Downs contains, perhaps, the oldest remaining monument of man’s activity in the county: all the way from Heyshott to Ditchling Beacon, and, as it is claimed, even right on to Lewes, there runs what is evidently a prehistoric trackway. Its antiquity is proved by many indications, but chiefly by this, that it has sunk deep, even into the hardest soils. There is a point near Sutton, under Cold Harbour Hill, where it is perhaps twelve feet below the general level of the soil, and there are many places where it is over six. This old way, which is utilised almost throughout the whole of its length by modern lanes, links up centres of population which are as old, one must imagine, as the existence of mankind in this island. Their names are those which we have just seen in connection with the great estates to which these villages belong--Lavington, Bignor, Bury, Amberley, Storrington, Washington, Steyning, Bramber, Povnings, Fulcking, and so on eastwards to Lewes. It was not only the fertility of the loam, nor only the proximity of the Weald for a hunting-ground, that produced these little prehistoric villages, but also the excellent supply of water. Sussex is, perhaps, of all the English counties that one in which it is most difficult to find good water, as we have already seen in speaking of the Weald, and as we shall see further when we come to talk of the Chalk Downs. But these little villages, standing as they do just upon the crack where the chalk (which is permeable and full of water like a sponge) comes sharp on to the impermeable soil of the Weald, are all fed by a multitude of delicious running streams filtered through hundreds of feet of the pure carbon of the hills and bursting out along the old road. They turn mills, they water orchards and small closes, they spread into teeming fish-ponds, and have, more than any other cause, created these little villages. There is hardly one without its stream. Having reviewed these three belts--the coast-plain, the forest ridge, and the southern belt of the Weald--it remains for us to describe that which is by far the most important, namely, the South Downs. It will be necessary to devote to those hills a closer attention than we have given to the rest of the county, for one may call them, without much exaggeration, the county itself. Sussex is Sussex on account of the South Downs. Their peculiar landscape, their soil, their uniformity, give the county all its meaning. * * * * * [Illustration: SUSSEX HILLS] [Sidenote: THE CHALK-RANGES]