Chalk to the south, clay to the north. Sun
to the south, rain to the north. Woods to the south, fields to the north. The
ridge of the South Downs I was walking had become a frontier in the landscape,
dividing the world into realms of weather, light and colour. Underfoot, the
track – of fine chalk, pure enough to write with – was glossy with recent rain.
Ahead of me, it ran brightly off over the hills, dipping from sight before
looping back up again.
The downs are the only high ground in an
otherwise flat and low landscape, and this means that – as in the desert or on
an ocean – you can sometimes see what weather will reach you hours before it
arrives. For much of that morning I led a charmed life: monsoon-squalls sliding
by to east and west. Then, just after noon, a big storm caught me: yellow
sun-flare, dulling to sepia. Rain drilling the earth, and the path a river, gathering
the water into a torrent that rinsed the chalk white again. I sheltered in a
copse of oak and high-trunked beeches, and ruefully considered the claim of the
French historian Hippolyte Taine that ‘the first music of England’ is to be
heard in ‘the fine patter of rain on the oak trees’. That morning, there was
nothing musical to the rain. It was military: weather war.
It was the first of many soakings for the
day. During each shower, the world bleared and wove. I tried to time my miles
between squalls, moving from cover to cover. Despite the rain, I felt delighted
to be out and walking. Ahead of me lay several days on foot, and the path
insinuating eastwards – in the old and innocent sense of the verb, from the
Latin ‘insinuare’, meaning ‘to bend in subtle windings, to curve’. I had left
that morning from Winchester, with the aim of following the ridgeline of the
South Downs east for a hundred miles until it made sea-fall near Eastbourne on
the English Channel.
That first night on the downs I slept in
the dubious shelter of a forestry plantation called War Down, tucked into my
little bivouac tent while the rain slipped down the conifer needles. I have
spent more comfortable nights under canvas. Yet by dawn the rain had stopped,
the air was warm and so I started early. Wild clematis smoked up the hedgerows.
Creepers – bryony, ivy, honeysuckle, bindweed – slinked out along tree branches
and hung down over the path like the slipped coils of snakes.
Somewhere near Amberley, a barn owl lifted
from a stand of phragmites. I stopped to watch it hunt over the water margin,
slowly moving north up the line of the river, pulling a skein of shrills from
the warblers in the reeds. It was a daytime ghost, its wings beating with a
huge soundlessness. East of Beacon Hill, I reached a sustained ridge of chalk.
Whitebeam trees marked the path to right and left, with their grey-green upper
leaves and their sharp silver unders. Emerging from a dark and yew-rich wood, I
reached an open down that stretched ahead for two miles. White flints were
scattered across the fields, with tumbleweeds of sheep’s wool bowling between
At dusk that second day I followed a
hollowed path that wound up the wooded scarp slope of the downs east of
Storrington. The path’s depth spoke of continual foot-passage over centuries,
and I liked its design: it moved in roundcornered zigzags, an uphill meander.
There in the forest, night was further advanced. I turned a corner and a badger
bustled out of a bank of dog’s mercury, stopped, stared at me, its eyes giving
a quick green jewel-flash in the dark before it barrelled on downhill along its
path, and I followed mine uphill, out of the woods and onto the summit plateau
of the downs, to a place called Chanctonbury Ring – where I now wish I hadn’t
spent the night.
The Ring is a circle of beech trees,
planted on a hilltop that had been the site of Bronze Age and Iron Age
fortifications, and a Roman temple. In 1760, a young aristocrat from the
scarp-foot village of Wiston named Charles Goring decided to add his own layer
of history to the Chanctonbury earthworks. He planted beech saplings in a
well-spaced circle and, according to one story, then carried bottles of water
up the slope to irrigate his saplings daily on that arid summit. According to
the other story, he got his servants to do this job for him.
Either way, the saplings took root and
flourished, and eventually grew into a cathedral grove. For two centuries,
Chanctonbury was the best-known landmark of the South Downs, but in 1987 the
Great Storm blew in and wrecked the Ring. It is now missing most of its main
trees, and its interior has reverted to a sprouting scrub of ash and bramble.
Nevertheless, up there that evening it still felt surprisingly remote. Brighton
glittered away to the southeast, like something far-fetched on fire. The Weald
to the north was almost lightless. The sky was a tarnishing silver. I rolled my
sleeping mat out between two of the remaining beech trees just as dark fell,
and soon fell to sleep.
I heard the first scream at around two o’clock
in the morning. A high-pitched and human cry, protracted but falling away in
its closing phase. It came from the opposite side of the tree ring to where I
was sleeping. My thoughts were sleepmuddled: A child in distress? A rabbit
being taken by a weasel or fox? No, impossible, for the sound was coming from
treetop height. A bird, then – an owl, surely? Yet this was like no owl I had
ever heard before: not the furry hoot of a tawny or the screech of a barn owl.
I felt a rasp of fear, then dismissed it as ridiculous.
Then another cry joined the first,
different in tone: slightly deeper and more grainy, rising at its end; the
shriek of a blade laid hard to a lathe. Also more human than avian, also
unrecognisable to me, also coming from treetop height. I lay there for two or
three minutes, listening to the screams. Then I realised, with a prickling in
my shoulders and fingers, that the voices had split and were now coming towards
me: still at treetop height, but circling round the tree ring, one clockwise and
one anti-clockwise, converging roughly where I was lying. I felt like standing
up, shouting, flashing a torch; but instead I lay still. The cries met each
other almost directly above me, 20 or 30 feet up in the dark. After 15 minutes
they stopped and eventually, uneasily, I fell back to sleep.
It was only later that I researched the
folklore of Chanctonbury Ring. I now know it to be one of the most haunted
places of the owns. Sussex folklore, mostly from the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, was rife with examples of it as a portal to the otherworld. Arthur
Beckett, in his 1909 The Spirit of the Downs, had reported that ‘if on a
moonless night you walk seven times round Chanctonbury Ring without stopping,
the Devil will come out of the wood and hand you a basin of soup’ in payment
for your soul, which sounds like a poor exchange.
I also discovered that many people who had
slept out at Chanctonbury had been forced to abandon the hilltop due to eerie
events. In the 1930s, Dr Philip Gosse recorded in his book Go to the Country
that ‘even on bright summer days there is an uncanny sense of some unseen
presence which seems to follow you about. If you enter the dark wood you are
conscious of something behind you. When you stop, it stops; when you go on it
follows.’ Closest to my experience was that of a group of bikers who had spent
the night at the ring in 1966. Things were quiet until after midnight, when a
crackling sound started, followed by the wailing voice of a woman that appeared
to move around the circumference of the ring. The motorcyclists fled, and
subsequently complained of physical ailments, headaches and lassitude in the
limbs. Reading that, I felt first a shock of recognition and then mild pride
that I’d tolerated what had put a gang of hairy bikers to flight.
I woke to a kingfisher dawn: orange cumulus
in the east and blue streaks in the cirrus cover overhead. I walked around the
ring looking for any explanation of the night’s screams. None. A white chalk
path spooled away east-south-east over high downs, so I followed it along
Bramber Bank, a sloping shoulder of turf that dips gracefully into the upper
valley of the River Adur. For half a mile of the bank, the path was littered
with thousands of striped snail shells over which I crunched. A field to the
north was pink with bursts of mallow, thrust up from the turf like magicians’
sprays of false flowers.
The sun was already hot by the time I
reached the medieval church of Botolphs, where my friend Rod Mengham – a South
Downsman by birth and upbringing, and a poet, archaeologist and writer by
practice – was waiting in the shade of the tower to walk a few miles with me. I
was very happy to see him.
East of the River Adur, the downs run in
three long plateaux, separated by stream and river valleys. On the high point
of the first, Edburton Hill, are the earthworks of a motte-and-bailey castle,
which in spring and early summer are a knee-high wildflower meadow: agrimony,
wild mignonette, red clover, yellow rattle, marjoram, scabious, knapweed and
the odd tall bolt of fireweed, through all of which wander string-like stems of
bindweed. Rod and I stopped there and lounged among the flowers, in a dry
westerly wind, talking about the downland poet Edward Thomas, the downland
painter Eric Ravilious, and why I should never have slept in Chanctonbury Ring.
