from column into line. These towns are, of course, stretched out along the beach; for their separate and successive organisation, the continual presence behind them of the coastal plain, with its railway parallel to the shore, has afforded admirable opportunities. That plain from Brighton to Bosham is perfectly flat; the crossing of the rivers has presented the only obstacle, and that obstacle was insignificant. The railway could run pretty well in a straight line and build up the towns along the sea.
Even to-day the villages are linking up with the towns. Rustington is full of bricks. Rottingdean, for twenty years a sort of suburb, has now long been full of painters and others. A curious collection of bungalows has sprung up on the long pebbly beach which shuts out the Adur from the sea. Opposite these barracks lies Lancing; and even upon the extremity of old Selsea a new settlement, now nourished by a light railway from Chichester, is arising. At Seaford, which is saved a little by its hills, the same attempt at rapid building is made.
There is one feature in this string of houses all along the coast of the county which Sussex men note with a pleasure not unmixed with malice. It is this, that while places of absolutely no commercial use and of no historical importance in the growth of the county are thus gradually being turned into appendages of London (so that all the way from Beachy Head to Chichester Harbour you have within the space of some fifty miles at least sixteen miles of houses), yet the places characteristically Sussex, the places upon the sea-line, which have gone to the building up of the county, and in which the population naturally gathered, continue to resist with extraordinary tenacity.
You can do nothing with Newhaven except leave it a port. Littlehampton refuses to be the pleasure ground that its landlord desires it to be. Bosham is still the ancient harbour and village which its history demands that it should be. Shoreham will not consent to become a lesser Worthing or a second Brighton, and this is the more remarkable from the fact that these harbour towns and villages are geographically more in touch with London than those other towns whose special character it is to lie sheltered by the hills and far from the gaps by which a railway could approach them from the north.
One may discover precisely the same state of affairs upon the eastern coast of the county
beyond Beachy Head. Here, for example, is the enormous development of Eastbourne, in a place which was useless for sailors, but sheltered from the winds by the neighbouring hill. Bexhill has increased along a beach which was not used until speculation had built the new town. Pevensey between them, upon its flat inland, is still deserted.
To this list Hastings is a very considerable exception, because its beach and hill made it during the Middle Ages, and for very different reasons to-day, a necessary sea-town. But, with the exception of Hastings, every other town follows a general rule, that the new growth of watering-places along the south coast is extraneous.
This long series of new towns grates upon men who have known and loved the county throughout their lives. There is little of Sussex about them; they have not the Sussex method of building nor any of the Sussex industries. Even their permanent population is largely drawn from other parts of England, and you do not hear the full warm accent of the south country often enough in their streets. The only consolation which the county can give itself as it watches this increasing line of new buildings is that, a mile or two behind them, their very presence seems to be forgotten.
A closer observer has another consolation, which is that the new methods of communication are perhaps beginning to check the tendency which existed throughout the nineteenth century to over-populate the sea coast. If men, foreign to the place, are trying to spoil the Weald, at least they are applying a counter-irritant to their too great success in spoiling the coastal plain, and in the Weald they have a larger area over which to spread their limited faculties for evil.
It is even possible that the power which the county has shown itself possessed of for so many centuries to digest and to absorb new-comers, will save it altogether from these latter invasions—possible, but doubtful. Then the descendants of those who now own Brighton, Worthing, and the rest, the children of the men who build villas on Crowboro’ top, and the heirs of the new-comers who have purchased, one would think, at least a third of the great old houses under the Downs, will be worthy of the soil which their ancestors certainly did not understand, and the historical development of Sussex will continue.
It is more likely that that development has already come to an unfruitful end.
The efforts which many have made to describe a peculiar Sussex dialect and peculiar Sussex methods of architecture, have been somewhat too laborious. The example of other counties, notably of Devonshire, which did possess a strictly defined local dialect and set of customs, has tempted the patriotic historian of Sussex to find in that county something which is not there. There is, indeed, a South country way of speaking as all the world knows. It is to be found in the valley of Meon, and it is to be found in Kent, and it is to be found in the southern parts of Surrey. It occupies a large region, whose boundaries are very vague and ill defined; it lies, roughly speaking, between the North Downs and the sea, and is bounded westward by the New Forest. It is not peculiar to the county of Sussex.
