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The majority of visitors to the Duchy approach it by this avenue, and the old stage-coaches followed very much the same route as the present railway, but conveyed their passengers to Saltash by ferry instead of by bridge. The rail is the successor of an immemorial trackway that linked Devon and Cornwall in days when they had not been subdivided.
It is a feature which the present writer continually observed in the exploration of the old British trackway between Winchester and Canterbury; it is similarly observable in the presumably British track between Chester and Manchester; and it is the feature which determined the site of London Bridge.
This trackway, far older than history, would doubtless have perished utterly, as so many of its fellows have done, but for two very different events, the first of which was the Martyrdom of St Thomas, and the other the practice of demanding tolls upon the great new system of turnpike-roads we owe to the end of the eighteenth century.
We rode with twenty housecarles of Relf's behind us, and it was a new thing to me that I should see the wayside folk run out into the trackway to see us pass; that the farm thralls in the fields should but rise up, straightening stiffened backs and laughing, and stay their work for a moment to watch us; that no man who met us should ask with anxious face, "What news of the Danes?"
The modern Bath road deserts the Roman trackway to make an easier descent into Radstock, but the Roman road, more suo, regardless of obstacles, clambered up hill and down dale, and made straight for Stratton. The lane which passes in front of the post-office and mounts the opposite embankment keeps the line of the original route. Clapton-in-Gordano, a parish 4 m. N.E. of Clevedon.
Stories were afloat of a mysterious figure being occasionally seen in some old overgrown trackway or other, remote from turnpike roads; but when a search was instituted in any of these suspected quarters nobody was found. Thus the days and weeks passed without tidings. In brief, the bass-voiced man of the chimney-corner was never recaptured.
The old gentleman was burdened with some purchases of provisions which he had made, and in an old satchel which he carried the necks of several bottles of wine were protruding. Assisting him to alight, Bucholz took the satchel, and they waited until the train started from the depot and left the trackway clear.
The route thither is hedgeless and treeless I need not add deserted. The moonlight is sufficient to disclose the pale riband-like surface of the way as it trails along between the expanses of darker fallow. Though the road passes near the fortress it does not conduct directly to its fronts. As the place is without an inhabitant, so it is without a trackway.
It was upon as fair a spring morning as ever was in England, that I set out from Canterbury through the West Gate, and climbing up the shoulder of Harbledown, some little way past St Dunstan's, turned out of the Watling Street, south and west into the old green path or trackway, which, had I followed it to the end, would have brought me right across Kent and Surrey and Hampshire to Winchester the old capital of England.
Stanton approached the turn and took off the infra-red goggles. Enough light spilled over from the Nipe's lair to illuminate the tunnel. He put the goggles on the trackway. He wouldn't need them again. He went on around the curve, slowly and quietly. He didn't want to fight down here in the tracks, and he didn't want to be caught just yet.
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