the pasturage of these flooded levels is of great value. The stream rolls on, more and more turbid with the advent of the tide, spreads out into the willow thickets of Amberley Wildbrook where there is good shooting of snipe, runs on right under Bury, leaving Amberley Castle upon the left, passes beneath the causeway and the bridge at Houghton, and so enters the Arundel Gap. Here it is completely lonely. There are not even small footpaths by which the villages of this narrow valley can be reached from the north, though their names of “Southstoke” and “Northstoke” indicate an early passage of some sort, for this place-name throughout South England refers to the “staking” by which the passage of a river was made firm. Two new dykes, cutting off long corners, have been dug in the course of this valley, and they take the main stream, while the old river runs in a narrow and sluggish course by a long detour towards Burpham. The main channel, as it now exists, continues to keep to the right hand side of the valley, where it is continually overhung by the deep woods of Arundel Park; and at last, a little below the Blackrabbit Inn, one sees, jutting out like a spur from the bulk of the hills, the great mass of the Castle.
The attitude of Arundel, standing above the river at this point, is hardly to be matched by any of the river towns of England. It stands up on its steep bank looking right down upon the tidal stream and towards the sea. The houses are natural to the place (the hideous new experiments upon the further bank are hidden from the river), and all the roofs are either old or at least consonant to the landscape, while the situation chosen for St. Philip’s Church, and its architecture, happen by an accident that is almost unknown in modern work, to be exactly suited to the landscape of which it forms the crown, and to balance the background of the Castle and the Keep.
Below the bridge at Arundel the Arun becomes a purely maritime river. It runs in a deep tidal channel with salt meadows upon either side, and with a very violent tide of great height scouring between its embankments. There are no buildings directly upon its sides save one poor lonely inn and church at Ford, and in seven miles it reaches the sea at Littlehampton, pouring into the Channel over one of the shallowest and most dangerous bars upon this coast.
The other rivers merit a much briefer attention.
The Adur is but a collection of very small
ARUNDEL CASTLE (EVENING)
THE ADUR
streams which meet in the water meadows above Henfield, where it becomes a broad ditch; it cannot be called a true river until it is close upon the hill of Bramber within a few miles of the sea. It is, in fact, a sort of miniature Arun, but its effect in history has been almost as great as that of the larger river, as we shall see farther on, for it also has pierced its own gap through the Downs, and this gap has been, like Arundel, from the earliest times one of the avenues of invasion, and therefore one of the strong places for defence. It runs through this gap, past two delightful and almost unknown relics of mediæval England, parishes that have decayed until they are merely small chapels attached to lonely farms (their names are Coombes and Buttolphs), and comes to where its mouth used to be, at old Shoreham, where was a Roman landing-place, and where the Saxons are said first to have landed also. But the river has built up between itself and the sea a great beach of shingle. Its mouth has gone travelling farther and farther down along the coast, and, had not modern work arrested this process, there probably would have happened to Shoreham what has happened to Orford upon the East Coast. For Orford was also once a great mediæval harbour, the mouth of which has drifted farther and farther off and silted up as it travelled.