We stumped on eastwards on tired legs,
crossing B-roads, car parks and the dry valley of Devil’s Dyke, a steep-sided
combe carved out of the permafrosted chalk during recent ice ages. By
afternoon, high on the longest of the downs ridges – the Plumpton Plain – I
looked longingly up at the buzzards, wishing for wings myself so that I could
loft over miles in minutes.
At a four-way crossroads we stopped to rest
and drink water. I lay on the ground by a gate, chewing on a grass stalk, too
tired to worry about the nettles that sprouted thickly around the gatepost. I
was delighted to be prone. I felt as though I could sleep there for a century.
The turf was my couch, my divan, my ottoman. Nothing, I vowed silently to myself,
would induce me to move from this position for at least an hour.
‘You know the reason there are so many
nettles where you’re lying?’ asked Rod.
‘Disturbed ground?’ I ventured.
‘Of a kind,’ Rod said. ‘It’s almost
certainly because so many animals have used this gateway as their toilet.
Nettles love fertile soil.’
I spat out the grass stalk, scrambled to my
feet and we went on our way.
At Kingston, Rod left for London and I
turned up Jugg’s Road, the broad old footpath from Brighton to Lewes that leads
onto the summit plateau of Kingston Down. I dawdled over the plateau, looking
for a place to sleep. I passed dewponds and tumuli, and a big field mushroom
lying upside-down on its cap, its black gills like the charred pages of a book.
Eventually, I decided on an area of lush turf, between two gorse bushes that
would serve as windbreaks. The turf was rich with lady’s bedstraw, which seemed
like a good plant to have as my mattress, though sweaty walker’s bedstraw would
have been a truer name that night. Hundreds of feet above me, skylarks trilled
on, the notes of their songs falling like ticker tape.
The skylarks sang me to sleep, and they
woke me before dawn. I walked down into Lewes as the day was forming, and then
onto the southern slopes of Mount Caburn, the only major summit of the downs
that outlies the main chain. Purple heads of marjoram thrummed in the warming breeze.
I picked up a scabious head and pinches of wild thyme. Near Glynde, I crossed
the Ouse: the river mucky-banked, beginning to loop as it neared its floodplain
and the sea. The path climbed again, up onto Firle Down, past teasels flowering
Late in the day, achy in the legs, I
reached Cradle Hill, into whose eastern slope a great white chalk horse has
been cut. Below me the River Cuckmere made its greasy meanders towards the sea.
I dropped off the scarp down to the river, and then along the edge of the
Cuckmere for two or three miles. The river water was the colour of milk
chocolate. The brown mud of its banks was a rich text of bird prints, and my
boot marks joined the tracks of heron, cormorant, gull and egret. An hour
before dark I stood on the summit of a small chalk bluff, from which I looked
down onto Cuckmere Haven, the point at which the river reaches the English
Channel. It is a wide bay of flint shingle with a shallowly sloping foreshore,
and was formerly guarded by slumping pillboxes. Coastguard cottages perch on
the high ground to its west and, to its east, the white cliffs of the Seven
Sisters are strung out like a line of washed and pegged sheets.
Little fledgling owls made test flights
between the branches of sycamores. A pale horse stood motionless in a cropped
field, gazing northwards. The tide was high, and for a hundred feet away from
the shore, the water appeared to be the colour of green milk, the waves having
sluiced chalk from the foreshore and cliffs, which stained the sea white.
I walked down to the shore and along the
tide line, which was cobbled with flint boulders. Beneath the first of the
Sisters, my eye was caught by a clutch of grey flints that lay together like
eggs right at the foot of the cliff. I picked them up, one by one, amazed. Each
one had a drawing of a creature on it, made in chalk. The style was that of the
Lascaux cave paintings: naïve but fluent in line. A deer, a gull, a hawk, a
seal, a human figure. Somebody must have been sitting here that afternoon,
using a piece of chalk from the cliffs to draw those figures onto the flints.
I placed the largest of the stones on a
flat outcrop of chalk, and then arranged the others above them in decreasing
size order. Hawk, on top of seal, on top of deer, on top of human: a simple
cairn at the rivermouth, marking my sea fall and the end of my walk.
Macfarlane is the award-winning author of Mountains of the Mind and The Wild
Places. This story is based on his new book, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot.
The article 'England’s ghostly South Downs Way' was published in partnership with Lonely Planet Magazine.