For example: A Sussex man will call a woodpecker a “yaffle,” which is a name taken from its peculiar call—it is for all the world like a mad laugh. Or again, he will talk of “steening a well,” that is, lining it with bricks. Or again, he will call a toad stool a “puck” stool. He will speak of a ploughshare as a “tourn vour,” that is, a “turn furrow”; and so forth. But these phrases are to be heard all up and down the district which I have mentioned. And the termination of place names, the peculiar epithet by which a steep wood is called a “hanger,” or a horseshoe depression in the Downs a “coombe,” though very Sussex, are not only Sussex.
So it is with the South country architecture, notably with the building of those fine “headed” chimneys which are its distinguishing feature. You will find them all along the valley of the Medway and of the Derwent, or the Stour, as much as you will find them in the valleys of the Arun or the Adur.
It is not in the establishment of a Sussex folklore, dialect, or architecture, that the peculiar and individual spirit of the county is best discovered. It is rather in the character of its inhabitants. And this again is fairly sharply divided between the eastern half of the county and the western.
The East of Sussex, it seems fair to conjecture, has always been influenced by the presence of iron. The iron is no longer worked, but anywhere in the higher parts of the Eastern Weald one finds one’s self treading upon ironstone, and one sees the streams running red with the ore, and until so late as the Napoleonic Wars the exploitation of Sussex iron was continued. It is perhaps on account of this tradition and its effect upon the inhabitants that East Sussex has, as contrasted with West, a livelier, and (in the impression of the West) a less pleasing manner. Though it is farther from London in actual distance, it is nearer London in feeling. The proximity of Kent, with its great international highroad running through the heart of it, may have something to do with this. So also has the early clearing of the forest, and therefore the early establishment of free communication with the Thames valley. This feature we have already touched on in the development of Pevensey and Hastings Rapes. But whatever be the cause, the effect is apparent to those who know the county. One very curious result of it to-day is the difference in the modern settlement of East Sussex and of West. The new-comers with their villas and their great search for something old, that they may destroy it by their admiration, have different chances in the two parts of the county. In the West they can form, as it were, islands which stand alone in the midst of a highly resisting environment. They will build you a Haywards Heath which is like a London suburb, or a Ditchling or a Burgess Hill which is another such line of new houses, or those towns on the sea coast of which we have spoken, or the little group of red brick which defaces the landscape of West Horsham, or the lump which is beginning to destroy Barnham. But these encampments are tied close to the railway; they do not seem to spread their influence over the landscape or to change the character of the people in any way.
In East Sussex you get, on the contrary, whole belts of country into which the spirit of the great towns has penetrated, perhaps for ever. Thus there is such a belt in the line of Rotherfield, Mayfield, and Heathfield. There is another stretch east and west from the height of Heathfield to the valley of the Rother, and notably in a village which we have already mentioned for its bad eminence in this respect—Burwash—which is just such a place as the Londoner or the Colonial calls “old world.” It is a village now only too conscious
of such a character and ready to exploit it for all it is worth. You have another example of this blight upon the top of Crowborough, which might as well be Hazlemere or Hindhead for all the South country feeling that is left to it.
