A Quiet Triangle For people interested in scenery—not everybody is—one
of the most attractive juxtapositions of contrasts in England is to be found in Sussex, among the by-lanes that lie like a hair-net over the triangle of country between the points Lewes-Brighton-Newhaven. The coast-line base of this triangle is about nine miles long: the sides up to Lewes at the apex about six miles each. Broken spurs of the South Downs run through it, and the River Ouse forms one side between Lewes and Newhaven.
In the middle of it stands a cement works, a collection of Heath Robiuson-like erections of the colour of fuller's earth. Traffic between the coast and London swirls down past this triangle, but Lewes acts as a groyne against this tide, dividing it and sending it to right and left. Leave the main roads to Brighton and Newhaven, and you enter a world as remote and timeless as Romney Marsh.
It is a country of contrasts ; the bare Downs folding within their caprice isolated pockets of riparian scenery, usually containing an old manor house, r r a farm, standing among timber where rooks gather and nest. Cattle and sheep move at leisure beyond the giant trees, within still luxuriant enclosures of meadowland.
I found Piddinghoc, a village on the Ouse, one sunny afternoon in the new year. The whole day had been calm and bright, after a week of violence and flood. The saturated Downs, the over-flowing streams, the trees standing in water, had that character which informs the after- math of sound when an orchestra suddenly ceases. I heard everywhere the trickling melody of water: but the water was bewitched in the sun- light, that took it at the level and changed it into cold, liquid fire. The Downs glowed like a badger's coat. Stone walls and tree-trunks were palettes of streaked colour.
What a scene ! A poet's madness ; a painter's despair ! It is impossible to convey, or even to describe, those experiences. One can give, as it were, only a nod and a wink to readers who at some time or other have known such exultation.
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