THE DOWNS
LEWES TO BRAMBER
Perhaps after all the most fundamental truth about Lewes is that she is
the capital of the South Downs, and the South Downs are the glory of
the South Country; from the noble antiquity of Winchester to the
splendour of Beachy Head they run like an indestructible line of Latin
verse beneath the blazon of England. They stand up between the land and
the sea, the most Roman thing in England, and of all English land it is
their white brows that the sun kisses first when it rises over the sea,
of all English hills every morning they are the first to be blest.
The most Roman thing in England I call them; and indeed this "noble
range of mountains" has not the obvious antiquity of the Welsh
mountains or the Mendip Hills, nor the tragic aspect as of something as
old as time, as old as the world itself, of the dark and sea-torn
cliffs of Cornwall, or the wild and desolate uplands of Somerset and
Devon. The South Downs seem indeed not so much a work of Nature as of
man; and of what men! In their regular and even line, in their
continuity and orderly embankment, in their splendid monotony of
contour they recall but one thing--Rome; they might be indeed only
another work of that mighty government which conceived and built the
great Wall that stretches from the Solway to the Firth of Forth which
marked the limit of the Empire and barred out its enemies. And this
wall of the South Downs, too, marked but another frontier of the same
great government; beyond it lay the horizons unknown, and it barred
out the sea.
But how much older than Rome are the South Downs! Doubtless before the
foundation of Rome, e'er Troy was besieged, these hills stood up
against the south and served us as a habitation and a home. Nor indeed
have we failed to leave signs of our life there so many thousand years
ago, so that to-day a man wandering over that great uplifted plateau
which slopes so gradually towards the sea, though he seem to be
utterly alone, as far as possible from the ways and the habitations of
men, immersed in an immemorial silence, in truth passes only from
forgotten city to forgotten city, amid the strongholds and the burial
places of a civilisation so old that it is only the earth itself which
retains any record or memory of it. Here were our cities when we
feared the beast, before we had knowledge of bronze or iron, when our
tool and our weapon was the flint.
The man, our ancestor, who chipped and prepared the flints for our use
at Cissbury for instance, doubtless looked out upon a landscape
different from that we see to-day and yet essentially the same after all.
The South Downs in their whole extent slope, as I have said, very
gradually seaward and south, and there of old were our cities chiefly set,
but northward their escarpment is extraordinarily steep, rising from time
to time into lofty headlands of which the noblest, the most typical and
the most famous is Chanctonbury. Standing above that steep escarpment a
man to-day looks all across the fruitful Weald till far off he sees the
long line of the North Downs running as it were parallel with these
southern hills, and ennobled and broken by similar heights as that of
Leith Hill. Between, like an uneven river bed with its drifts and
islands of soil, running from west to east, lies the Weald, opening at
last as it were into the broad estuary of Romney Marsh, half lost in
the sea. And what we see to-day our neolithic forefathers saw too--with
a difference. Doubtless the Downs then were as smooth and bare as they
are now, but the Weald, we may be sure, was different, wilder and
certainly fuller of woodland, though never perhaps the vast and
impenetrable forest of trees of which we have been told.
I say that the Downs, now deserted save by the shepherd and his flock,
were of old populous, and of this fact the evidence is plentiful. There
is indeed not one of the five main stretches of the Downs that does not
bear witness to the immemorial presence of man. To say nothing of the
discoveries about Beachy Head, the earthworks there, and the neolithic
implements and bronze weapons discovered about East Dean and Alfriston,
we have in the Long Man of Wilmington, that gigantic figure cut out in
the chalk of the hill-side, something comparable only with the Giant of
Cerne Abbas in Dorset and the White Horses of Wiltshire. That figure is
some two hundred and forty feet in height and holds in each hand a
stave or club two hundred and thirty feet long. It would seem
impossible to be certain either of its age or its purpose, but we may
perhaps be sure that it lay there upon the Downs above Polegate before
the landing of Caesar, and it may have been the foundation of one of
those figures described by him as formed of osiers and filled with
living men to be destroyed by fire as a sacrifice for our barbarian
gods.