The resistant quality of which we have just made mention, and which is especially discoverable in the western part of the county, is perhaps the most remarkable and, under modern circumstances, the most pleasing of the characteristics of the people. To those who have not been brought up in the county it becomes but slowly apparent. Those who know Sussex and its people take a somewhat cynical delight in observing that power at work. There is no peasant in the world so rooted in his customs and so determined to maintain them as is the Sussex peasant. He has been despoiled of his lands; he has been exploited by farmers from every other county, who come to use his rich belts of loam; he has been virtually bought or sold by families utterly out of the Sussex tradition (the Wyndhams, for example), or what is worse, Colonials and random rich men who make themselves great by the purchase of an ancient estate with whose traditional history they have not the remotest sympathy. He is, one would say, without defences against the modern world. But the modern world, as it is represented by the chance rich men who are now his masters, will very soon learn that the pressure of that proletariat is too much for them and not they for it. A Sussex man will not plant early. You may pay him to do so, and if you pay him enough he will do so once or twice; but before you have your garden many years, you will find he is planting again at his accustomed dates. He will not use silos. You may prove to him in a thousand ways that he would be the richer for using them. You may pay him as your servant such a wage that he may begin using them, but his abhorrence of a new method of that sort will express itself in the result, that you will lose a great deal of money by your experiment. He will hatch no eggs in an incubator, he will keep no bees in a new-fangled hive. He will give his pigs too much barley meal if he can get it, and will remark when he has done so that pigs do not really pay. He will bargain in his traditional fashion if you send him to market, and you will not by any payment or pressure cause him to express dissent in any other manner than by silence.
It will be of interest to watch the near future and to see if his characteristics can be retained as
the county gets better and better known, and more thoroughly spoiled by the advent of what is called the leisured class. So far those who have been able to watch this peasant for the last thirty years have seen very little change indeed. And even the noble and rich south country accent, which education was to have destroyed, is as perfect in the little children of the last few years as in the mouths of the oldest men. And that peculiar emphasis upon the latter syllable—Amberley, Billingshurst, and the rest—has not disappeared, at least in the western half of the county.
A test may be applied by those who care to watch the progress of social disease and the resisting power of a social organism. Throughout the county the termination “ham” is kept separate, as though by a hyphen, from the first part of a place-name. For example: Bosham is pronounced Boz-ham or Boss-ham. To be accurate, the sound is a little between “s” and “z,” but the “ham” is kept quite distinct. Or again, the name of Felpham, near Bognor (where William Blake indulged his eccentricities), is pronounced Felp-ham. Now it is evident that in many cases where a “t” or an “s” or a “p” comes before “h,” any one not acquainted with this local method of pronouncing the words would run the two consonants together, and would pronounce Bosham “Bosh-am,” or Felpham “Felf-am.” Horsham has already broken down. Two generations ago everybody called the town Hors-ham. It became a considerable railway station. Many were led to read the name who had never heard of the little county town until the railway was built. Its own inhabitants did not defend the traditional pronunciation with sufficient vigour, and Horsh-’m it has now fallen to be in spite of the most vigorous efforts of those who love their county to restore its original and significant name, and in spite of the fact that a horse even in Horsham is not yet a Horsh. If Bosham, Felpham, and the rest go in the same way, then one may take it that Sussex will not be Sussex any more. The test is small, but it is absolutely determining.
After the characteristic Sussex manner there should be considered the characteristic Sussex landscape. This has been dealt with at some length in various parts of the book when we were speaking of the Downs, the Weald, and the coastal plain, and of particular towns. But we will here consider it by itself as a mark of the county.
There are two elements in the landscape of Sussex, the first of which is more permanent than any
other similar character, perhaps, in England; the second of which is more changeable than most. It is not easy to give a name to these separate elements, but with the one are connected the emotions aroused by the great views which Sussex presents, and with the other are connected the emotions aroused by its hollow and secluded places, those little isolated hills of sand and their small lonely valleys.
The great spaces of landscape which Sussex can afford have never changed and never can. No man will ever build largely upon the Downs. No forest will ever gather on so valuable a soil as that of the coastal plain. No mere extension of buildings or further cultivation will destroy the distant aspect of the Weald.
A man looking down from the crest of the Downs to the south and to the north of him sees much of what his ancestry have seen since men first stood upon those hills. The Weald was once a little denser in wood, the coastal plain a little less thick with villages, but that is all. The high, broad belt of the sea has always made a frame for that view. The flooded river valleys have always picked it out with patches of silver. The roll of the Downs has always stood, like a monstrous green wave, blown forward before the south-west wind. The simple and vivid green of the turf, and the sharp white chalk pits, have always stood making the same contrast with the sky and the large sailing clouds; and they will continue to do so for ever.
