A personal, cultural and historical record of West Sussex
THIS BOOK – a memoiristic cultural and historical record of West Sussex – grew on me like primroses along a verge. There is nothing particularly special about its subject, “a fairly obscure patch of rural England”. But the stretch of the South Downs between “Pulborough and Chichester” is where the cultural historian Alexandra Harris grew up and, although she left it as a youngster without a backward glance, there came the moment, “Midway upon the journey of my life”, when she found herself drawn home again: “Never go back they say, but for me the return was a revelation”. Finding herself interested in what she had discarded, she began to make regular return visits to explore its histories in the archives and hers within it – and The Rising Down is the result.
As she traces the area’s evolution through the centuries – from the day in 1253 when an anchorite was walled up in the church at Hardham to the contemporary struggles and joys of her childhood friend Caroline, from Pulborough, in dealing with an ageing mother – Harris illustrates the intersection of place and time with human thought. The Rising Down is a beehive of voices and aspirations, ahum with busyness; all these people, sometimes centuries apart from each other, often treading the same soil, through the same trees, by the same sea.
The book takes a chronological approach, with each of the four parts dealing with one century. The first looks back to William Camden’s Britannia (1586), but is mostly concerned with the seventeenth century. It begins in earnest in the 1630s, with an anonymous water bailiff who wrote about the River Arun “as if he were rowing downstream, talking as he went”, for “he knew the voices and habits of fishermen and bargemen as much as he knew the voices of the gentry whose lands and swans he could tell you blindfold”:
It hasteth under the Bridge by Greatham part whereof was sometimes the land of Sir Henry Tresgose. But by the way it taketh in a little Riveret that springeth from the foot of the Downs at Chantrey Farm in Storrington whence, driveing certain water mills, it passeth from Sillington.
Part II features visits to Sussex by eighteenthcentury luminaries such as the poet William Cowper (who found it as desolate as the Juan Fernández Islands in the South Pacific) and the naturalist Gilbert White (who travelled to Goodwood to observe the Duke of Richmond’s moose). There are also verses by three Sussex-born poets who moved away from the county, but recalled it in their later work: William Collins (who rediscovered a love for his native River Arun only after educating himse
