  THE SOUTH DOWNS From these levels at Stonepound the South Downs come full upon the view, crowned at Clayton Hill with windmills. Ditchling Beacon to the left, and the more commanding height of Wolstonbury to the extreme right, flank this great wall of earth, chalk, and grass—Wolstonbury semicircular in outline and bare, save only for some few clumps of yellow gorse and other small bushes. Just where the road bends, and, crossing the railway, begins to climb Clayton Hill, the Gothic, battlemented entrance to Clayton Tunnel looms with a kind of scowling picturesqueness, well suited to its dark history, continually vomiting steam and smoke, like a hell’s mouth. Above it rises the hill, with telegraph-poles and circular brick ventilating-shafts going in a long “Clayton Hill!” It was a word of dread among cyclists until, say, the year 1900, when rim-and back-pedalling brakes superseded the inefficient spoon-brake, acting on the front tyre. Coming from Brighton, the hill drops steeply into the Weald of Sussex, and not only steeply, but the road takes a sudden and perilous turn over the railway bridge, at the foot of the descent, precisely where descending vehicles not under control attain their greatest speed. Here many a cyclist has been flung against the brick wall of the bridge, and his machine broken and himself injured; and seven have met their death here. Even in these days of good brakes a fatality has occurred, a cyclist being killed in November, 1902, in a collision with a trap. From the summit of the downs the Weald is seen, spread out like a pictorial map, the little houses, the little trees, the ribbon-like roads looking like dainty models; the tiny trains moving out of Noah’s Ark stations and vehicles crawling the highways like objects in a minature land of make-believe. Looking southward, Brighton is seen—a pillar of smoke by day, a glowing, twinkling light at evening: but for all it is so near, it has very little affected the old pastoral country life of the downland villages. The shepherds, carrying as of yore their Pyecombe crooks, still tend huge flocks of sheep, and the dull and hollow music of the sheep-bells remains as ever the characteristic sound of the district. Next year the sheep will be shorn, just as they were when the Saxon churls worked for their Norman masters, and, unless a cataclysm of nature happens, they will continue so to be shorn centuries hence. CLAYTON TUNNEL. But the Sussex peasant is by no means altogether bereft of his ancient ways. He is, in the more secluded districts, still a South Saxon; for the county, until comparatively recent times remote and difficult, plunged in its sloughs and isolated by reason of its forests, has no manufactures, and the rural parts do not attract immigrants from the shires, to leaven his peculiarities. The Sussex folk are still rooted firmly in what Drayton calls their “queachy ground.” Words of Saxon origin are still the staple of the country talk; folk-tales, told in times when the South Saxon kingdom was yet a power of the Heptarchy, exist in remote corners, currently with the latest ribald song from the London halls; superstitions linger, as may be proved by he who pursues his inquiries judiciously, and thought moves slowly still in the bucolic mind. The Norman Conquest left few traces upon the population, and the peasant is still the Saxon he ever has been; his occupations, too, tend to slowness of speech and mind. The Sussex man is by the very rarest chance engaged in any manufacturing industries. He is by choice and by force of circumstances ploughman, woodman, shepherd, market-gardener, or carter, and is become heavy as his soil, and curiously old-world in habit. All which traits are delightful to the preternaturally sharp Londoner, whose nerves occupy the most important place in his being. These country folk are new and interesting creatures for study to him who is weary of that acute product of civilisation—the London arab. OLD SUSSEX WAYS Sussex ways are, many of them, still curiously patriarchal. But a few years ago, and ploughing was commonly performed in these fields by oxen. CLAYTON CHURCH AND THE SOUTH DOWNS. Outside, in the garden, grew homely flowers and useful vegetables, and perhaps by the gnarled apple-tree there stood in the sun a row of bee-hives. Sussex superstition declared that they might, indeed, be purchased, but not for silver: If you wish your bees to thrive, The year was one long round of superstitious customs and observances, and it is not without them, even now. But superstition is shy and not visible on the surface. In January began the round, for from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Day was the proper time for “worsling,” that is “wassailing” the orchards, but more particularly the apple-trees. The country-folk would gather round the trees and chant in chorus, rapping the trunks the while with sticks: Stand fast root, bear well top; These wassailing folk were generally known as “howlers”; “doubtless rightly,” says a Sussex archÆologist, “for real old Sussex music is in a minor key, and can hardly be distinguished from howling.” Then, if mud were brought into the house in the month of January, the cleanly housewife, at other times jealous of her spotless floors, would have nothing of reproof to say, for was this not “January butter.” and the harbinger of luck to all beneath the roof-tree? Saints’ days, too, had their observances; the habits of bird and beast were the almanacs and weather warnings of the villagers, all innocent of any other meteorological department, and they have been handed down in doggerel rhyme, like this of the Cuckoo, to the present day: In April he shows his bill, If he stayed till September, he might possibly see a sight which no mere human eye ever beheld: he might observe a practice to which old Sussex folk know the Evil One to be addicted. For on Old Michaelmas Day, October 10th, the Devil goes round the country, and—dirty devil—spits on the blackberries. Should any persons eat one on October 11th, they, or some one of their kin, will surely die or fall into great trouble before the close of the year. Sussex has neither the imaginative Celtic race of Cornwall nor that county’s fantastic scenery to inspire legends; but is it at all wonderful that old beliefs die hard in a county so inaccessible as this has hitherto been? We have read travellers’ tales of woful happenings on the road; hear now Defoe, who is writing in the year 1724, of another proof of heavy |
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