A Sussex man recognises his home when he sees it from the height above Eden Bridge, or from Crowborough top as he enters the county from the north or from the Surrey hills; he knows it when, as he gazes southwards, he catches along the horizon the dark wall of the Downs. The outline is not to be confounded with any other in the world, and these few simple planes of vision build up for him the major pleasures which the landscape of his county can afford. They have not changed in the past and they will not change in the future.
With the homelands, with the little valleys and the sandy rocks of the Weald, and the hills between the foot-hills of the southern side of the Downs, the case is different.
What the original aspect of these hollows with their clayey or sandy knolls on either side may have been in the beginnings of the county it is now very difficult to conjecture. They are certainly among the very first of its inhabited places, and it is perhaps most accurate to think of them as little packed groups of huts along the
stream which almost invariably flows beneath the small steep hillside, these huts surrounded by the pasture of the small pastoral community, and on the upland above by long stretches of open furze and fern. It is probable that the wooding of the knolls came later, and it is remarkable that there is very little ancient plough land in the neighbourhood of most of these villages. Within the last few hundred years their general aspect has completely changed through the introduction of the pine.
Along the whole belt of sand from Elsted right away to the valley of the Ouse you get bunches of this tree, making a peculiar note in the landscape; and the same is true of the forest ridge to the north.
It is not easy to determine at what date this foreign timber first invaded the county. It is certainly not Roman, and almost certainly it was not to be discovered in Sussex during the sixteenth century. The Elizabethan cottage of the Weald has oak for its material, and this not only on account of the strength of such wood, but obviously because it was the cheapest and commonest kind of timber; for instance, the thin lathes or strips to which the smallest tiles are affixed are of oak in the old houses as much as are the tie beams and the main rafters. We should hardly find this if the pine had been present in Sussex during that great period of activity in domestic building; for the wood of the pine was far easier to split and to work where great strength was not required. It is thought by some that the tree came in, with all other Scotch things, in the time of James I. But it must be repeated, the point is undetermined. At any rate it has completely transformed the details of the landscape between the Surrey border and the Downs. There is, in the present day, no more peculiarly Sussex view than the sight of the bare line of the Downs caught in a framework of firs. For instance, such a fine sight as you get of them at Heyshott from the height that was once Cobden’s land, or the wonderful bit close by between Selham and Burton. It is from a hill isolated and covered with this kind of timber near Hardham that the best view of the Arun valley may be obtained, and so forth all along the line from which at various points one may regard the range of the Downs.
A third and characteristic aspect of Sussex is, of course, that great stretch of the coastal plain to which so much allusion has been made that we need not emphasise it here: the sole impression of the county which those retain who have known it from a residence at Goring, at Lancing, at Findon, at
Arundel, at Slindon, at Eartham, or indeed at any of the villages built upon the southern foot-hills of the Downs. It may be mentioned in connection with this part of the county, that of all maritime districts possessed of remarkable inland scenery Sussex is the least to be remembered by those who have seen it from the sea. The Downs slope up so gradually, the line of the coast is so flat, and the reek of the coastal towns, though slight, so continuous, that the general impression a man has who runs along even upon a clear day from Rye harbour, let us say, to the Looe Stream inside the Owers, thus covering the whole stretch of the county coast, is one of monotony. The Downs make no impression upon the view to landwards, save at one place where, for ten miles or so from Eastbourne to Newhaven, one runs along their seaward end and the high cliffs of Beachy Head, Birling Gap, and Seaford.
For any one not fully acquainted with the county, and desirous of thoroughly learning its character, the best plan is to take one of the several routes which traverse it, and to make his journey slowly. The county is so diversified, its changes of scenery are so rapid, and the slight falls and rises of the Weald make each so considerable a difference to the view, that quick travelling will never teach a man the nature of Sussex. It is on this account that the millions who have gone and come by the railway between London and the sea coast have not retained so much as the knowledge that they have passed through the most distinctive county in England. The same is undoubtedly true of the motor car of to-day. What man travelling at fifteen to twenty miles an hour recognises the moment when he crosses the county boundary, or picks out, as he flashes by, the brickwork of a true Sussex gable?
