THE OUSE, NEAR BARCOMBE MILLS, SUSSEX
homesteads, the hop-fields upon the slopes, the charming villages, and the still surviving windmills surmounting the ridges are of the best that tranquil southern England has to offer. But the dyked-in waters themselves, flowing sullenly and monotonously over their muddy bottoms between raised turf banks, with rare exceptions contribute nothing and are powerless to charm.
The most easterly of the four chief rivers cutting through the coast range is the Cuckmere. As one drops down the long westward slope from Beachy Head into a sequestered and far-spreading Down country this little river, cleaving a narrow way into the sea below, without port or harbour or village or anything but an isolated homestead or two within apparent touch of it, seizes one’s fancy not a little. For this reason the Cuckmere as a replica in miniature of the Ouse and Arun, but of curiously sequestered habit on this otherwise rather populous coast, has a place of its own somewhat apart from its fellows.
The Ouse, the next, going westward, to cut through the Downs, is a very much larger stream. It breaks through the here narrow but lofty chalk range some five miles from the sea at Lewes, and then winds through the meadows as a tidal river to Newhaven—a stretch of country familiar enough to every one using this route to the Continent. The cleft in the Downs made by the Ouse below the ancient and picturesque town of Lewes is one of the boldest and most precipitous scenes of its kind in the whole chalk system. Looking down from the top of the prodigiously steep streets of Lewes, or from the summit of the castle, the opposite Down rises like an inaccessible green wall for five or six hundred feet, and one might fancy there was scarcely room for the slow running river to push its way through what one is almost tempted to call the defile below. The Ouse rises in many feeders about the edges of Ashdown forest but is quite insignificant till, after the manner of Sussex rivers, it makes this fine effort at Lewes. Hence strong tides rush up and down the seven miles or so of channel which winds through the banked-in meadows to Newhaven.
The Adur, which joins the sea at Shoreham, between Brighton and Worthing, follows the same tactics, and is a still more insignificant stream up the country, but winds for some way through the chalk range, from Bramber, where it has some claim to be a river to the two Shorehams, the old and the new. But the Arun, the most westerly of all the Sussex
rivers, is the best known and the most important. It, too, draws near the sea by Amberley and Arundel to Littlehampton with a rapid transformation from comparative insignificance to scenes that always compel one’s interest and sometimes one’s admiration. Meeting the Western Rother at the old Roman station, now covered by Pulborough, which lifts itself above the flat, the two little streams make together one of a reasonable size that, flowing on through wide water meadows, enters the gap in the Downs at Amberley, and there, under the influence of the tide, begins to rise and fall upon a muddy bed. Arundel Castle, raised above the town with its wooded park swelling up the face of the Down behind, makes a really noble background to the reaches of the Arun, both above and below. It is an awkward river for boating on account of the pace with which the tide rushes up its reedy, muddy bed, and the distance over which it makes its force felt. But it is perfectly feasible, if forethought be taken, to ascend with the tide for many miles above Arundel, and return with it to great advantage. The swell of the Downs, clad above Arundel with beech-woods approaching at places close to the bank, and the rich scented meadows, through which the river winds for miles, aloof from dwellings or villages, more than compensate for the slightly deterrent qualities of the turgid and muddy waters. Even these blemishes, however, are obscured when the tide is high. But it is not well, when it has begun to turn, to tie the bow of your boat to a tree trunk and take an unwary siesta beneath its shade in the stern, or, as once happened to the present writer, you may peradventure be awakened by the water running over your shoulders and the nose of the boat pointing heavenward at an angle of forty-five degrees.
From Arundel bridge the river runs a navigable course through salt meadows for some seven miles to its mouth at Littlehampton with no appreciable widening of its channels. The Arun above Arundel and all the way up past Amberley is a noted haunt of the humbler class of London anglers, whom the railroad, for a quite trifling sum, brings down here by hundreds. At intervals along the banks for miles you find the patient bream-fisher from the East End, having spent the night often beneath the sky, watching his float throughout the day with unremitting concentration.