Indeed, all over the broad back of the Downs, for seventy miles and more, these patches of woods, both in the combes and up on the shoulders of the hills, are a necessary part of Sussex. They exhibit the unconquerable nature of the county, its strongholds of silence and of desertion within an hour or two of London, and within a short walk of those flaring new places which have sprung up upon the sea-shore. The past and the very meaning of the county can still be remembered in the names of those woods. Here are certain of the “forests” remaining. Right at your feet is Houghton Forest, the remnant of a great royal wood lost to the Crown perhaps in the civil wars. This view along the Downs tells you many other things about the county: you have, for instance, close beside you, not three miles away, perhaps the earliest and until latterly one of the most used of the “Passes” over the Downs--the cross-roads at Whiteways. The London road and the road which had followed along under the Downs from Lewes unite at the summit of the Saddle, and lead travellers from the capital or from the Weald to Arundel or to the sea-plain. It is an example of those passages over the hills which have been mentioned as running from Cocking near Midhurst right away to Lewes, and which have their best roads at Duncton, here at Whiteways, at Washington, and beyond New Timber at Clayton. [Illustration: OLD WHITING MILL, MIDHURST] [Sidenote: VIEW FROM GUMBER] Those river valleys which we have seen to be so peculiar to the modelling of the South country--trenches cut right through the chalk and appearing to ignore the natural watershed which the hills would form--come also into this landscape. The greatest of them is right before you in the Arun valley. If it is winter you will see in the sheets of water surrounding the river why these valleys were not used for communication, and why to this day, though the railway has built itself an embankment across the marshes, no road runs through along the level floor, which would seem at first sight the obvious gate through the Downs from the Weald to the sea. You can also see from this point of vantage one of those castles which guard the gates of the county, for you can see to the north of the gap the ruins of Amberley. In a word, you have the whole nature of the Downs and of the sea-plain before you as you look from Gumber. But you have also much more. Turn to the northward, and there lies before you the whole stretch of the Weald: its towns, its little sandy pine-clad heights, its irregular plan, the large remains of its old woods and heaths. Far beyond it you may see, like another wall answering the southern wall of the Downs, the line of the Surrey hills; and all Sussex which is not maritime lies between you and them in one sweep.