Journey 5: Taking Root...

Migration. Plague. Persecution. Revolt. Recovery. Rewilding. The spirals and cycles of history across the Cuckmere Valley, South Downs, Sussex.

‘Imagine all those who have ever been here before you, over the millennia; our ancestors from the Middle East, Africa and across Europe, travelling over the land bridge to this island before it split apart from the mainland, escaping environmental disaster, war or persecution…’

A story walk, originally written for a Listening Post on the site of Exceat Hill, Seven Sisters Country Park, South Downs, UK.

So you‘re at the gate here.

Maybe you walked right past them on the left, as you made your way up Exceat Hill?

They were just on the further rise of the chalkland hill behind you.. perhaps you were more focused on the path ahead, or the meanders down there in the basin of the valley. Or maybe you caught sight of a buzzard, or a kestrel above, or were distracted by the crunch of tiny shells under your boots?

But before you open this gate and bear left down to Foxhole in the lower crook of the valley and perhaps up onto the Seven Sisters, or continue straight down towards the beach, just take a look over your shoulder and onto the ground.

You should be able to see them, especially if its spring or summer.

There are two of them. Two desire paths, or desire lines as they are also called; skinny but distinct trails compressed into the grassland, by footsteps, worn in over the centuries most probably. An ancient form of intuitive wayfinding, a trampled shortcut that one generation of humans or animals leaves for the next.

One path rises straight up towards the brow of the grassy knoll, the other path, to the right as you are facing it, takes you around its waist to the vista behind.

            I invite you to take the left, most direct one – or I’ll take it for you if you’re listening at home. I admit it doesn’t look that promising, no visible landmark ahead suggesting that this desire path is asking to be followed any more than the many others snaking up and over this side of the Cuckmere Valley.

But stay with it, and when you reach the top, you will find a single, slightly moss-eaten Portland stone with an inscription on it, marking the site of a former church. But you won’t see the name of the 15 year old boy, Maurice Theodore Lawrance, who first stumbled across the remains of this church, on this stone. He found it, amid the flint and chalk rubble and the summer grasslands, as he was wandering the valley in 1913. However, you can see him as a war martyr set into a stained-glass window, over at All Saints Church in West Dean where his father was the Rector; one of the 20 million soldiers killed in action, and it happened just three years after his discovery here. The boy who sparked the dig that revealed the forgotten, Saxon village of Exceat.

A church means there was a village settlement here once. I imagine the lights of this church were the first to be seen from the sea, an early beacon of sorts, a sign to those on ships – whether friends or invaders – of a safe or open haven here. A naval base during King Alfred’s time in the power struggles with the Danes, it began with only seven settlers.

There were 250 people scattered across this valley by 1086, 24 households in all, including a farm on the site of the Seven Sisters Visitor Centre you may have walked up from, down at New Barn Bottom, around Foxhole, and beyond towards West Dean. Among them were likely to be smallholders and freemen as well as serfs and villeins, those medieval slaves tied to land and lord over generations. See them, drawing full and profitable nets of fish, and in the height of summer, with large shallow pans around the meanders, turning marsh salt into brine, for boiling in salt houses.

They woke to the abundance of this beautiful valley every morning; the writhing of the silver snake of the meanders, the bright welcome of the chalk, and what must have been then a much clearer, cleaner, sparkling sea.       

As part of the wider population of England, working people had already had it tough and chaotic, even before the big change came. A cataclysmic ‘little ice age’ earlier that century had triggered rising sea levels, poor soil quality and the Great Famine. There was a national wipe-out of cattle from disease. Poverty, sickness and hunger, unaffordable prices, a wage drop and soaring taxes. All this, underpinned by persistent class oppression, keeping workers in perpetual debt bondage. And in coastal areas like this one, cycles of attacks by French raiders wore communities thin, building up to the turmoil of The Hundred Years War, borne out of festering nationalism and Anglo-French conflicts over entitlement and territory.

The spirals and cycles of history.

And then, from 1347, a sudden sweep from across the channel brought life to a head and death to doors across the entire country. The desperate attempts to explain, rationalise and blame specific communities for what happened, did not stop its charge towards these shores. The superstition of diseased air, which it was claimed could be cured by the fragrance of flowers, musk, or camphor. The excesses of human sin and pride, which could be solved by prayer alone, people were told. The toxic and paranoid beliefs in the poisoning of well water by Jewish communities on the European mainland, which led to their persecutions and massacres by Christian extremists - who had already expelled much of the community from this country.

No. It was simply the pin prick of a bacteria, Yersinia Pestis, on the hair of a flea, on black rats aboard ships coming into havens like this one, bringing fever, headaches, vomiting, swollen lymph nodes, blackened fingers, toes and noses; the sudden shock, delirium and horror of what later became known as the Black Death.

A health apocalypse. The end of days, some said.

A bubonic plague that destroyed tens of millions of lives across Europe and worldwide. With only three men left alive in this once thriving valley settlement, the village was totally abandoned by the mid 1400's. Unlike the rise of the Neolithic burial mounds of those earliest farmers, or that of their Bronze Age ancestors across this area, there was no marker, no place for remembrance of those lost inhabitants. So many bodies during the plague, with no-one left strong or healthy enough to carry them or priests alive to oversee proper burial. This was particularly true of the workers, the poorest, who were most likely to have been thrown into plague pits, their names erased from history like the memory of this village was for centuries.

            As human settlements like those in this valley were left derelict, the land was too, a third of it unharvested. Crops rotting. Sheep and cattle left wandering, many dropping, starving and dying in the fields. An enforced period of rest after so much death and turbulence. Yet this also meant more space and resource was available for those who had survived; the potential for social mobility, and a rise in wages, which was resisted by the elites.

