Between the high place from which you are thus looking southward and surveying the land toward the sea--between the main range of the Downs, that is, and the dead flat of the rich plough-land--you see, in one low summit after the other, those foot-hills of the Downs which are an essential part of the Sussex landscape, and which are so full of Sussex history. Here stand in a row, partly isolated from each other, Halnecker, with its gaunt deserted mill; Eartham, where Cowper for some little time wrote, and where perhaps the best portrait of him was painted. Next is the great wooded mass of the Nore Hill, now uninhabited and silent, but once a stronghold; the neighbouring summit of Slindon, which was Canterbury land, one of the great houses of the Archbishop; the promontory of the Rewell Wood, which hides Arundel; and farther off eastward that semi-conical lift of Cissbury, which the men of the place call High Down. Here first the Briton, then the Roman, then the Saxon held their trenches, and here has been found that most fascinating and absorbing relic of prehistory--a manufactory of flint implements, finished and half-finished, with the cores and the chips lying beside the completed work. This is what you see to the southward. Directly to the east and the west of you is the wall of the Downs, on the crest of which you stand. Nowhere else on the crest of that wall will you see them look so long or so sheer. You see them fall mile after mile on to the plain, some jutting slightly forward, as does Ditchling Beacon, upon the limit of one’s gaze, and the whole forming one strict escarpment, the like of which is not to be discovered to our knowledge elsewhere in the world. From this point you perceive and are filled with the utter loneliness of these hills; there is not a house on them nor a man, and they are the more [Sidenote: VIEW FROM GUMBER] lonely that you have so immediately, and yet so far, below you the little farmhouses in their combes. These combes, their names and their great hollows, recall to you the enormous antiquity upon which Sussex reposes. Their name is a Celtic name. It has outlasted the three great foreign invasions of the land--the Roman civilisers, the German pirate, and the re-entry of the Latins with the Norman Conquest. Their woods also have outlasted every destroyer, every cultivator, and engineer. No one can plough these steep hollows--the beeches have clung to them from the beginning and will cling to them always. Immediately beneath you is one such horseshoe, bitten into the mass of the Down; and if you stand still you can hear moving in it the life of beasts which men have never seriously disturbed. Small as these woods are, they are as primal and as isolated as anything you will find in any distant valley. They are not cut for profit, or at least very rarely, because the ground is too steep for haulage. They live their own life and are secluded.