[6] _Wiltshire Archæological Magazine_, XXXIV.
The Arab’s answer to Mr. Doughty’s[7] question whether he knew all the strange spires, pinnacles, and battlements of the wind-worn sand rock in the desert was that he knew, “as good as every great stone” in all his marches over three or four thousand square miles; and there were drovers who could have said as much of the landmarks on the downs, the tumulus and camp, the furze thicket, the hawthorns, solitary or in line, the beech or fir clump, the church tower, the distant white wall or scallop of a chalk-pit, the white horse carved through the turf into the chalk, the church towers of the valley, the long coombes.
[7] _Travels in Arabia_, by Charles M. Doughty.
Even when deserted, these old roads are kept in memory by many signs. The grass refuses to grow over the still stream of turf in the same way as at either side of it. A line of thorn trees follows their course, or the hedge or fence or wall dividing two fields. They survive commonly and conspicuously as boundaries between fields, between estates, parishes, hundreds, and counties. It is one of the adventurous pleasures of a good map thus to trace the possible course of a known old road or to discover one that was lost. A distinct chain of footpath, lane, and road--road, lane, and footpath--leading across the country and corresponding in much of its course with boundaries is likely to be an ancient way. By this means much of the line of a road like the Icknield Way might be recovered if document and tradition had not preserved it. Without these signs few men to-day could tell an old from a new road, though, in fact, there are not many great lengths of entirely new road except in new towns and newly drained regions; elsewhere the new roads have been made by linking up or improving old ones. The life of cities has destroyed at once the necessity and the power to judge the expanse of earth under our eyes, and few but soldiers educate whatever gift they have for this kind of judgment. If we learn to use a map, it is without fundamental understanding, without the savage’s or the soldier’s or the traveller’s grasp; we must have inherited glimmerings of the old power, but they help us chiefly to an æsthetic appreciation of landscape. Let a man take an old map--not a very old one, which may be faulty or deficient--of his own district, and see if he can really grasp the system of the hills and rivers, and the bones of the land and the essential roads, and not be long baffled merely by the absence of certain new roads and familiar names; for few old ones will have entirely disappeared. If he is not so baffled he has cause for pride. Many are to be found who can hardly read a map when going from north to south, i.e. down the map instead of up it, with the east on the left and the west on the right and the north behind; and their difficulty is increased by being in a railway train. Such men may be very good walkers and very good men, though they be walking for exercise, or to improve body or soul, which is a reason that has lately been condemned by Mr. Belloc. “The detestable habit of walking for exercise,” he tells us, “warps the soul.”[8] He is perhaps assuming that the man always keeps this one object in view, and is always looking at his watch or feeling his pulse. But even a man walking for exercise may forget his object and unexpectedly profit; he may surprise happiness by the wayside or beyond the third stile, and no man can do more, whether he have the best and the most Bellocian object in the world. Then he condemns also men who ride along the road and into an inn yard and feel that they are “like some one in a book.” This is a rather serious matter. Authors have unintentionally persuaded simple men to suffer many blisters for the chance of drinking ale in the manner of Borrow and meeting adventures, in the hope of being heartily and Whitmanesquely democratic. Even Leslie Stephen half-seriously lamented that he was unworthy of Borrovian adventures; for they never fell to him. A writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ has made a good piece of prose in which he speaks of himself reading the _Essays of Elia_ in an old inn at Llandovery--as Hazlitt read _La Nouvelle Heloise_ at Llangollen on his birthday. A great many must be walking over England nowadays for the primary object of writing books: it has not been decided whether this is a worthy object. Mr. John Burroughs also condemns a walk taken as a prescription, but goes so far as to regard walking itself as a virtue.