Free Channel Shore by Tom Fort Page A

grasped or understood, something still to be discovered.’ He manages to express the essence of what so many people find in living by the sea and being in constant communion with it: ‘We feel we have wider thoughts than we knew; the soul has been living, as it were, in a nutshell, allunaware of its power and suddenly finds freedom in the sea and the sky.’
    Later he ascends and lies on the grass: ‘The glory of these glorious downs is the breeze . . . if it comes from the south the waves refine it; if inland the wheat and the flowers distil it. The great headland and the whole rib of the promontory is windswept and washed with air; the billows of the atmosphere roll over it.’
    This is very beautifully put, but of course the Sussex Downs that Jefferies and his fellow master of nature writing, W. H. Hudson, wandered in the second half of the nineteenth century is beyond recognition now. Where it has not been gobbled up by housing it is annexed by the silent, deserted tracts of arable fields, or domesticated and brought to heel by the National Trust and the warriors of the heritage army. Its native people have gone, their country ways with them.
    Between Rottingdean in the west and Eastbourne in the east, sheep kept the turf and wildflowers cropped and springy. The shepherds were the rulers of the Downs. They were grindingly poor and any extra source of income was eagerly seized upon. The arrival in the late summer of a little bird called the wheatear (apparently a corruption of ‘white arse’) was one such. The wheatears collected on the Downs from all over the country to ready themselves for migration to North Africa. Plucked and roasted on spits, they were consumed in hotels and restaurants and grand houses with the same enthusiasm as aroused by the ortolan in France.
    The wheatears’ habits made them easy prey. They like to breed in holes and are naturally inclined to take refuge in them to shelter from bad weather or just to rest. To trap them ashepherd dug a shallow, T-shaped trench partially covered with the sod, and placed a snare made of horsehair inside, strong enough to detain the bird without throttling it. So many of these traps were dug that by September the downland looked almost as if it had been ploughed. Enormous numbers of birds were taken – forty or fifty per shepherd per day was standard, with the poulterer in Brighton paying eighteen pence a dozen. A shepherd in Parson Darby’s parish of East Dean is recorded as having taken a thousand in a day; so many that, instead of threading them onto crow quills in the normal way, he used his own coat and his wife’s petticoat as sacks to take them away.
    According to E. V. Lucas in
Highways and Byways in Sussex
, London gourmets travelled down to Brighton to feast on them in the season, in the same way that they migrated to Greenwich for whitebait and Colchester for oysters. For a few years some shepherds were making as much as £50 a year from the trade, but inevitably, given the slaughter, the numbers arriving began to drop steeply. In the 1880s landowners around Rottingdean banned their shepherds from trapping wheatears on the grounds that they were neglecting the sheep. By then many had given up anyway because there weren’t enough birds to justify the effort. In 1897 the wheatear was given statutory protection and trapping was banned altogether.

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    S TAND U P FOR P EACEHAVEN
    Seven Sisters
    The ride from Beachy Head was not amusing. The road descends steeply to Birling Gap, and west from there the clifftop is controlled by the National Trust, which does not welcome cyclists and installs gates intended to make that clear. I was forced inland onto the traffic-clogged A259 and as a result I missed the stretchof coastline including the Seven Sisters, Cuckmere Haven and Seaford Head. I was too cross to appreciate whatever charms Seaford may possess, and I’m afraid the place made no impression of any kind on me. I can, however, report that it does not