, Surrey. The upper route, on the brow of the
North Downs, is the
ancient trackway (note the archaeological finds at the top left); the lower, almost in the valley, is the route surmised by the
Ordnance Survey in the 19th century The prehistoric trackway extended further than the present Way, providing a link from the narrowest part of the
English Channel to the important religious complexes of
Avebury and
Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, where it is known as the
Harroway. The way then existed as "broad and ill-defined corridors of movement up to half a mile wide" and not as a single, well-defined track. The route was still followed as an artery for through traffic in
Roman times, a period of continuous use of more than 3000 years. and it drew pilgrims from far and wide. Winchester, apart from being an ecclesiastical centre in its own right (the shrine of
St Swithin), was an important regional focus and an aggregation point for travellers arriving through the seaports on the south coast. It is "widely accepted" that this was the route taken by
Henry II on his pilgrimage of atonement for the death of Bishop Thomas, from France to Canterbury in July 1174, although this has been disputed and some evidence points to his having taken a route via London. Travellers from Winchester to Canterbury naturally used the ancient way, as it was the direct route, and research by local historians has provided much by way of detail—sometimes embellished—of the pilgrims' journeys. The numbers making their way to Canterbury by this route were not recorded, but the estimate by the Kentish historian
William Coles Finch that it carried more than 100,000 pilgrims a year is surely an exaggeration; a more prosaic estimate—extrapolated from the records of pilgrims' offerings at the shrine—contends an annual figure closer to 1,000. A separate (and more reliably attested) route to Canterbury from London was by way of
Watling Street, as followed by the storytellers in
The Canterbury Tales by
Geoffrey Chaucer. Romantic writers such as
Hilaire Belloc were eager to follow this up and they succeeded in creating "a fable of...modern origin" to explain the existence of the Way. The official history of the Ordnance Survey acknowledges the "enduring archaeological blunder", blaming the enthusiasm for history of the then Director, General Sir
Henry James. However, F. C. Elliston-Erwood, a Kentish historian, notes that
tithe records dating from before 1815 use the well established name "Pilgrims' Way" to reference and locate pieces of land. The Pilgrims' Way is at the centre of the
Powell and Pressburger film
A Canterbury Tale, with the camera panning along a map of the route at the start of the film. ==Route==