If Heaven were an English county...

if heaven were an english county...

The splendid views from Kingston Ridge on the South Downs in East Sussex – HerbySussex

In 1792 the poet William Cowper left his little corner of Buckinghamshire for the first time in 27 years, with only the airiest idea of his destination. “The other side of London,”

he thought, “nobody knows where.” The poet had been invited to join a creative colony near the South Coast. He lasted six weeks, until he was beaten down by “a wildness that rather encreases my natural melancholy”. Back he went to Bucks.

This fearful otherwhere was Sussex. It was reachable only by traversing mountains that unnerved him – Cowper never having seen an Alp. Those of us who grew up in the lee of the South Downs (from Old English dún, meaning hill) prefer the plaudit of Defoe: “The most pleasant beautiful country in England,” he wrote near Arundel on one of his tours.

The county enfolds majesty and mystery in its chalky curves and flinty pastures, and yet somehow it gets overlooked. “Sussex can hardly be said to exist in literature,” decreed W H Hudson in 1900. It’s true that painters have always made more of the place than writers; not long ago there was a gorgeous exhibition of Sussex landscapes at Pallant House in Chichester. Only after Hudson’s verdict did Ford Madox Ford take refuge from the trenches in an unplumbed cottage near Pulborough and start on Parade’s End.

Now there’s The Rising Down, Alexandra Harris’s beadily researched love-letter to the spaces of her childhood. Home for Harris was “a 1970s house in a 1920s lane” in the Sussex Weald (from the Old English word for forest) where the Downs commanded her horizon, “a solid green wave that never comes to shore”. Her spur to go back and write about it is a weighty gift from a friend: the annual records, from 1847 onwards, of the Sussex Archaeological Collections. Harris, who lectures in English, falls on this and other archives as if it were cocaine.

Starting at the moment Roman remains are disinterred from Sussex’s undersoil, she tracks down the people who walked the lanes, knapped the flints, thundered from the pulpits. And through scholarly willpower, plus a bit of imaginative whimsy, she forces them into life.

if heaven were an english county...

A regular citizen of Sussex: The Moose (1770), by George Stubbs – Bridgeman Images

Meet, therefore, the nameless anchorite who walled himself up in a tiny cell in Hardham church in the 1250s; the water bailiff who commanded the river Arun in the 1630s; the restlessly eccentric inventor who in the 1680s found new ways to cleanse clover, spin wool and “improve cyder”; Elizabeth Perkins, the rich Chichester wife who in the 1710s sued her husband over his spending on architecture. Perkins is fun to hang out with, but what really excites Harris is the court record as a stonemason gives evidence: “It’s rare to hear the voices of early 18th-century Sussex workmen talking about what they do.” And when they deign to visit, we hear all about the star names too – Cowper and co.

Harris frames her journey into the past as a deep Dantescan dive. “Midway upon the journey of my life, I found myself in Sussex,” she writes. Sometimes it feels as though she had landed in paradise, but signs of infernal disturbance are everywhere. England’s civil war happens on a widow’s doorstep. Refugees arrive from France’s revolution. Criminals are sent to the colonies from the Petworth House of Correction, while the destitute seek out new lives in Canada. “Here is Sussex,” one ecstatic emigrant declares of southern Australia. “Sussex without inhabitants, Sussex all our own.”

Later, Canadians arrive in uniform and practise amphibious invasions of France on the same beach where William Blake had one of his visions of Heaven. But the most singular transatlantic visitor is a moose, ordered for the Duke of Richmond’s menagerie at Goodwood, and idealised in oils by Stubbs. “There’s some doubt over whether the Duke took receipt of his first moose in 1766 or ’67,” writes Harris, and you absolutely know that she has sleuthed in every conceivable source.

Her last book was Weatherland, which reported on the sun, rain and snow seen and felt in English literature. This is another fascinating, evocative ramble, which belongs on the shelf of every reader in the county, and perhaps also in Montecito, California, to where the current Duke and Duchess have taken the county’s name.

The Rising Down is published by Faber & Faber at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

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