After waves of rural migration to towns and a growing discontent and resistance to the shackles of serfdom, came The Peasant’s Revolt, the Great Rising. The focused fury by rebels marching on the capital for justice.

A brief promise of greater freedom by the nervous Crown, a glimpse of change. But inevitably - suppression, betrayal and executions. A movement for change almost as faint in memory as this village itself. Subjects not citizens then, and still now.

If you are standing here, on this summit, under what might have been the porch of a tiny church, then perhaps you too have survived a crisis, are in recovery, or in resistance.

Perhaps you too have known the frozen loneliness, the sleeplessness, the feverish oblivion of a more recent pandemic, or a different, serious health crisis of body or mind?

Or, if you are listening at home, maybe you are going through this now, or you are caring for someone who is ?

If so, have you, like me, longed for the fresh tumble of valley air into your lungs, out in an open landscape like this? As your sickness took root, did you, like me, dream of drifting up among the necklace of the stars, in endless space, to escape your body, and travel out of earth’s orbit?

For months, I missed, what I now know is a privilege - that of an able body and mind, with the strength and the means to access and walk safely in landscapes like this. I missed the intense thrill of hearing the skylarks raving joyously up here, and the soft hair of the grassland to hold me as I sat writing, drawing, or just…being.

A few weeks into my recovery, lying in bed, the image of a particular tree came to mind, which, if you are up here, you will have already met right across this valley and over the South Downs.

My favourite tree, my teacher; the hawthorn.

The villagers would probably have made frequent use of its creamy blossoms and red berries, in tinctures for heart conditions or in the pastes applied to the boils and sores of the afflicted. You might know that the hawthorn is not only a healer, but the embodiment of survival through adversity. Thorny, resilient, in wind, storm and surrounding chaos, it takes on the shape, bending backwards, of a constantly blowing handkerchief. A shape that has enabled it to live for up to 400 years, as its tap root remains connected to its source, deep below the ground. It is adaptive, as are we. Our own tap root, our inner strength, may be weakened through the life crises we face, yet still we pulse.

If it’s dry and warm, try sinking your bare feet or hands into the ground. And when you head back downhill, try doing this ever so slowly, if weather allows. Maybe there are gentling rain drops moistening your skin right now, or you’ve lain down and are soaking in the longed-for heat of a Spring or Summer day or an early Autumn evening.

Bring to mind a friend who’s not here who needs this air, needs revival, needs connection.

Speak their name.

                 And, since we are on a former sacred site, how about a little more; imagine all those who have ever been here before you, over the millennia. The ancestors from the Middle East, Africa and across Europe, travelling over the land bridge to this island before it split apart from the mainland, escaping environmental disaster, war or persecution. The imprint of so many humans, since and now, creating these desire paths through the landscape, with moments of pause and rest at points like this. Imagine us all, with our tap roots, reaching down into the depths of the estuary channel, connecting and intersecting with the families of hawthorn and other tree roots, and the moist genius of the mycelium networks. Imagine us all becoming more than human in the chalk, the soil and the mix of spring, river and seawater below.  

Where once there was deadly sickness in this valley, now there is a natural process of renewal happening here, as was first begun thousands of years ago by indigenous peoples across the world, striving to live in balance with a land that once belonged only to itself. The carefully curated cycles of rest, renewal and care you may know here as rewilding or renaturing, is an ancient practice. The tundra-like grassland, as it always does after catastrophes subsides, if given the space to, is fed by the chalk aquifers to gift us a miniature rainforest. Within this rainforest, many species, among them migrated settlers, take root and blossom; the violet-blue of chicory, the Red Clover, the lilac, purple and yellow flame of clustered bellflower, round-headed rampion, self-heal, kidney vetch and milkwort. The aromatic fragrance of wild thyme and marjoram. As the ponies and cows are taking the place of the sheep who once ate the flowerheads and cropped the grassland flat, even the Bee orchids are returning. Families of insects and animals can thrive here; blue butterflies, crickets, grasshoppers, tiny field voles, barn owls, foxes and badgers.

If you descend down to the beach, towards the cottages, and walk over the milky clay mud speckled with sea foam, or dip into rock pools, you may catch the rising scent of seaweed, or spot one of the treasures to be found in the wrack line at low tide. Occasionally you might spot a sea bean or ivory nut perhaps, floated over centuries and far shores from the Caribbean, Africa or the Americas to this one; a fragment of Fool’s Gold pyrite or a fossilised sea urchin, with its delicate pointed star form. Land, sea and river are interdependent, are lovers, are our lungs and arteries. Stand fast with all the many guardians of this valley and coast to protect it, so that the Blue belt of this shoreline, with its mussels, oysters, seahorses, seals and all surrounding heritage in a complex family system, finds fullest health again, and sings out to your descendants its welcome.

Here around you, life is rising again, like sun, and moon, and the peasants who rose up then, and those who walk together in solidarity to defend and reclaim lands and rights across this planet through these times.

The poet Rumi wrote, Where there is a ruin, there is hope of treasure. So one more thing, before you leave. Sit and have a quiet word of encouragement with your future self.

And if you do, perhaps the lines from your lips will fall lightly onto the ground, or rise up into a cloudless clear sky or into the smoky grey brew of a storm coming in. The next time you come here, I hope you will be greeted by bursting populations of new flowers or plants taking root, or see the insects or birds you have never seen before taking flight, high up and over the future canopy of this haven of dreams, desire paths, and ruins turned to hopes of treasure.

Listen to this in the Seven Sisters landscape as part of the We Hear You Now audiowalk, map and details here.