30 June: Solitude by the sea.

On this day in 1826 Charles Lamb replies to John Dibdin who has written from Hastings, Sussex, where Charles and Mary Lamb had enjoyed many walks on their own holidays.

Let me hear that you have clamber’d up to Lover’s Seat; it is as fine in that neighbourhood as Juan Fernandez, as lonely too, when the Fishing boats are not out; I have sat for hours, staring upon a shipless sea. The salt sea is never so grand as when it is left to itself. One cock-boat spoils it. A sea-mew or two improves it.

By the way, there’s a capital farm house two thirds of the way to the Lover’s Seat, with incomparable plum cake, ginger beer, etc.

from “The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 Letters 1821-1842

Four miles from Hastings, the Lovers’ Seat is on the Fairlight cliff, seen here from Pett Level on a day when clouds were forming at the cliff top. Although the beach often has families enjoying the sand that lies below the shingle seen here, a little way off are quiet spots where one can stop and stare. A rare solitude for Lamb, the convinced Londoner.

Where and when today can I find a few minutes of solitude with God and creation?

Juan Fernandez is a group of Islands in the Pacific Ocean belonging to Chile; it includes Robinson Crusoe Island, though that name was not in use in 1826.

Sea-mew: sea gull, especially the common gull.

The gate at Snailham Level Crossing

Not any old gate

We came across this gate while walking in Sussex. When we got home I saw that there were a few stories to be heard – or seen – here.

This is where a track crosses the railway, or better, the other way about, because the track was there well before the railway was built. There was a station here, though few passengers. The station had a wooden platform, wooden shelter and no lighting, oil, gas or electric. Not surprisingly. there is little to be seen of the station, nor of the crossing keeper’s cottage.

The footpath is on the Brede Level marshland. It must get very muddy, so someone has added cobbles to make the foot crossing dry. The crossing keeper would surely have kept the gates open to trains, closed to road vehicles, so the position was something of a sinecure, or a job for an elderly worker still strong enough to manage the heavy gates. There were fewer road vehicles than trains. A lightweight farm gate either side of the track is all that’s needed.

The old pedestrian gate is a picture; I guess it’s XIX Century. Its new galvanised post suggests that a surveyor did not want to scrap this unique specimen – the one on the opposite side is quite different, but both were clearly handmade by carpenter and blacksmith, probably in the South Eastern Railway works at Ashford. No question of an off-the-peg gate here. Note the decorative work on the top hinge, and the swivelling pulley cover to keep fingers safe; its makers took pride in their work. The gate frame will have been made of hardwood, possibly English oak, and when the upright palings had perished a sheet of marine plywood was substituted. Railwaymen seem to have had a soft spot for this gate over the last 150 years or so.

Modern technology is represented by the telephone: drivers of slow moving vehicles are warned to call the signaller for the all clear before crossing the railway. We arrived here by foot downhill from Udimore where King Edward III once stayed. He was supervising defensive fortifications at nearby Winchelsea in 1350 when the Spanish fleet came into sight and gave battle, ending in an English victory, witnessed by Queen Phillipa from the top of the track we are following.

Since then a naval safe haven has become a saltmarsh, supporting sheep beside the river; and the sea is now some distance away.

In the distance across the marsh is a hill with a village and pub, a destination for our walk. A shared walk, a shared meal; reminders of why we chose to share all things, for better or worse, forty-three years ago.

Behold the sea itself!

Here is the beach at Pett Level, Sussex, a few miles west of Brighton. Today we have a Londoner’s reflections on the seaside and walking around Sussex, up to 15 miles a day. Mary Lamb was in Brighton with her brother Charles and a friend. She is writing to Dorothy Wordsworth up in the Lake District. Seaside holidays 200 years ago! A little taste of her summer in our winter.

I resolved to learn to look out of the window, a habit I never could attain in my life, and I have given it up as a thing quite impracticable—yet when I was at Brighton last summer, the first week I never took my eyes off from the sea, not even to look in a book. I had not seen the sea for sixteen years.

Mrs. Morgan, who was with us, kept her liking, and continued her seat in the window till the very last, while Charles and I played truant and wandered among the hills, which we magnified into little mountains and almost as good as Westmoreland scenery. Certainly we made discoveries of many pleasant walks which few of the Brighton visitors have ever dreamed of—for like as is the case in the neighbourhood of London, after the first two or three miles we were sure to find ourselves in a perfect solitude.

I hope we shall meet before the walking faculties of either of us fail. You say you can walk fifteen miles with ease,—that is exactly my stint, and more fatigues me; four or five miles every third or fourth day, keeping very quiet between, was all Mrs. Morgan could accomplish.

God bless you and yours. Love to all and each one.

I am ever yours most affectionately M. LAMB.

From The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796-1820, Edited by E. V. Lucas

Local food II: ask the local supermarket

Jempson’s is a local supermarket group in East Sussex, committed to sourcing food locally when they can. Compare their five reasons to shop locally to the Goods Shed’s ten that we saw the other day; which is more considered, which is more convincing?