There are but two ways of learning Sussex: on horseback and on foot; and of these the first, for those who can afford it, is the best. As to the line to be followed, those who have the leisure should certainly traverse two—the one from north to south, the other from east to west. And for the benefit of those who may be inclined to try the experiment, there shall be detailed here the way in which such a journey may best be undertaken.
It will be remembered that we have seen, with regard to the Weald, that its original clearings with their isolated farmhouses were united by random winding tracks—not true ways, such as
the old deep-cut British road under the Downs, still less properly engineered or civilised roads, but mere forest paths rambling with but a general direction, and linking up one steading with another.
Now it is a remarkable fact that the lines of these original tracks are in great part preserved; in places they have been destroyed by the plough, in others they have merged into the great highways of the county, but much of them still remains in the form of secluded and tortuous lanes which are sometimes partly metalled, sometimes flagged on a packhorse path with Sussex marble, and sometimes left green. If a traveller will take one of these where it enters the county and pursue it to the Downs, he will get as true a conception of the way in which the Weald has grown up, of its primeval woodland, and of the nature of its clearings as it is possible to obtain. He will discover that to this day very much of the curious loneliness of the Weald survives within a mile or two of its most populous towns, and the impression of his two days’ march (or one day if he is a great walker—the distance will commonly be under twenty-five miles) will teach him more of the county than any amount of bicycling along its main roads.
Perhaps the best example remaining of such an old track is that which runs right for the Downs from the Surrey border where the road comes from Dorking to Warnham. Its place-names here and there sufficiently indicate the historic importance of the way. Thus its entry into the county is the “shire mark”; its first farm “King’s Fold”—fold is a characteristic ending of a Wealden name. Often before there were regular farmhouses in a place there was a pen or boundary within which forest cattle could be kept. Thus, Chiddingfold, Slinfold, Flitchfold, Dunsfold, etc., in the forest on either side of the border.
Next on the road, an hour within the county, is Warnham, and in the neighbouring hamlet of “Friday Street,” a termination which is characteristic of village names along some ancient way; immediately afterwards the road skirts Field Place, where Shelley the poet was born, and becomes (a further characteristic of old tracks) a boundary—at present a parliamentary boundary. It crosses the Arun at New Bridge or Broad Bridge, and thence for many miles runs south, neglected and silent, crossing the main ridge of the Weald and coming down upon the “Greens,” Barn’s Green, where it throws off a little branch to the left, which passes through Brook’s Green, Dragon’s Green, becomes
King’s Lane at Shipley, and thence goes on in a deserted green road towards Chanctonbury.
Meanwhile from Barn’s Green the original track continues south and somewhat west, becomes again a parliamentary boundary in the neighbourhood of Coneyhurst Common, turns there once more into a highroad, crosses the marshy upwaters of the Adur by a bridge which recalls its twin to the north (Broad Ford Bridge), and makes straight for the village of West Chiltington, one of those characteristic villages which depend for their site upon the sandhills which rise so suddenly from the clay beneath the Downs.
After this village it suddenly ceases to be a road, but continues in the same line as a right of way to Roundabout (delightful name!), and thence onward as a lane again to Storrington, which settlement was probably the original goal of this very ancient forest road.
If any one will take such a walk in good weather he will thoroughly understand what the history of the central part of Sussex has been. Every name he finds and every building will enlighten him.
For an east and west line of travel two may be chosen, and both should be undertaken if this highly differentiated countryside is to be fully appreciated. The first needs but little description, it is a highroad all the way, and holds the whole line of market towns spread out upon it like beads upon a string; but it is characteristic of the Weald that even this is not a road single in its intention, but is composed of various old paths which have been patched together.
