The Old Road: From Canterbury to Winchester by Hilaire Belloc

Published 1935: Hardcover / Very Good Condition / illustrated throughout / Illustrated Fold-Out-Map

Original green cloth with black titles on the spine. 296 very clean and bright pages, previous owners signature on the first free page. Boards slightly marked, rubbed and faded with time consistent with age.

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The Anglo-French writer Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870-1953) remains best known today as the author of the 1907 `Cautionary Tales for Children’ with its often comically violent accounts of what happens to misbehaving youngsters. Belloc, son of a French father and English mother, produced more than 150 books, and lived most of his life in London or West Sussex. He was the Member of Parliament for Salford for the Liberal Party from 1906 to 1910, and a lifelong devout Catholic. His interpretation of his religion compelled him to oppose the suffragette movement, despite the face it was something passionately supported by his mother.

Belloc’s link with Kent is through one book, but an influential one. `The Old Road’ was published in 1904, This described the route of the trackway from the coast of Winchester to Canterbury. The route Belloc described himself as travelling ran through Farnham, and then close by Dorking, Reigate and Redhill, before coming to Otford within Kent, Kemsing, Wrotham, Trottiscliffe, Snodland, Detling, Lenham, Charing and finally via Chilham to the destination. Belloc’s argument for why the old road existed, and what its origins were, is conveyed in a storybook way. Imagining a man coming in prehistoric times from the continent across the waters from the modern day French coast, Belloc speculates:

`The wind might fail him, or the wind might so increase that he had to run before it. Did it fail him he would be caught by the flood tide some miles from the land. He cold drift up along the English shore, getting a few hundred miles nearer with every catspaw and looking impatiently for some place to which he could steer. The dip in the cliffs at Dover would give him a chance perhaps. If he missed that he would round the South Foreland.’

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