Storytellers of the South Downs
January 24, 2020
© View Toward Firle, Derry Robinson
Through song, poetry, novels and plays, some of the world’s most respected and well-regarded writers have been inspired by the chalk ridges and wooded heaths of the South Downs National Park.
Hilaire Belloc called them “the great hills of the South Country”. For Algernon Swinburne they were “green, smooth-swelling, unending”. For Rudyard Kipling, “Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs.” When Nobel Laureate and author of The Forsyte Saga John Galsworthy died, he had his ashes scattered across them from a plane.
Virginia Woolf lived, walked and wrote on the South Downs, living in Monk’s House in Rodmell from 1919 until her death in 1941. Monk’s House and Woolf’s sister’s house in Charleston also served as retreats for much of the Bloomsbury group and its wider circle, including the likes of EM Forster, John Maynard Keynes, TS Eliot and Lytton Strachey.
150 years earlier and 100 miles away in Hampshire, Jane Austen felt most able to write when she was at her home in Chawton, inspired by her beloved Hampshire. And for Edward Thomas, the melancholy war poet that died at Arras in 1917, walking the forested hills around the Hampshire hangars brought solace and inspiration.
For Cressida Cowell, the author of the popular How to Train Your Dragon? series of books, it was memories of holidays visiting her grandmother and the myths and legends surrounding the South Downs that fuelled her imagination.
In the case of Rudyard Kipling and Charles Kingley, the South Downs conjured a romantic and imaginary England, as found in Kipling’s Burwash-based Puck of Pooks Hill and Kingsley’s Itchen-inspired Water Babies. For many though, this was fantasy made real, a place where a deeply held dream of the English countryside, with its cultivated fields, hedgerows and rolling hills, could still be found.
Arthur Conan-Doyle’s most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes retired to the South Downs, choosing to spend his waning years farming on the Downs just outside of Eastbourne. And, it was in the Sussex village of Felpham that William Blake wrote the lines to Jerusalem that celebrate ‘England’s pleasant pastures’ and ‘mountains green’.
It is a bond that continues today. Storytellers live in and visit the South Downs National Park, while many others come here to follow in the footsteps of literary heroes, old and new.
You came and looked and saw the view
Long known and loved by me
Green Sussex fading into blue
With just a touch of sea.
– Alfred Lord Tennyson