roads, whose character was anything but serpentine. Beside this lofty village is the Camp of Anstiebury, traditional harbour for an invading force of Danes, who sallied forth to be slaughtered on the slopes of Leith Hill or on Ockley Green below.

On the south side of Leith Hill, showing such a bold face to the flats of Ockley, the line of the Roman Road coincides with the modern one, still known as “Stone Street causeway,” that had been ascribed by country-folk in Aubrey’s time to the work of the Devil. This road runs straight for about three miles, then, beyond its forks, the line of the old way is marked on maps as leading about as far ahead, across the Sussex border, into the valley of the Arun. As a practicable path, however, it seems to have fallen much out of use, overlaid by the woods and grounds of this generation. In the fork one can see no trace of it now, but, if one here take the right-hand road crooking up to the hamlet of Oakwood Hill, below this an inscription, Shut the Gate, shows the bridle-way preserved as drive of a modern mansion. Beside this house it passes as a green lane to be almost choked as it tunnels the copses that soon obscure its line for a stranger, though local wayfarers make out a right-of-way to Rowhook. Mr. Malden, the Surrey historian, who has patiently explored part of its lost course, finds that some ancient lanes take no heed of that older track, which he supposes to have been early abandoned as leading into the Wealden wilds, almost uninhabited at the date of Domesday.

Ockley itself is one of the pleasantest of Surrey villages, clustered about a broad green, beside which Stone Street has grown into a lordly avenue, shadowing what seems a Roman-like massiveness of paving. About it, within the bounds of Surrey, green byways wind among swelling ridges and clumps of timber thick-set on the edge of the Weald. Two or three miles southward, on the right hand of Stone Street’s line, woodland paths lead to the sequestered chapel of Oakwood and on to Oakwood Hill, whence, half a dozen miles south-west, might be reached in Sussex the Baynards or the Rudgwick station of a line from Guildford, near the new quarters of the Bluecoat School converging with that other from Dorking, on which Warnham, the home of Shelley’s youth, has a station about as far to the south-east of Ockley. Eastward, one can seek the secluded Wealden villages caught in a network of the Mole’s branches, through which the free foot or wheel can thread a devious way to the Brighton road, or bend round into the Holmesdale valley. Westward, zigzag roads under the wooded crests of the sand-hills take one to Ewhurst, to Cranleigh, and on to Godalming, or by Bramley or Wonersh to Guildford. To the north rises the stiff ascent of Leith Hill, from which let us survey its choice surroundings.