Nor is this all. The whole range of the Downs as I say is scattered
thick with the work of our pre-historic forefathers. In Burlough Castle
and Mount Caburn we have fortresses so old that it is impossible to
name the age in which they were contrived and built, nor can we assert
with any confidence who they were that first occupied the camp upon
Ditchling Beacon, the highest point of the South Downs, or who first
defended Wolstanbury. And it is the same with those most famous places
Cissbury Ring and Chanctonbury. But the flint mines upon Cissbury give
us some idea of the neolithic men, our forefathers, which should and
does astonish us. The Camp itself is less wonderful than the mines upon
the western side of it. Here we have not only numerous pits from ten to
seventy feet in diameter and from five to seven feet deep, but really
vast excavations leading to galleries which tap a belt or band of
flints. That these mines were worked by neolithic man it is impossible
to doubt, but he may not have discovered or first used them. They may
be older than he, though all record even upon that marvellous hill-
side, has been lost of those who first exploited them. Nor is
Chanctonbury, though it cannot boast of mines such as these, less
astonishing or less ancient. The camp set there following the contour
of the hill can only have been one of the most important in south-
east England. It commands the camps at Cissbury, the Devil's Dyke,
High Down and White Hawk, the whole breadth of the Weald lay beneath
it and a signal displayed upon Leith Hill upon the North Downs could
easily be answered from this noble mountain; Mount Caburn itself was
not more essentially important.
It has been thought that the Romans may have used Chanctonbury, but if
so they have left but little mark of their occupation, and indeed,
though the Downs as a whole far off are stamped with so Roman a
character, there is but one spot in their whole length where we may
say; here certainly the Legions have been. That spot lies upon the
last division of the Downs towards the west, the line of hills which
stands between Chichester and the Weald.
It is certain that the Romans were, in Sussex, most at home on that
great sea plain towards which the Downs slope so gradually southward.
Here indeed they built their town of Regnum, and perhaps towards the
end of their occupation of Britain they laid out the only purely military
highway which they built here from Regnum to London Bridge. This great
Roman road, known as the Stane Street, coming out of the eastern gate
of Chichester, takes the Downs as an arrow flies, crossing them
between Boxgrove and Bignor, nor is the work of Rome even to-day
wholly destroyed, for there under Bignor Hill we may still see the
pavement of their Way, while at Bignor itself we have perhaps the
best remains of a Roman villa left to us in Sussex.
[Illustration: THE DOWNS]
But though all these marks and signs, the memory and the ruins not
only of our forefathers, but of those our saviours who drew us within
the government of the Empire so that we are to-day what we are and not
as they who knew not the Romans, make the Downs sacred to us, it is
not only or chiefly for this that we love them or that in any thought
of Southern England, when far away, it is these great hills which
first come back into the mind and bring the tears to our eyes. We love
them for themselves, for their beauty and their persistence
certainly, but really because we have always known them and they more
than any other thing here in the south remind us and are a symbol of
our home. A man of South England must always have them in his heart
for every day of his childhood they have filled his eyes. And to-day
more especially they stand as a sign and a symbol. For not only are
they the first great hills which the Londoner sees, but they offer the
nearest relief and repose from the modern torture and noise of that
enormous place which has ceased to be a city and become a mere asylum
of landless men. From the mean and crowded streets he seeks with an
ever increasing eagerness the space of the Downs, from the noise and
confusion and throng, this silence and this emptiness; from the
breathless street, this free and nimble air, which is better than
wine. And so to-day more than ever the Downs have come to stand as a
symbol of an England half lost, which might seem to be passing away,
but that is, as indeed these hills assure us, eternal and
indestructible, the very England of our hearts, which cannot die.
