gaps--both upon
the Oxfordshire and the Berkshire side unless the place of regular
crossing had been here.

Within a mile or two of Streatley this lane begins to descend the side
of the Berkshire Downs. Just before it falls into the Wantage Road and
is lost it has begun to curl round the shoulder of the steep hill; but
there is no way of telling at what precise spot it would strike the
river upon the Berkshire side, because a thousand years or so of
building, cultivation, and other changes have obliterated every trace
of it.

Luckily, we have some indication upon the farther bank. A way can then
be traced here as a lane (and in the gaps as a right of way, as a
path, or sometimes only by its general direction) for some miles on
the Oxfordshire side as it approaches Goring and the river coming from
the Chilterns. And we know the point at which it strikes the village.
This point is at the Sloane Hotel close to the railway; the inn is
actually built upon the old road. Beyond the railway the track is
continued in the lane which leads on past the schoolhouse to the old
ferry, where there was presumably in Roman times a ford. If we accept
this track we can conjecture that the vicarage of Streatley, upon the
Berkshire bank, stands upon the continuation of the Way, and give the
place where the pre-historic road crossed the river with tolerable
certitude, though it is, I believe, impossible to recover the
half-mile or so which lies between Streatley vicarage and the point
where the Wantage Road and the Icknield Way separated upon the
hillside above.

If the ford lay here the site was certainly well chosen, just below a
group of islands which broadened the stream and made it at once
shallower and less swift, acting somewhat as a natural weir above the
crossing.

The third crossing place of a great pre-historic road, that of the
Watling Street, is believed to correspond with the line of that very
ugly suspension bridge which runs from Lambeth to the Horseferry Road
in Westminster. This is, according to the most probable conjecture,
the place at which the great road which ran from the Straits of Dover
to the north-western ports of the island crossed the Thames.

Here, of course, there could be no question of a ford; there can only
have been a ferry. Such a ferry existed throughout the Middle Ages and
up to the building of Westminster Bridge, and produced a large revenue
for the Archbishop of Canterbury. The memory of it is p