Seren: Julia Lynam's Blog: Telegraph Hill

I’m back in England now, staying at my sister’s house in Petersfield, Hampshire, having left Findhorn after a very interesting nine weeks there. I may write some more about Findhorn in retrospect, but for the moment here’s what I did on Saturday April 4: I went walking!

I started, as one does, from a pub in the midst of a charming village – Compton in West Sussex to be precise – and took a three mile circular walk over Telegraph Hill. Do come along with me.

"An inn since the 1660s; walker and dog friendly"

Compton’s set on the geological formation known as the South Downs. That’s a chalk ridge that stretches a hundred miles across southern England. Yes, the bedrock is chalk, although it’s not very visible here because there’s a thin layer of topsoil obscuring it. What is visible, however, is flint, nodules of silica that occur in chalk, millions of them. The chalk and flint are both echoes of the lives of sea creatures who inhabited a huge ocean countless ages ago.

Inside, lies concealed beauty:
this is what a split flint looks like.

The footpath surface is mostly flint. It's a bit
knobbly for walking on.

The flints infest the soil - they look like white stones here - and render the Downs more suitable for grazing than arable.
That low grassy bump in front of the trees is Bevis's Thumb . . . read on!

Typical Sussex houses, like this one in Compton, West Sussex, are often faced with split flints

Detail of flint facing

Flowers of the Forest

Violet: violet

Violet: white

From the village, the path led gently upwards, its margins graced with wild violets of various colors, from deep purple to clear white, and with wild primroses. Such flowers are less common than they were in my youth. My friend George, who grew up in the west of England, once told me that the local village store used to buy bunches of primroses from the children at the rate of sixpence for a hundred flowers. That kind of enterprise might have something to do with the decline of wild flowers in the countryside.

Primrose

Lesser celandine

Cowslips on Bevis's Thumb

My downloaded trail guide told me to keep to the “bridleway”: that’s a path for horses and bicycles as well as pedestrians; a “footpath” is for walkers only. Most English counties are crisscrossed by a network of such paths, public rights of way, which are more or less well maintained by the relevant county. I’m pleased to report that West Sussex does a good job.

The bridleway passed from the wooded trail out onto open downland. This land, if never occupied by humans, would be thickly forested with dense stands of oak, beech, yew, hazel and other native trees. Forest clearance began here a long time ago: “Current woodland cover has fallen to less than 12% from an estimated high of around 75% around 6,000 years ago.” (Kevin Watts 2006 http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/QJF_legacy_of_fragmentation_may06.pdf/$FILE/QJF_legacy_of_fragmentation_may06.pdf)

Gradually, over thousands of years, the forest was removed, mainly for grazing animals, and over those thousands of year a rich downland flora has developed which supports many species of insects and invertebrates, and which environmentalists now try to preserve by not allowing trees to re-colonize. In his 2013 book “Feral” author George Monbiot questions the logic of this approach, as opposed to allowing the land to revert to its natural state. I find it a difficult question: so much of wildness has been lost, why not take advantage of opportunities to let it re-assert itself. But then, what would happen to those plant and animal species that thrive in the grazed downlands? That concern was overruled during WWII when large parts of the South Downs were ploughed up to grow much-needed food for a Britain largely cut off from the sea routes that usually brought its food.

And so now we have the sweeping views of rolling hills, spattered with woodlands. Here in West Sussex there’s quite a bit of forest, although right now I’m walking between farmed fields and the wind is galloping along the open bridleway toward me at a steady clip.

Uppark House across the valley.

Off in the distance, well placed on the side of a distant hill, looms a minor stately home, Uppark House. I’ve visited there with my mother in the past. You never know what bit of history, what recognizable characters, you’ll trip across in these properties, now open to the public. Uppark is connected with Lady Emma Hamilton (1765 – 1815), notorious for her entanglement with Admiral Lord Nelson, and was home to the futurist writer H.G. Wells, (The War of the Worlds, 1898, The First Men on the Moon, 1901) whose parents were employed there.

Giant Digit

My trail guide now promises a visit to a Bronze Age long barrow – an ancient burial mound - and I can clearly see an imposing one surmounting a slope off to the right. Rather a long way off I think, the path’s going to have to make a dramatic turn to reach that! It doesn’t, and instead I lower my sights, literally, to see ahead of me a long low grassy mound tucked into the lee of a hedgerow. This, it transpires, is Bevis’s Thumb, the designated barrow on my route. Bevis was a giant of long ago.

This overgrown grassy mound is Bevis's Thumb, a "barrow" covering an ancient burial site - who knew? Thumb, eh?

“The old tales tell that Bevis ate an ox washed down with two hogsheads of beer every week. This same Bevis was said to have cast his sword off the parapets of Arundel Castle.” (http://www.britainexpress.com/attractions.htm?attraction=3133)

Bevis’s Thumb marks the furthest reach of my walk, and I turn back downhill through hazel coppice to regain the village square where my sister Elizabeth is waiting to whisk me back to modern civilization.

Woodland management by coppicing: trees, especially hazel, willow and chestnut, are cut close to the ground because they then regrow multiple trunks. These trunks can be harvested for many uses: fence posts, tool handles, firewood, and, nowadays, biomass for power stations. Just as thousands of years of grazing have altered the downland habitat, so centuries, or millennia, of coppicing, have created specific woodland environments. I have heard that nightingales like to nest in seven-year-old chestnut coppice. My photo shows hazel coppice on Telegraph Hill.

2. As well as trapping the warmth of the sun and
channeling water to the trees' roots, the tree tubes
are bio-degradable. On my Telegraph Hill walk I
spotted some, probably from 1987,
that are busily degrading!

1. After the Great Storm of October 15, 1987,
which felled 22 million trees across
southern England, I joined other volunteers to plant
many young replacement trees, protected
by tree tubes like this one. These tubes create a
microclimate conducive to
growth.

It was a fine walk, and I was delighted to find, on further investigation, that it's part of a set of short walks clustered around an 18-mile circuit through eight parishes. The circuit is called The Octagon Way (http://southdowns.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Octagon-Walks-The-Octagon-Way.pdf) and my sister and I are now plotting how we can cover all this ground. Gradually, I hope!

More pix from Telegraph Hill: