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Updated: May 15, 2025
To right and left green roads dip down to the unseen villages, and here and there the way itself becomes a metalled road leading to some larger highway; but even so, you can soon regain the grassy tract, following the slow curve of the placid down. There is no sweeter place to be found on a hot summer day than the old drift-road.
This splendid main road in the course of its immense journey across Southern England, extended feelers to many settlements of man, providing them as it were with a talent which, according to the energy of the settlement, might be increased a hundredfold drained, metalled, tarred, and adorned with splendid telegraph poles and wires or might be wrapped up in a napkin of neglect, monstrous overgrown hedges and decayed ditches, and allowed to wither: the splendid main road, having regard to its ancient Roman lineage, disdainfully did not care tuppence either way; and for that matter Penny Green, which had ages ago put its feeler in a napkin, did not care tuppence either.
The Bada plain is backed by a curtain so tall that we seemed, by a common optical delusion, to be descending when we were really ascending rapidly. Anxiety to begin our studies of the spot made the ride across the basin, soled with rises comfortably metalled, and with falls of sand unpleasantly loose and honeycombed, appear very long.
It was pitch-dark, but they could hear the carriage tearing along until the sound became very distant; then in another moment the sound changed, as the vehicle turned on to the metalled road a couple of miles off. Then it died away altogether.
Trust? what was the trust he held? Surely, no legitimate commerce could warrant the outfit of such a vessel as he controlled. A man-of-war could hardly have been more fully equipped with means of offence and defence. Amidship, beneath that long boat, was a long, heavy metalled gun that worked on a traverse, and which could command nearly every point of the compass, while the ship kept her course.
I followed the stream farther up, and found that it crossed a road that was metalled for half a mile with cinder, and that the cinder lay on the road and on the road only. I instituted inquiries and ascertained that this was all brought from a steam mill a mile and a half off along this road.
The roads themselves are not so distinct as they were. They are becoming grass-grown: for more than a year in daylight at least no human foot has trodden them. The place is like hundreds of others that you may see scattered up and down this countryside two straight, flat, metalled country roads, running north and south and east and west, crossing one another at a faultless right angle.
I did not recognize the lonely metalled road down which lorries were rushing for the little lane so full of life, whose wheel-ruts were three years old. As I gazed about me looking for our line, I passed an old French civilian looking down at a slight mound of white stone that rose a little higher than the road.
But if he will go a little way to the south and watch the gaunt shapes against the sky for a time and thus realize their utter remoteness from that stream of evanescent mortality beneath, the unknown ages that they have stood here upon the lonely waste, the dynasties, nay, the very races, that have come and conquered and gone, and the almost certainty that the broad metalled highway which passes close to them will in turn disappear and give place, while they still stand, to the turf of the great green expanse around; then the awe that surrounds Stonehenge will be felt and understood.
Passing into the copse by the road, which is metalled but weed-grown from lack of use, the grasshoppers sing from the sward at the sides, but the birds are silent as the summer ends.
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