XXX
THE SOUTH DOWNS
From these levels at Stonepound the South Downs come full upon the view, crowned at Clayton Hill with windmills. Ditchling Beacon to the left, and the more commanding height of Wolstonbury to the extreme right, flank this great wall of earth, chalk, and grass—Wolstonbury semicircular in outline and bare, save only for some few clumps of yellow gorse and other small bushes.
Just where the road bends, and, crossing the railway, begins to climb Clayton Hill, the Gothic, battlemented entrance to Clayton Tunnel looms with a kind of scowling picturesqueness, well suited to its dark history, continually vomiting steam and smoke, like a hell’s mouth.
Above it rises the hill, with telegraph-poles and circular brick ventilating-shafts going in a long perspective above the chalky cutting in the road; and on the left hand the little rustic church of Clayton, humbly crouching under the lee of the downs.
“Clayton Hill!” It was a word of dread among cyclists until, say, the year 1900, when rim-and back-pedalling brakes superseded the inefficient spoon-brake, acting on the front tyre. Coming from Brighton, the hill drops steeply into the Weald of Sussex, and not only steeply, but the road takes a sudden and perilous turn over the railway bridge, at the foot of the descent, precisely where descending vehicles not under control attain their greatest speed. Here many a cyclist has been flung against the brick wall of the bridge, and his machine broken and himself injured; and seven have met their death here. Even in these days of good brakes a fatality has occurred, a cyclist being killed in November, 1902, in a collision with a trap.
From the summit of the downs the Weald is seen, spread out like a pictorial map, the little houses, the little trees, the ribbon-like roads looking like dainty models; the tiny trains moving out of Noah’s Ark stations and vehicles crawling the highways like objects in a minature land of make-believe. Looking southward, Brighton is seen—a pillar of smoke by day, a glowing, twinkling light at evening: but for all it is so near, it has very little affected the old pastoral country life of the downland villages. The shepherds, carrying as of yore their Pyecombe crooks, still tend huge flocks of sheep, and the dull and hollow music of the sheep-bells remains as ever the characteristic sound of the district. Next year the sheep will be shorn, just as they were when the Saxon churls worked for their Norman masters, and, unless a cataclysm of nature happens, they will continue so to be shorn centuries hence.