In taking this walk you will go from Petersfield to Midhurst, where are two inns, The Angel and The Eagle; then from Midhurst through Cowdray Park you follow the Petworth road, and at Petworth is an inn called The Swan, remarkable for excellent mild ale. Then from Petworth you will go through Fittleworth and Stopham, over Stopham Bridge to Pulborough; and at this point the old marshes of the Arun, the line of heights from Broomer’s Hill to Thakeham, and the marshes of the Adur beyond these cause the road to double. Cowfold is your object, some ten miles away in a straight line. You must either strike up through Billingshurst five miles north, and then take the straight road from Billingshurst to Cowfold, or else you must strike south to Storrington, and then take the road through Washington, which branches to the left just after Wiston, and so reaches Cowfold through Ashurst and Partridge Green. After Cowfold
it is a connected road again as it was up to Pulborough. You go eastward through Cuckfield, through Hayward’s Heath, past the railway which you cross close to Newick Station, straight on to Maresfield, down south to Uckfield, then on by the main road to Heathfield. A mile eastward of the railway there the road branches; but your better plan is to follow the old line up which came the army of Jack Cade—that is, to skirt Heathfield Park, to pass through Chapel Cross, go over Brightling Hill which has wonderful command of the whole district, and so come down upon the Rother at Robertsbridge. There you will find an inn called the George, of considerable moment. East of this you are no longer in the spirit of Sussex, but in that of Kent, and a very few minutes farther on you are over the legal boundary between the two counties.
The second line is, of course, that of the Downs. It has the disadvantage of ending abruptly at the sea, and does not show you the whole length of the county as does the line through the Weald. But it has the advantage that no other walk or ride anywhere is of the same kind: fifty miles of turf, broken only by four short gaps in the river valleys, lie before you between Harting Hill and Beachy Head. The itinerary of such a ride is as follows:—
You will leave Petersfield by the eastern road, and turn by that lane on the right which makes for the Downs, reaching their summit upon Harting Hill. There is no proper track, but it is open going round the northern edge of Beacon Hill and so onwards, always keeping to the escarpment, and passing to the southern side of the summit of Linch Down. This latter course has the advantage that it avoids going round deep combe or crypt, and, moreover, on the southern side of the summit you strike that ridgeway which will accompany you for many miles, and which here leads you between the two woods in the open. About a mile to the east of the summit of Linch Down you have to cross the somewhat low and steep pass where the Midhurst and Chichester road crosses the hills. Your ridgeway takes you straight across it over the top of Cocking Tunnel, and on up again to the Down on the eastern side of the gap. There it is a clear ride right away until you come above Lavington. At this point it is well to strike to the right or south-west, making for a little chapel which you will see below you in a sort of interior valley of the Downs. Here you will find a highroad
which is the highroad to Petworth; and if you continue it to a group of cottages known as The Kennels, you may leave it again due eastward over some ploughed land until you find in less than half a mile the escarpment of the hills again.
The object of this somewhat complicated direction is to avoid the sharp angle of the Downs at Duncton Hill, but if any one thinks the short cut too difficult, he has but to follow round the escarpment, and he will come by a rather longer route to the same point, which is that steep combe above Sutton and Cold Harbour which those who live to the south of it call, from the nearest farm, “Gumber Corner,” but which is also known as Cold Harbour Hill. It is well to pause here and make it, as it were, a centre of observation, for it is a spot from which the general character of the county, the divisions into which it naturally falls, and the special features which make up its landscape, may all be seized in one view.
There is, perhaps, no other place in England where the landscape is so full of history, and at the same time so diverse and so characteristic of its own country-side.
To the south of you, some 600 feet below, is the whole stretch of the sea-plain, and beyond it, up to the horizon, which is lifted right into the sky, is the belt of the sea. On this, if it be near evening, you see the regular flashing of the Owers Light, which marks that group of rocks where once was a Roman town, and you note how the sea is eating up all that shore. Stretching out towards the light in a sharp point is the promontory of Selsea Bill—all that is left of the submerged land. Here was founded the first bishopric of Sussex. And as your mind dwells upon that foundation you catch, a little to the west and to the right, the great spire of Chichester Cathedral standing up eight miles away under the sunset—Chichester, to which was removed, and which is now the successor of, St. Wilfrid’s original See.
