The Weald
Arun and the marshy land east of Pulborough until it gets to Roundabout, and so to Storrington. All the history of communications in the Weald is exemplified in such a journey—and it is a journey which, though it is little more than twenty miles in length, takes quite a day. You have the modern high road, the green lane of the immediate past, and in places a mere track of remote antiquity. You see just how difficult it is to traverse the clay, how the occasional knobs of sand relieve your going; you can notice the character of the woodland where it is still untouched, and if you are wise you will notice one thing above all, and that is the character of the water. Now it is this which explains the Weald. Many bad bits of clay in Europe have formed highways for armies—for instance, all that rotten land in the great bend of the Loire which the Romans called the Solitarium, and which the French called the Sologne. But the Weald differs from most others in this, that good and plentiful water is hard to find. It is not the muddiness of the streams that is the chief defence of the place against human travel and habitation; it is the way in which, when rain has fallen and when water is plentiful, going is difficult, and the way in which, when a few days of dry weather come, the going becomes easy, but the water in the little streams disappears. There is evidence that the Romans, when they built their great military road—perhaps their only purely military road in Britain—across the Weald skipped one intervening station which should,
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