The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things. Tim Radford

three generations could meet and feast in the same house – but somehow it is surprising. We tend through our education or our experience or our preferred reading to pursue intimacy with one period of history rather than another, and I cannot successfully imagine in any detail the England of the Conquest or the medieval centuries. I know a bit more about the England of Henry VIII and Bloody Mary and Elizabeth I, but it has always seemed an alien place to me: another country, where poets brawled and courtiers plotted and kings warred and landowners went to sea and explored new worlds and then came back and were put to death; where the devout were tortured and then incinerated for believing in the same God while following a different ritual of celebration; where Sir Richard Grenville could take on a whole armada, squander the lives of his seamen, and be hailed as a hero for it, rather than condemned as a pugnacious madman.

      So the landscape of human ambition was different. The physical countryside beyond the cities seems to have remained throughout the centuries remarkably the same: the houses have changed, been rebuilt, extended and improved, again and again, but the terrain on which those houses stand seems barely to have altered. I stress the word seems. In 1586, William Camden visited Sussex, raced through its Roman past, briefly rehearsed its South Saxon origins, and then began to describe the county that I think I can see about me every time I go for a walk:

      … it hath few harbours by reason that the sea is dangerous for shelves, and therefore rough and troublous, the shore also it selfe full of rocks, and the South-west wind doth tyrannize thereon, casting up beach infinitely. The sea coast of this countrie hath greene hils on it mounting to a greater height, called the Downes, which, because they stand upon a fat chalke or kind of marle, yeeldeth corne aboundantly. The middle tract, garnished with medowes, pastures, corne-fields, and growes [groves] maketh a very lovely shew …

      In fact, Camden confirms that Sussex has certainly changed: the ‘rough and troublous’ seas that he records have torn away at the downland cliffs, and drastically rearranged the levels of Romney and Pevensey, have left the port and harbour of Rye and the castle of Bodiam stranded miles from the water’s edge, and have swept settlements away altogether. Camden describes Sussex:

      Full of iron mines it is in sundry places, where for the making and fining whereof there bee furnaces on every side, and a huge deale of wood is yearely spent, to which purpose divers brookes in many places are brought to runne in one chanell, and sundry medowes turned into poles and waters, that they might bee of power sufficient to drive hammer milles, which beating upon the iron resound all over the places adjoyning.

      Daniel Defoe, when he returned 150 years later, found Hastings barely worth a mention, and he observed that Rye

      would flourish again, if her harbour, which was once able to receive the royal navy, cou’d be restor’d; but as it is, the bar is so loaded with sand cast up by the sea, that ships of 200 tun chuse to ride it out under Dengey or Beachy, tho’ with the greatest danger, rather than to run the hazard of going into Rye for shelter.

      Dengey and Beachy must be Dungeness Point and Beachy Head. Defoe too was interested in the heavy industry of Sussex: ‘I had the curiosity to see the great foundaries, or iron-works, which are in this county, and where they are carry’d on at such a prodigious expence of wood, that even in a country almost all overrun with timber, they begin to complain of the consuming it for those furnaces, and leaving the next age to want timber for building their navies.’

      The iron mines, furnaces and forges have gone. So in fact this sense of permanence, this feeling of enduring history, is a tease: landscapes alter. Humans make their mark and then in a generation or two the marks are erased: the evidence of what has once been may be visible enough to archaeologists, ecologists and topographers, to trained eyes, but to most of us the countryside we see is timeless: because it is there, and because it looks just so – a little pathway through woodland, a small clearing among the beech and Scots pine that is ablaze with rampion and bladder campion and stitchwort and rosebay willow herb – we find it easy to believe it has always looked so. A second inspection reveals that the woodland is in fact an old hedge that has been neglected for long enough that its hawthorn, elm and beech constituents have grown to full height, and its canopy has closed over the path. The beech and Scots pine trunks around the woodland clearing at closer examination are seen to stand in rows; the pines were planted, and many of them replaced after the first thinning with beech seedlings; the foresters have been here, and left a little place in the sun for the wildflowers, but already new saplings are pushing their way above the shrubs. The countryside tends to be seen as humans wish it to be. Anthropocentrics all, we see the landscape from our point of view, and even the entity we call the beauty of the wilderness is simply a happy arrangement of high ground and valley, glacier and river, forest and sky, that fits the unconscious frame of reference that we have for beauty: nature builds the structures, but we provide the composition.

      Human appreciation changes too. Huxley, when contemplating the geology of Hampshire, Sussex and Kent, marvelled at the grandeur of the white cliffs of the Channel coast but patronisingly remarked that ‘the undulating downs and rounded coombs, covered with sweet-grassed turf, of our inland chalk country, have a peacefully domestic and mutton-suggesting prettiness, but can hardly be called either grand or beautiful’. The inland downs between Brighton and Eastbourne now seem to me to be one of the grandeurs of the world, precisely because their rounded, comely perfection – Kipling called them the ‘blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs’ – has been shaped by sheep. The Romney Breeders Association claims that the Romney sheep, the handsome, fleecy heavyweight of the Romney marshes, was the foundation of the great wool and mutton industry of New Zealand, but the other breed of sheep that we knew in New Zealand was the somewhat smaller, and perhaps more prettily mutton-suggesting Southdown, the basis (I am reminded by the Southdown Sheep Society) for Canterbury lamb, that is, lamb from the Canterbury plains of the South Island of New Zealand. This too takes its name from its place of origin, its first forwarding address, and this too is an old breed, one that would graze and manure downland pastures and enrich them enough for a wheat crop the following year.