But you have also much more. Turn to the northward, and there lies before you the whole stretch of the Weald: its towns, its little sandy pine-clad heights, its irregular plan, the large remains of its old woods and heaths. Far beyond it you may see, like another wall answering the southern wall of the Downs, the line of the Surrey hills; and all Sussex which is not maritime lies between you and them in one sweep.
You have to the north-westward the great bunch of Hindhead, where the three counties of Hampshire, Sussex, and Surrey meet; you have to the eastward an interminable succession of low heights, one behind the other, which stretch out to the Kentish border and make up the Sussex Weald. You may see, at the farthest point which the eye can reach, the lonely fir-trees upon Ashdown, which stands so high as to hide the Kentish “hursts” behind it.
One of those small towns of the Weald which are most characteristic of Sussex is beneath you, the little town of Petworth, with its great house insolently overshadowing it and swallowing it up. There is also beneath you something more Sussex and more dignified than the blatant grandeur of such a palace—the squires’ houses all the way along from Burton to Parham. You are too far to see how well they illustrate the county,—Parham especially, which is built of chalk, and is altogether a sort of natural growth of Sussex,—but you may easily grasp in their continuous line what sort of house it was round which the old manors clung.
MILL POOL, MIDHURST
VIEW FROM GUMBER
From Gumber also you judge how far it may be true that the Weald was ever uninhabited. You see indeed great patches of woodland, and many more patches of what may have been recent, but what are most likely ancient, clearings. You see belts of heath on which nothing has ever grown or will grow, and you see everywhere villages which are certainly of great age, because they lie along the main lines of communication.
Speaking of these, it is worthy of notice that you have next to you, as you stand here on Gumber, that most distinct and the best-preserved Roman road in England. The Stane Street crosses this saddle of the range; it is raised several feet above the surface of the hills. It is like a rampart, and comes straight from the spire of Chichester on the south-western horizon. Here are visible all the points of the Stane Street which have been detailed upon a former page, the way in which it negotiates the escarpment of the Downs in a great curve, and the way in which, when once it has struck the plain, it darts right for the crossing of the Arun at Pulborough. Hence also may be caught that gap in the Surrey hills at Dorking for which the road makes northward, and beyond which it is lost in the turf at Epsom.
As you trace that taut line across the Weald you may note every period of the Sussex past. You see it crossing at Bignor the winding elbowed British lane which has sunk so deep through centuries of traffic below the surrounding fields, you see the famous ruins of the Roman villa, and the ruin of the Priory of Hardham, which stood upon its highway.