Jempson’s seem to know and value their suppliers. This post card, free by the checkout, spreads the word, and others celebrate some of their farmers and producers, as you can see below. Hard-working, innovative workers, local heroes indeed!

Fleecy tenants

fleecy tenants

… The sheepfold here
  Pours out its fleecy tenants o’er the glebe.
  At first, progressive as a stream they seek
  The middle field: but, scatter’d by degrees,
  Each to his choice, soon whiten all the land.
  

(from William Cowper’s The Task

When Cowper wrote this in the 18th Century he was living in Bedfordshire, almost as flat as the Sussex salt marshes, where the picture was taken. And he would have seen the occasional stage coach pass by, not hourly trains, as seen in the background here.

A delightful word picture, an illumination like those little sketches in mediaeval manuscripts.

Sussex by the sea

Mrs Turnstone’s proposal of a few days in Sussex was inspired. We went to Pett Level, long a family favourite beach. The pebbles are relaxing to look at, relaxing to lie upon.

The south-facing beach can glow in many shades of blue;on this warm day, following rain, clouds were forming on shore and at sea.

Looking inland from the same spot; Romney Marsh is protected by the sea wall, so high that not even top deck bus passengers can sea the see from the road just below us. Romney Marsh sheep and red Sussex cattle grazing. A little along the coast and the dunes were held in place by a miniature forest, largely of elder. At the base we found stonecrop, poppies, ragged robin and viper’s bugloss.

In a wet woodland we were surrounded by orchids, yet more beautiful when seen in close-up. The resident wild boar did not disturb us.

Hospitality towards Barn Owls

Barn Own

At Trotton Place lived Arthur Edward Knox, whose Ornithological Rambles in Sussex, published in 1849, is one of the few books worthy to stand beside White’s Natural History of Selborne. In Sussex, as elsewhere, the fowler has prevailed, and although rare birds are still occasionally to be seen, they now visit the country only by accident, and leave it as soon as may be, thankful to have a whole skin.

Guns were active enough in Knox’s time, but to read his book to-day is to be translated to a new land. From time to time I shall borrow from Mr. Knox’s pages: here I may quote a short passage which refers at once to his home and to his attitude to those creatures whom he loved to study and studied to love:—

“I have the satisfaction of exercising the rites of hospitality towards a pair of barn owls, which have for some time taken up their quarters in one of the attic roofs of the ancient, ivy-covered house in which I reside. I delight in listening to the prolonged snoring of the young when I ascend the old oak stairs to the neighbourhood of their nursery, and in hearing the shriek of the parent birds on the calm summer nights as they pass to and fro near my window; for it assures me that they are still safe; and as I know that at least a qualified protection is afforded them elsewhere, and that even their arch-enemy the gamekeeper is beginning reluctantly, but gradually, to acquiesce in the general belief of their innocence and utility, I cannot help indulging the hope that this bird will eventually meet with that general encouragement and protection to which its eminent services so richly entitle it.”

There is a naive verbosity about some writers of Edwardian times, as we British count the XX Century before the Great War. This passage is from “Highways and Byways in Sussex” by E. V. Lucas, 1904, but of course the passage from Knox is older still. I hope both men would appreciate today’s general good will and legal protection towards birds and the scientific study of them, but both men could tell us something of what has been lost in the years since then. We should be less complacent.

Sunflowers

Last year, for reasons that now escape me, I took my beloved Brompton bike for a ride around Rye, across the border into Sussex, as a reflective part of my birthday celebration. I passed to the north of a field of sunflowers, which, being sun-worshippers, all had their backs to me.

This time, my seventieth year from heaven completed, we celebrated beneath these sunflowers at the L’Arche garden in Canterbury. This time, we were to the south of the blooms, and received the blessing of their faces, reflecting their master as they smiled upon us.

And a good time was had by all!

Not far behind

A reminder of what May looks  like! I found this picture of the inviting Worth Way in Sussex as I was reorganising files to set up the new computer. I enjoyed this ride over former rail lines and quiet roads, despite facing determined lycra clad racing cyclists going the opposite way on the road! My trusty Brompton refuses to be a townee bike!

Killers

September had turned warm again, it was a good day to enjoy a sandwich in sight of the sea near Rye Harbour, and watch the world go by.

There were fewer humans than the last time I was this way, which was in August, but there were plenty of birds, as always. What first caught my eye was a small group of sand martins, swooping and swirling, stirring themselves up for the long flight to Southern Africa. Not quite ready to go yet! Was it a family group, the parents imparting their final advice before taking off in earnest?

A cormorant passed by, purposefully facing the light westerly breeze. A different spectacle altogether: its flying looked like hard work, though we know the grace they acquire as soon as they are in their watery element.

It must have been the frequent sightings of fighter planes this Battle of Britain month that set me comparing the martins to Spitfires, all speed and aerobatics and the cormorant to a ponderous Wellington bomber: killing machines both. So are the martins and cormorant killers, but not of their own kind and no more than necessary to feed  themselves and their children.

We humans know better than that of course.

(Another day at the same place.)