Caesar, however, cannot have been in any way daunted save perhaps by
the memory of the time already lost and the advancing season. He at
once began his march into Britain. We may well ask by what route he
went, and to that question we shall get no certain answer. But it
would seem he must have marched by one of two ways for he had to cross
the Stour, the Medway and the Thames. We may be sure then that his
route lay either along the old trackway which, straightened and built
up later by the Romans, we know as the Watling Street, which fords the
Medway at Rochester, and the Thames at Lambeth and Westminster, or by
the trackway we call the Pilgrims' Way along the southern slope of the
North Downs, in which case he would have forded the Medway at
Aylesford and the Thames at Brentford. The question is insoluble,
Caesar himself giving no indications.
Now, when I had well considered all this, I went on to that loveliness
which is Chilham; passing as I went, that earthwork older than any
history called Julaber's Grave, marked by a clump of fir trees. Here
of old they thought to find the grave of that Quintus Laberius, who
fell as Caesar relates, at the head of his men, on the march to the
Thames; but it was probably already older when Caesar passed by, than
it would have been now if he had built it.
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