The boundary here between the Sussex sea-plain and Hampshire is clearly marked, for the level light sends a gleam along the creeks of the upper harbours beyond Bosham, which undoubtedly were the first principal divisions along this coast between the South Saxons and their neighbours to the west.
As you look along that horizon eastward, you continue to see a chain of Sussex things. You see the port of Littlehampton, one of the Sussex river mouths; farther off, on the extreme limit of your view, you see the lights of Worthing,
KING RICHARD’S WALK, CHICHESTER CATHEDRAL
VIEW FROM GUMBER
characteristic of the new great watering-towns which have grown up all along this coast. You have in one landscape all that maritime fringe of Sussex which is held in such detestation by the men of the Weald, and which is yet the side from which civilisation or change has always come into the county: the sea-plain upon which the Saxon pirates landed; the plain upon which the siege of the Roman town of Anderida took place. It was from this sea that Christianity came, and it was on the same flat, though in the eastern part of it, that William of Falaise landed with his army on the way to conquer at Hastings.
Between the high place from which you are thus looking southward and surveying the land toward the sea—between the main range of the Downs, that is, and the dead flat of the rich plough-land—you see, in one low summit after the other, those foot-hills of the Downs which are an essential part of the Sussex landscape, and which are so full of Sussex history. Here stand in a row, partly isolated from each other, Halnecker, with its gaunt deserted mill; Eartham, where Cowper for some little time wrote, and where perhaps the best portrait of him was painted. Next is the great wooded mass of the Nore Hill, now uninhabited and silent, but once a stronghold; the neighbouring summit of Slindon, which was Canterbury land, one of the great houses of the Archbishop; the promontory of the Rewell Wood, which hides Arundel; and farther off eastward that semi-conical lift of Cissbury, which the men of the place call High Down. Here first the Briton, then the Roman, then the Saxon held their trenches, and here has been found that most fascinating and absorbing relic of prehistory—a manufactory of flint implements, finished and half-finished, with the cores and the chips lying beside the completed work.
This is what you see to the southward. Directly to the east and the west of you is the wall of the Downs, on the crest of which you stand. Nowhere else on the crest of that wall will you see them look so long or so sheer. You see them fall mile after mile on to the plain, some jutting slightly forward, as does Ditchling Beacon, upon the limit of one’s gaze, and the whole forming one strict escarpment, the like of which is not to be discovered to our knowledge elsewhere in the world. From this point you perceive and are filled with the utter loneliness of these hills; there is not a house on them nor a man, and they are the more
VIEW FROM GUMBER