The road once travelled
May
West Humble to Ashtead
I walk this journey once on foot, although there are also many mental excursions - planning, measuring, calculating distances and train times. This section follows Stane Street, once a Roman road linking what is now Chichester to London, a legacy of invasion to connect and rule a new territory. The Roman name is lost and we call it “stane” from the old English for ‘stone’, a paved road in a county of tracks. It is now a wooded track in a land of paved roads.
The army’s road once had a central mound, an agger, and ditches either side. In places, a ditch still parallels the straight path but there is little else to link to the past. The route is quiet on a weekday morning but below the bird song there are voices. Indistinct mutterings that may be Roman ghosts still travelling to London. When a golf course shows between the trees, it seems the voices may belong to golfers. The soldiers’ ghosts distain the soft men driving their buggies around the course while the Romans march by with their burdens of conquest.
Another sound increases, a constant roar. A bridge takes the Roman road over the M25 that circles London like an enraged serpent, head to tail, on forever. Crossing the M25 is the gateway to a new world. Like a watershed, the path now descends towards the Thames and city.
Beyond the serpent there are still woods and green places, although fewer and narrower as the path leads forward. A smashed car is disintegrating among the trees. Stilled at last in the dappled light of green wood.
At Ashtead, St Giles’ church has a prayer labyrinth with winding paths that gravitate to the centre, a symbolic journey taken to a still point and back out again. My destination calls me on, but not as a meditation, more as a dark force drawing me in.
Thames Down Link
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
