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Updated: June 15, 2025
Take a piece of Sussex downland; put a stream in every hollow and a patch of wood; and at the edge, where the cliffs at home would fall to the sea, put a cloak of forest muffling the scarp and dropping thousands of feet to the blue plains. Take the diamond air of the Gornergrat, and the riot of colour which you get by a West Highland lochside in late September.
One of the best shepherds I know, who is sixty years old and has been on the same downland sheep-farm all his life, assures me that he has never had and never would have a dog which was trained by another.
On she struggled after her resolute indefatigable nose, and the poppies in her bonnet quivered perpetually and her spring-side boots grew whiter and whiter with the downland dust. Flip-flap, flip-flap went her footfalls through the still heat of the day, and persistently, incurably, her umbrella sought to slip from under the elbow that retained it.
A great trade was once done by the Downland peasantry in these "Sussex Ortolans," as they were called, but of late years the demand has dwindled to vanishing point. The lover of the picturesque will feel grateful to the powers who refuse to destroy the deserted windmills which stud the Downs and of which there is one good example near here.
The door opened and Castleman entered. "If you please, sir, the carriage is at the door." The rain gradually ceased falling as we drove onward and upward to the station. It stood on high ground, overlooking a wide sweep of downland and fallow, bordered towards the west by close-set woodlands, purple that evening against a sky of limpid gold, which the storm-clouds discovered as they lifted.
My second cousin, Reginald Stratton, had been drowned in Finland, and his father had only survived the shock of his death a fortnight; his sister, Arthur Mason's first wife, had died in giving birth to a stillborn child the year before, and my father found himself suddenly the owner of all that large stretch of developing downland and building land which old Reginald had bought between Shaddock and Golding on the south and West Esher station on the north, and in addition of considerable investments in northern industrials.
Between the nearest a long, rolling, treeless ridge of downland and the edge of the jungle lay an expanse of open, grassy savannah, dotted with ponds, and here and there a curious, solitary, naked tree-trunk, with what looked like a bunch of grass on its top. They were like gigantic green paint-brushes, with yellow-gray handles, stuck up at random.
And then came three more months of Sussex downland summer, the hunting of innumerable rabbits, out-of-door days which were fifteen hours long, and a steadily increasing amount of slow-road exercise, for which Finn was still fortified by three good meals a day, and those of the best that care and science could devise.
On these rises are some dark clumps of woodland, one of them called after the nightingales, which perhaps sing there this year, in what is left of their home. There is nothing now to show that this quiet landscape was one of the tragical places of this war. The whole field of the Somme is chalk hill and downland, like similar formations in England.
A Downland road can be taken from here to Friston, Eastdean and Eastbourne, saving some miles of up and down walking, but the most enjoyable though more strenuous route is by the cliff path from Cuckmere Haven over the "Seven Sisters" cliffs to Beachy Head; a glorious six miles with the sea on one side and the Downs on the other, culminating in the finest headland on the south coast, 575 feet high, the magnificent end of the Downs in the sea.
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