lonely that you have so immediately, and yet so far, below you the little farmhouses in their combes.
These combes, their names and their great hollows, recall to you the enormous antiquity upon which Sussex reposes. Their name is a Celtic name. It has outlasted the three great foreign invasions of the land—the Roman civilisers, the German pirate, and the re-entry of the Latins with the Norman Conquest. Their woods also have outlasted every destroyer, every cultivator, and engineer. No one can plough these steep hollows—the beeches have clung to them from the beginning and will cling to them always. Immediately beneath you is one such horseshoe, bitten into the mass of the Down; and if you stand still you can hear moving in it the life of beasts which men have never seriously disturbed. Small as these woods are, they are as primal and as isolated as anything you will find in any distant valley. They are not cut for profit, or at least very rarely, because the ground is too steep for haulage. They live their own life and are secluded.
Indeed, all over the broad back of the Downs, for seventy miles and more, these patches of woods, both in the combes and up on the shoulders of the hills, are a necessary part of Sussex. They exhibit the unconquerable nature of the county, its strongholds of silence and of desertion within an hour or two of London, and within a short walk of those flaring new places which have sprung up upon the sea-shore. The past and the very meaning of the county can still be remembered in the names of those woods. Here are certain of the “forests” remaining. Right at your feet is Houghton Forest, the remnant of a great royal wood lost to the Crown perhaps in the civil wars.
This view along the Downs tells you many other things about the county: you have, for instance, close beside you, not three miles away, perhaps the earliest and until latterly one of the most used of the “Passes” over the Downs—the cross-roads at Whiteways. The London road and the road which had followed along under the Downs from Lewes unite at the summit of the Saddle, and lead travellers from the capital or from the Weald to Arundel or to the sea-plain. It is an example of those passages over the hills which have been mentioned as running from Cocking near Midhurst right away to Lewes, and which have their best roads at Duncton, here at Whiteways, at Washington, and beyond New Timber at Clayton.
OLD WHITING MILL, MIDHURST
VIEW FROM GUMBER
Those river valleys which we have seen to be so peculiar to the modelling of the South country—trenches cut right through the chalk and appearing to ignore the natural watershed which the hills would form—come also into this landscape. The greatest of them is right before you in the Arun valley. If it is winter you will see in the sheets of water surrounding the river why these valleys were not used for communication, and why to this day, though the railway has built itself an embankment across the marshes, no road runs through along the level floor, which would seem at first sight the obvious gate through the Downs from the Weald to the sea.
You can also see from this point of vantage one of those castles which guard the gates of the county, for you can see to the north of the gap the ruins of Amberley. In a word, you have the whole nature of the Downs and of the sea-plain before you as you look from Gumber.