THE MAIN LANDSCAPE
other similar character, perhaps, in England; the second of which is more changeable than most. It is not easy to give a name to these separate elements, but with the one are connected the emotions aroused by the great views which Sussex presents, and with the other are connected the emotions aroused by its hollow and secluded places, those little isolated hills of sand and their small lonely valleys.
The great spaces of landscape which Sussex can afford have never changed and never can. No man will ever build largely upon the Downs. No forest will ever gather on so valuable a soil as that of the coastal plain. No mere extension of buildings or further cultivation will destroy the distant aspect of the Weald.
A man looking down from the crest of the Downs to the south and to the north of him sees much of what his ancestry have seen since men first stood upon those hills. The Weald was once a little denser in wood, the coastal plain a little less thick with villages, but that is all. The high, broad belt of the sea has always made a frame for that view. The flooded river valleys have always picked it out with patches of silver. The roll of the Downs has always stood, like a monstrous green wave, blown forward before the south-west wind. The simple and vivid green of the turf, and the sharp white chalk pits, have always stood making the same contrast with the sky and the large sailing clouds; and they will continue to do so for ever.
A Sussex man recognises his home when he sees it from the height above Eden Bridge, or from Crowborough top as he enters the county from the north or from the Surrey hills; he knows it when, as he gazes southwards, he catches along the horizon the dark wall of the Downs. The outline is not to be confounded with any other in the world, and these few simple planes of vision build up for him the major pleasures which the landscape of his county can afford. They have not changed in the past and they will not change in the future.
With the homelands, with the little valleys and the sandy rocks of the Weald, and the hills between the foot-hills of the southern side of the Downs, the case is different.
What the original aspect of these hollows with their clayey or sandy knolls on either side may have been in the beginnings of the county it is now very difficult to conjecture. They are certainly among the very first of its inhabited places, and it is perhaps most accurate to think of them as little packed groups of huts along the
CROWBOROUGH HEATH