At one point in planning the walk I had almost decided to stick to the south coast for its entire length. Now up here on the Downs I was glad I had not plodded on beside the sea. It would have been a mistake to plough through the crowded coastal strip that I could see below me. Bognor ran into Littlehampton, ran into Worthing into Brighton. I was happier in the rolling green hilltops of the South Downs escarpment. A hand made landscape, perpetuated by sheep’s stomachs.
For the next three days I followed the South Downs Way going east. I walked long sections of the escarpment with its huge views looking north to the Weald and the North Downs. Sometimes the path wove its way into the centre of the Downs, or rose to a promontory that gave me a view to the south and to the sea as well. Like the chalk hills of Wessex these ridges had been the site of prehistoric man’s activities. I walked from hillfort to hillfort. Sometimes my sense of being in a film was made complete by watching a para-glider pilot stepping off onto the air in front of me. The colours of the canopy seemed so exact against the clear blue of the empty sky.
There was plenty of variety on the South Downs Way. What surprised me most about the Downs was how wooded they were. Instead of just walking through close cropped grass, I found myself walking in glorious glades of downland flowers sandwiched between mature woods of trees. In one particularly lovely wood I caught sight of a deer in the trees. I stood quite still until the deer became aware of me. Then in a flash, its markings made it invisible as it ran off into the dappling shade of the broad leafed wood.
One of the things that struck me as I wound my way along the domed ridge of the Downs was that the rivers of this part of Hampshire and Sussex flowed from north to south with total disregard of the barrier of the Downs or for the basic laws of gravity. It looked to me that the sharp valleys of the Rivers Arun and Adur had been created by the water taking a running charge at the hills. At first sight this arrangement did not make any sense to me. I decided to find out about this remarkable piece of geography.
The chalk which makes up the bulk of the South Downs was originally formed at the bottom of a sea and even now you can still see marine fossils where the rock has been exposed. However sometime after being laid down underwater these chalk deposits began to bend upwards forming a flat topped dome which rose up out of the sea. The rivers which drained the land to the north of the Downs had always drained southwards and as the chalk rose they acted like stationary saws, cutting through the rock as it rose up to produce the deep valleys that are characteristic of the downland rivers.
The road builders also had taken no notice of the Downs. The newly built A-roads ploughed into hills passing through hacked out cuttings. Despite the country aspect of the South Downs Way I began to notice the growing volume of noise around me. The constant roar of traffic and planes overhead. I was glad when I found a spot that was relatively peaceful.
There are few better places for a break on a mild Summer’s day than the atmospheric ruins of an Iron Age settlement. By now I had learnt how to get the best out of any napping stop and I made myself comfortable at Chanctonbury Ring under a tree on the grassy bank.
Resting by the side of a tree in this way I found was a great way of watching people approach on a footpath. I found that my shape blended in against the bulk of the tree and the approaching walkers happily carried on their conversations until they are right on top of me. Hidden by the bank I perfected this leopard-like way of hiding. I listened with my eyes closed as two middle aged women walking the South Downs Way came up to me discussing orgasms and the merits of HRT. I dropped off to sleep.
A looming shape came towards me out of the sun - a shaggy, woolly, sort of Iron Age shape which seemed to be carrying an axe over one shoulder. For a fraction of a second I believed in ghosts. I sat up to see what it was that was coming down the footpath. The shape raised its axe and came charging towards me. Then the shaggy figure stopped and reached into a large pouch hanging around his neck. What next, I thought, expecting the figure to produce a toad or some other talismanic object out of its sack but instead.... it produced three oddly shaped dice.
"Damn...Two ones, a three ....I wouldn’t even bother throwing if I was you."
It was at this point that I noticed that my Iron Age aggressor was wearing a
sheep skin car coat inside out with the sleeves cut off. I asked him who the hell he
thought he was.
"I am a barbarian!" he stated somewhat surprised at my attitude. "You are
part of the game aren’t you? You must be a mage with that kind of beard."
Fantasy enactment is a spin off from the
role playing game. It’s sort of like
Dungeons and Dragons in drag where computer programmers, students and the young
male employees of DIY stores rush around bits of countryside playing let’s pretend.
They get dressed up as either Gandalf or Conan the Barbarian
and spend whole weekends having fantasy adventures. However, rather than going to all the trouble of
actually conjuring up a spell or hacking each others’ limbs off, all the messy and
magical bits of the game are settled by throwing dice.
The South Downs had got into my heart now and I looked forward to my first view each morning. To the quiet contemplation of either the escarpment looking into the Weald or to the Sea, to watching ships moving up the English Channel.
As a family we had lived one summer in Brighton and the green hills of the South Downs reminded me of that summer. My father was working on a film called ‘Oh What a Lovely War!’. As I walked along I remembered the times when we drove out to see the sets on the Downlands. I remember vividly the scene that had been created for the very end of the film.
It was supposed to recall the endless cemeteries of Flanders (the film was set in trenches of the First World War). It was an amazing sight to see as a five year old. It’s an image that has stayed with me ever since. A sea of white crosses against the green hillside of the Downs.
The bulk of the film’s scenes were shot on Brighton’s West Pier and I remember that my brothers and I got to play on this rickety old structure. The old ballroom of the pier was done out in glitter and looked fantastic as we pushed our noses to the windows to look in at the places where we were not allowed to go. Strangely, despite the clarity of what I think of as my memories, I can not remember seeing the cameras and the other clobber that makes up a film set. I wonder now whether what I think of as original memories have not got mixed up with what I remember of the film. Perhaps all of my memories have been coloured in this way.
I was coming to the end of the route of the South Downs Way. I had decided not to follow the route right down across the Seven Sisters to Eastbourne but to stay inland following the northern edge of the escarpment down into Lewes.
Lewes is a pretty place and I pottered along its streets, looking at the castle and the remains of the priory. I had no difficulty getting into Lewes but I had a lot of difficulty finding the footpath I wanted to follow out of the town. Everyone in the shops was too busy to want to answer my question, so I sat on a bench and tried to figure out the map.
"Can ... I... help?" It was an odd voice, created by an effort of control. I looked up into the face of the old man who sat next to me. If ever eyes could be said to smile then his did.
I learnt over the next half hour that he had had a stroke. His slurred speech was one of the results. It made him appear stupid and he had lost confidence in himself. However his determination to communicate fascinated me.
I knew that I would not have sat and listened to him before I had set out on this walk - too busy, too willing to walk off into ‘What I am doing requires urgency’. The walk had changed me - getting to the end was not my only goal. I was taken with the idea of the manner in which I got there.
He thanked me for listening. Now I was embarrassed, after all it was me that had been lost. So I thanked him for his time, and there was that smile in his eyes again. I only realised later that he had been brave to talk to me. He risked rejection.
"I .. don’t ... know... whether ... I’ll get.. back to nor.. mal!".
Normal. I pondered that word for the rest of the day as I headed towards the
small town of Horam. Nothing good had ever happened to me while trying to be
normal and yet it is a state that is so important to us.
I walked along little used footpaths along field edges and through small culverts and copses of trees. The ground was much flatter than the Downlands that I had been walking for the last week and was a heavier clay type soil. It was also striking that the fields here were much smaller. With their borders of hedges they really gave me the feeling that at one time in the past they had been cleared from woodland.
© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004