The boundary here between the Sussex sea-plain and Hampshire is clearly marked, for the level light sends a gleam along the creeks of the upper harbours beyond Bosham, which undoubtedly were the first principal divisions along this coast between the South Saxons and their neighbours to the west.
As you look along that horizon eastward, you continue to see a chain of Sussex things. You see the port of Littlehampton, one of the Sussex river mouths; farther off, on the extreme limit of your view, you see the lights of Worthing,
characteristic of the new great watering-towns which have grown up all along this coast. You have in one landscape all that maritime fringe of Sussex which is held in such detestation by the men of the Weald, and which is yet the side from which civilisation or change has always come into the county: the sea-plain upon which the Saxon pirates landed; the plain upon which the siege of the Roman town of Anderida took place. It was from this sea that Christianity came, and it was on the same flat, though in the eastern part of it, that William of Falaise landed with his army on the way to conquer at Hastings.
Between the high place from which you are thus looking southward and surveying the land toward the sea—between the main range of the Downs, that is, and the dead flat of the rich plough-land—you see, in one low summit after the other, those foot-hills of the Downs which are an essential part of the Sussex landscape, and which are so full of Sussex history. Here stand in a row, partly isolated from each other, Halnecker, with its gaunt deserted mill; Eartham, where Cowper for some little time wrote, and where perhaps the best portrait of him was painted. Next is the great wooded mass of the Nore Hill, now uninhabited and silent, but once a stronghold; the neighbouring summit of Slindon, which was Canterbury land, one of the great houses of the Archbishop; the promontory of the Rewell Wood, which hides Arundel; and farther off eastward that semi-conical lift of Cissbury, which the men of the place call High Down. Here first the Briton, then the Roman, then the Saxon held their trenches, and here has been found that most fascinating and absorbing relic of prehistory—a manufactory of flint implements, finished and half-finished, with the cores and the chips lying beside the completed work.
This is what you see to the southward. Directly to the east and the west of you is the wall of the Downs, on the crest of which you stand. Nowhere else on the crest of that wall will you see them look so long or so sheer. You see them fall mile after mile on to the plain, some jutting slightly forward, as does Ditchling Beacon, upon the limit of one’s gaze, and the whole forming one strict escarpment, the like of which is not to be discovered to our knowledge elsewhere in the world. From this point you perceive and are filled with the utter loneliness of these hills; there is not a house on them nor a man, and they are the more
lonely that you have so immediately, and yet so far, below you the little farmhouses in their combes.
These combes, their names and their great hollows, recall to you the enormous antiquity upon which Sussex reposes. Their name is a Celtic name. It has outlasted the three great foreign invasions of the land—the Roman civilisers, the German pirate, and the re-entry of the Latins with the Norman Conquest. Their woods also have outlasted every destroyer, every cultivator, and engineer. No one can plough these steep hollows—the beeches have clung to them from the beginning and will cling to them always. Immediately beneath you is one such horseshoe, bitten into the mass of the Down; and if you stand still you can hear moving in it the life of beasts which men have never seriously disturbed. Small as these woods are, they are as primal and as isolated as anything you will find in any distant valley. They are not cut for profit, or at least very rarely, because the ground is too steep for haulage. They live their own life and are secluded.
Indeed, all over the broad back of the Downs, for seventy miles and more, these patches of woods, both in the combes and up on the shoulders of the hills, are a necessary part of Sussex. They exhibit the unconquerable nature of the county, its strongholds of silence and of desertion within an hour or two of London, and within a short walk of those flaring new places which have sprung up upon the sea-shore. The past and the very meaning of the county can still be remembered in the names of those woods. Here are certain of the “forests” remaining. Right at your feet is Houghton Forest, the remnant of a great royal wood lost to the Crown perhaps in the civil wars.
This view along the Downs tells you many other things about the county: you have, for instance, close beside you, not three miles away, perhaps the earliest and until latterly one of the most used of the “Passes” over the Downs—the cross-roads at Whiteways. The London road and the road which had followed along under the Downs from Lewes unite at the summit of the Saddle, and lead travellers from the capital or from the Weald to Arundel or to the sea-plain. It is an example of those passages over the hills which have been mentioned as running from Cocking near Midhurst right away to Lewes, and which have their best roads at Duncton, here at Whiteways, at Washington, and beyond New Timber at Clayton.
