When my spouse Jan and I arrived in Sussex in 1980, we began driving the South Downs on moonlit nights. The white chalk paths mirrored the sunshine and made the going simple, regardless of the steep drops and our night-wary horses. As soon as on the crest, you possibly can see the lights of ships developing the Channel to 1 aspect and the villages twinkling down beneath on the opposite. It’s a magical house and offered an exquisite introduction to Britain, which we had come to from South Africa. As we clip-clopped house alongside the darkish pathways, curtains would twitch – not surprisingly, because the final night time riders hereabouts have been smugglers transporting French brandy from the coast to London through these deep, hidden lanes.
Sussex Panorama: Chalk, Wooden and Water, a brand new exhibition of work at Pallant Home in Chichester, encapsulates all the things I like about Sussex, a panorama I’ve now crisscrossed on horseback for greater than 4 a long time. Chalk Paths, by Eric Ravilious, captures the just about bleak high quality of the South Downs in winter, which for hundreds of years was a part of the pilgrims’ path to Canterbury. The sense of house and loneliness in Ravilious’s closely contoured panorama stands in distinction to the world’s closely populated villages and cities. It jogs my memory how this place has been house to humankind for millennia, the swelling inhabitants finally pushing again the boar-and-deer-haunted forest of Anderida, leaving the open rolling farmland we see on this image.
There’s an echo, too, of the artist’s battle work: the shortage of timber, the barbed wire fences. Ravilious, who spent his childhood in Eastbourne, is maybe greatest recognized for his battle work. Within the years earlier than he died in an airplane crash in 1942, he created spectacular watercolours, lithographs and drawings of the equipment of battle. Maybe Sussex was on is thoughts as he did so: the panorama he beloved, in spite of everything, was all a part of what these dreadful machines have been combating for.
This similar panorama led me to find the writers I’ve shared Sussex with: Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, EF Benson, Virginia Woolf, WB Yeats, Ezra Pound, Hilaire Belloc, AA Milne, William Cobbett and the Bloomsbury Group. At present the Bloomsbury’s former nation retreat, Charleston Farmhouse, is house to an annual literary pageant attracting authors from around the globe, who converse amid the farmyard scents of hay and silage.
One solely has to learn these writers to see the impact of Sussex landscapes on them. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, the gloomy, fog-shrouded moors that Arthur Conan Doyle describes are pure Ashdown Forest in winter. WB Yeats wrote that, in the course of the first world battle, the longer he and Ezra Pound stayed in Stone Cottage, on the sting of the forest, the more durable they discovered returning to the hubbub of London. Regardless of its title, Yeats’s well-known poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree may simply be about that inexperienced haven.
“The main focus of this exhibition,” says Simon Martin, director of Pallant Home, “is what specific issues made Sussex completely different from elsewhere, these primal components: the chalk that kinds the South Downs and the long-lasting shoreline and cliffs, the rivers and waterways operating to the coast, and the woodlands of the weald.”
It’s exceptional what number of artists and writers have sought and located sanctuary in what Martin describes – escaping the horrors of the primary world battle, nazism within the second and, in my case, apartheid-era South Africa. Many expatriates have discovered an echo of their homeland right here, from Russian taxi-drivers to Lithuanian and German émigrés, to not point out the numerous who moved out of London to the countryside. As I journey Sussex now, my horse and I transfer by two landscapes: the bodily one and an enriching one lovingly captured in paint.
Through the years, I’ve heard speak of magic hereabouts: ley strains on the forest, white magic, witchcraft and the truth that this space appears to be a haven for various existence and religions. Inside a 10-mile radius of my house, there are communities of Rosicrucians, Mormons, Catholic monasteries and retreats, Opus Dei and druids. I don’t pay a lot heed to any of this, however it’s exhausting to spend any outing within the deepest reaches of Ashdown Forest and never join with one thing primordial in addition to religious.
Sussex is without doubt one of the most closely wooded counties in England and has its personal vernacular structure. The homegrown oak, flint and tile building that nestles amongst this panorama of cattle, sheep and grain farming is breathtakingly captured by Ivon Hitchens in Curved Barn, one other gorgeous portray on this exhibition. It’s nearly as if the barn is itself entangled within the wooden, in a setting the place elves and witches would match proper in. The Sussex constructing fashion proven right here – so completely different from the thatched, whitewashed, gabled and green-shuttered Cape Dutch farmhouses of my childhood – has grow to be a part of my grownup tradition, a part of what makes me really feel so at house right here.
Simon Roberts’ romantic picture of a picnicking couple on the South Downs, nearly folded into the embracing panorama, is titled We English 13, Satan’s Dyke, but it couldn’t look much less devilish – though cyclists on the annual London to Brighton race would possibly disagree, because the climb is a killer, simply 10 miles from a pint after ending. The portray jogs my memory of rides I’ve had right here chased by russet purple Sussex calves hell bent on catching my horse – and the trick of getting by the gate earlier than them.
Sussex is very like a seaside, a spot caught between the ocean and the land. Nearly all of it lies between two big 900ft land-waves, the South Downs behind Eastbourne, Brighton and Chichester, and the North Downs, sheltering the county from London’s creeping presence. The difficulty with the Downs is that the ridges supply no place to cover from the climate in winter. Walkers and riders are uncovered and so Jan and I settled in Ashdown Forest, the place the deep valleys and dense woodland supply shelter from the wind and rain.
The coast options strongly within the exhibition. I’ve at occasions solid a line from Newhaven’s east pier for mackerel within the spring and summer season, going house principally empty-handed however wind burnt and thrilled from seeing France on the horizon. John Piper’s Seashore and Star Fish, Seven Sisters Cliff, Eastbourne, brings again the sensation of a fishing rod in my hand and the pull of the tide, his abstracted chalk cliffs creating an nearly other-worldly feeling of one thing past us. No much less atmospheric is Constable’s Brighton Seashore, an essay in loneliness earlier than a stormy sea, an expertise these of us who’ve walked or ridden spherical these elements know properly.
There’s a clearing in Ashdown Forest, that I consider as my “church”. As Callum and I enter this intimate tree-columned house, I believe how few church buildings would really welcome a horseman clip-clopping up the nave to the font. There’s simply the faintest breath of wind excessive above us within the branched rafters and above that solely sky. The forest stands mute as soon as extra, holding a horseman and his horse by an influence that neither understands, however which pulls them again repeatedly to this magical place.
Earlier than I understood the phrases “forest bathing” or the “nature remedy”, or the sacredness of panorama ascribed to it by early man, I sensed one thing of this as I rode by the heathland and the beechwoods that I discovered in Sussex. Lifting right into a sluggish canter, Callum carries me effortlessly on the paths rising uphill. The beech timber gleam moist with the morning fog and the rain that got here within the night time, the subtle mild now making every tree its personal drama, every a separate determine on this panorama. I breathe deep, taking on this forest providing, this stunning, satisfying place.