For me indeed the Downs, long as I have known them, remain most dear as a spectacle, but this you will miss altogether if you are actually upon them, lost amid their rolling waves of green turf with only the sky and the wind and the sun for companions. Therefore when I set out from Lewes to go westward I did not take the way up past the race- course over the battlefield south of Mount Harry towards Ditchling Camp and Beacon. Let me confess it, I followed the road. And what a road! In all South England I know no other that offers the traveller such a spectacle, where above him, in full view, that great rampart stands up like a wall, peak speaks to peak, till presently with a majesty and a splendour, not to be matched I think in our island, Chanctonbury stands forth like a king crowned as with laurel towering upon the horizon. Now this road I followed passes westward out of Lewes and then turns swiftly north, climbing as it goes, under the Downs beyond Offham, turning west again under Mount Harry and so on past Courthouse Farm and Plumpton church, which stands lonely in a field to the north of the road, till suddenly by Westmaston church under Ditchling Beacon it turns north again towards the Weald and enters the very notable village of Ditchling. All that way is worth a king's ransom, for it gives you all the steepness of the Downs upon their steepest side, their sudden north escarpment, towering up over the Weald some seven hundred feet or more. On a spring morning early I know no way more joyful. Ditchling Beacon itself stands some eight hundred and fifty feet above the sea and is the highest point in all the range of the South Downs, though it lacks the nobility of Chanctonbury. The earthworks here are irregular and not very well defined, but there is a fine dewpound to the east of the camp though perhaps this has not much antiquity, a seemingly older depression now dry in the north-west corner is rather an old rainwater ditch than a dewpound. Altogether it might seem that Ditchling Camp was rather a refuge for cattle than a military fortress. Ditchling village is charming, with more than one old half-timber house, and the church of St Margaret's is not only interesting in itself, but, standing as it does upon rising ground and yet clear of the great hills, it offers you one of the finest views of the Downs anywhere to be had from the Weald. It consists of a cruciform building of which the north transept and the north wall of the nave were rebuilt in the thirteenth century. The chancel, however, has some beautiful Early English work to show and the nave is rather plain Transitional. The eastern window and most of the windows in the nave are of the early Decorated period, the window in the south chancel aisle being somewhat later.