I say the road by which I went out of Winchester and followed for so
many miles, through King's Worthy and Martyr Worthy, Itchen Abbas, New
Alresford and Bishops Sutton, is perhaps the oldest in England; in fact
it is the old British trackway from the ports of the Straights and
Canterbury to Winchester and Old Sarum, the western end, indeed, of the
way I had already followed from Canterbury to Boughton Aluph up the
valley of the Great Stour, known to us all as the Pilgrim's Way. For
though it is older than any written history, it was preserved from
neglect and death when the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were making
all new, here as elsewhere, by the pilgrims, who, coming from Western
England, from Brittany and Spain to visit St Thomas' shrine, used it as
their road across Southern England from Winchester to Canterbury.
Now, though for any man who follows that road to-day it is filled with
these great companies of pilgrims, there are older memories, too, which
it evokes and which, if the history of England is precious to him, he
cannot ignore.
To begin with the exit from Winchester: there in Jewry Street a Roman
road overlies the older British way, not indeed exactly, but roughly,
certainly as far as King's Worthy, whence it still shoots forth
straight as an arrow's flight over hill over dale to Silchester.
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