There are some doubtless who grumble at this invasion and are fearful
lest even this last nobility should be destroyed by the multitude or
this last sanctuary desecrated by the rapacity of the rich, or this
last silence broken by the brutal noise of the motor car. But the
Downs are too strong, they have seen too many civilisations pass away,
and the men and the ages that built upon their hill-sides have become
less than a dream in the morning. They remain. And is it nothing that
in our day if a man hears a bird sing in a London street in spring it
is of the Downs he thinks, if the wind comes over the gardens in some
haggard suburb it is these hills which rise up in his mind, these
hills, which stand there against the south, our very own from
everlasting to everlasting.
But to possess the Downs at least as a symbol, to dream of them as a
refuge, it is not necessary to know them in all their secret places,
to have seen all their little forgotten homesteads, or to be able to
recognise all their thousand steep tracks one from another.
For me indeed the Downs, long as I have known them, remain most dear
as a spectacle, but this you will miss altogether if you are actually
upon them, lost amid their rolling waves of green turf with only the
sky and the wind and the sun for companions. Therefore when I set out
from Lewes to go westward I did not take the way up past the race-
course over the battlefield south of Mount Harry towards Ditchling
Camp and Beacon. Let me confess it, I followed the road. And what a
road! In all South England I know no other that offers the traveller
such a spectacle, where above him, in full view, that great rampart
stands up like a wall, peak speaks to peak, till presently with a
majesty and a splendour, not to be matched I think in our island,
Chanctonbury stands forth like a king crowned as with laurel towering
upon the horizon.
Now this road I followed passes westward out of Lewes and then turns
swiftly north, climbing as it goes, under the Downs beyond Offham,
turning west again under Mount Harry and so on past Courthouse Farm
and Plumpton church, which stands lonely in a field to the north of
the road, till suddenly by Westmaston church under Ditchling Beacon it
turns north again towards the Weald and enters the very notable
village of Ditchling. All that way is worth a king's ransom, for it
gives you all the steepness of the Downs upon their steepest side,
their sudden north escarpment, towering up over the Weald some seven
hundred feet or more. On a spring morning early I know no way more
joyful.
Ditchling Beacon itself stands some eight hundred and fifty feet above
the sea and is the highest point in all the range of the South Downs,
though it lacks the nobility of Chanctonbury. The earthworks here are
irregular and not very well defined, but there is a fine dewpound to
the east of the camp though perhaps this has not much antiquity, a
seemingly older depression now dry in the north-west corner is rather
an old rainwater ditch than a dewpound. Altogether it might seem that
Ditchling Camp was rather a refuge for cattle than a military
fortress.
Ditchling village is charming, with more than one old half-timber
house, and the church of St Margaret's is not only interesting in
itself, but, standing as it does upon rising ground and yet clear of
the great hills, it offers you one of the finest views of the Downs
anywhere to be had from the Weald. It consists of a cruciform building
of which the north transept and the north wall of the nave were
rebuilt in the thirteenth century. The chancel, however, has some
beautiful Early English work to show and the nave is rather plain
Transitional. The eastern window and most of the windows in the nave
are of the early Decorated period, the window in the south chancel
aisle being somewhat later.
Something better than Ditchling church awaits the traveller at Clayton
where the little church of St John the Baptist possesses a most
interesting chancel arch, round and massive, that may well be Saxon.
The chancel itself is of the thirteenth century with triple lancets at
the western end with two heads, perhaps of a king and queen on the
moulding. Here, too, on the south chancel wall is a fine brass of 1523
in which we see a priest holding chalice and wafer. In the nave are
the remains of frescoes of the Last Judgment.
Right above Clayton rises Wolstanbury, a hill-top camp or circular
work some two hundred and fifty yards in diameter. It is interesting
because it is curiously and cleverly fortified, the rampart being
built up below and outside the fosse, owing to the steepness of the
hill. To the left are certain pits which may have been the site of
dwellings; certainly many neolithic implements have been found here.