Those river valleys which we have seen to be so peculiar to the modelling of the South country—trenches cut right through the chalk and appearing to ignore the natural watershed which the hills would form—come also into this landscape. The greatest of them is right before you in the Arun valley. If it is winter you will see in the sheets of water surrounding the river why these valleys were not used for communication, and why to this day, though the railway has built itself an embankment across the marshes, no road runs through along the level floor, which would seem at first sight the obvious gate through the Downs from the Weald to the sea.
You can also see from this point of vantage one of those castles which guard the gates of the county, for you can see to the north of the gap the ruins of Amberley. In a word, you have the whole nature of the Downs and of the sea-plain before you as you look from Gumber.
But you have also much more. Turn to the northward, and there lies before you the whole stretch of the Weald: its towns, its little sandy pine-clad heights, its irregular plan, the large remains of its old woods and heaths. Far beyond it you may see, like another wall answering the southern wall of the Downs, the line of the Surrey hills; and all Sussex which is not maritime lies between you and them in one sweep.
You have to the north-westward the great bunch of Hindhead, where the three counties of Hampshire, Sussex, and Surrey meet; you have to the eastward an interminable succession of low heights, one behind the other, which stretch out to the Kentish border and make up the Sussex Weald. You may see, at the farthest point which the eye can reach, the lonely fir-trees upon Ashdown, which stands so high as to hide the Kentish “hursts” behind it.
One of those small towns of the Weald which are most characteristic of Sussex is beneath you, the little town of Petworth, with its great house insolently overshadowing it and swallowing it up. There is also beneath you something more Sussex and more dignified than the blatant grandeur of such a palace—the squires’ houses all the way along from Burton to Parham. You are too far to see how well they illustrate the county,—Parham especially, which is built of chalk, and is altogether a sort of natural growth of Sussex,—but you may easily grasp in their continuous line what sort of house it was round which the old manors clung.
From Gumber also you judge how far it may be true that the Weald was ever uninhabited. You see indeed great patches of woodland, and many more patches of what may have been recent, but what are most likely ancient, clearings. You see belts of heath on which nothing has ever grown or will grow, and you see everywhere villages which are certainly of great age, because they lie along the main lines of communication.
Speaking of these, it is worthy of notice that you have next to you, as you stand here on Gumber, that most distinct and the best-preserved Roman road in England. The Stane Street crosses this saddle of the range; it is raised several feet above the surface of the hills. It is like a rampart, and comes straight from the spire of Chichester on the south-western horizon. Here are visible all the points of the Stane Street which have been detailed upon a former page, the way in which it negotiates the escarpment of the Downs in a great curve, and the way in which, when once it has struck the plain, it darts right for the crossing of the Arun at Pulborough. Hence also may be caught that gap in the Surrey hills at Dorking for which the road makes northward, and beyond which it is lost in the turf at Epsom.
As you trace that taut line across the Weald you may note every period of the Sussex past. You see it crossing at Bignor the winding elbowed British lane which has sunk so deep through centuries of traffic below the surrounding fields, you see the famous ruins of the Roman villa, and the ruin of the Priory of Hardham, which stood upon its highway.
The watershed which divides the Sussex from the Surrey rivers stands up in the midst of the Weald before you plainly enough, though it is lower than the ridge of the Downs to the north or the south. There is to be distinguished very clearly to the north-east that part of it called St. Leonard’s Forest from which flows the Arun to the south and the Mole to the north: the Sussex river of Arundel, and the Surrey river of Dorking.
All those things, then, which are especial to the county, and which we have remarked elsewhere to be the distinguishing marks of Sussex, stand out in this view from Gumber: the historic sites, the forests, the escarpment of the Downs, their foot-hills; the encroachments of the sea; the ancient and the modern parts which the sea-line plays in Sussex history; the small old ports which have so much, and the great modern pleasure towns which