Below Wolstanbury which thrusts itself out into the Weald like a great
headland nearly seven hundred feet in height, lies Pyecombe to the
south-west. This little place which lies between the heights of
Wolstanbury and Newtimber Hill is celebrated for two things, its
shepherds' crooks and the Norman font of lead in the little church
whose chancel arch is Norman too. You may see here even in so small a
place, however, all the styles of England, for if the font and chancel
arch are Norman, the lancets in the chancel are Early English, the
double piscina is Decorated and the windows of the nave are
Perpendicular while the pulpit is of the seventeenth century.
Pyecombe is hard to reach from Clayton without a great climb over the
Downs, but there is a way, though a muddy one, which turns due west out
of the Brighton road where the railway crosses it. This leads one round
the northern side of Wolstanbury (and this is the best way from which
to visit the camp on the top) and so by a footpath past Newtimber
Place, a moated Elizabethan house well hidden away among the trees west
of the road to Hurstpierpoint.
From Pyecombe there is a delightful road winding in and out under the
Downs about Newtimber Hill to Poynings. Poynings is, or should I say
was, one of the loveliest, loneliest and most unspoiled villages to be
found here under the Downs, but of late it has been accessible by
railway from the Devil's Dyke and Brighton. Nothing, however, can spoil
the beauty and interest of its church which is, I suppose, one of the
earliest Perpendicular works in the county, built before 1368 by the
third Baron de Poynings, some remains of whose old manor-house may
still be found east of the churchyard. The church is a Greek cross with
central tower, and is dedicated in honour of the Holy Trinity.
Everything in it is charming, especially the beautiful eastern window,
the triple sedilia and the piscina; but the pulpit and altar rails are
of the seventeenth century as is the great south window which once
stood in Chichester Cathedral. The Poynings lie in the south transept,
but their tombs have been defaced. The north transept is the Montagu
Chapel; here in the window is some old glass in which we may see the
Annunciation.
The Devil's Dyke, which stands right above Poynings, is a great trench
in the Downs, dug according to the legend by the devil, whose genial
intention it was to drown holy Sussex by letting in the sea. He was
allowed from sunset to sunrise to work his will, but owing to the
vigilance of those above who had Sussex particularly in their keeping,
the cocks all began to crow long before the dawn, and the devil,
thinking his time was spent, went off in a rage before he had
completed his work. This would seem to prove what I have often
suspected that the devil is as great a fool as he looks.
The camp above the Devil's Dyke is of the usual design of a hill-top
fortress, the defence following the natural line of the hill, the
look-out having been apparently upon the north-west, whence a
remarkably extensive view is to be had both over the Weald and the
Downs. But as no water would seem to have been conserved here it is
difficult to believe that this camp was ever a permanent fortress
which only a very large number of people could have defended.
Nevertheless a great number of neolithic implements have been found
there.
From Poynings in full view of Chanctonbury the beautiful road runs all
the way at the foot of the Downs to that great gap through which the
Adur seeks the sea, and which of old was guarded by Bramber Castle. On
the way it passes through the loveliest of villages, to wit, Edburton,
where in the Early English church of St Andrew is the second of the
three Norman fonts of lead within this county. The church is
altogether interesting, for if it is for the most part of the
thirteenth century, it has a charming Decorated eastern window
and it is said that Archbishop Laud himself presented the
pulpit and altar rails. What the two low side windows were for I
know not, but the chapel on the north was dedicated in honour of St
Catherine of Alexandria.
It was already dusk when I came out of Edburton church, the late dusk
of a day in early May; and so, liking the place passing well, I
determined to sleep there and soon found a hospitable cottage. In the
morning I liked the place better still, and remembering the "tarmac"
and the sophistication (alas!) of Steyning, I decided to stay where I
was two or three days and to visit thence a place in the Weald it had
long been my desire to see. And so having made up my mind, before
nine o'clock I set out on my way.