The battleground coast: smugglers, tank traps, shipwrecks and strange chalk figures - Cuckmere Haven
I finally visit the winding Sussex estuary, subject of the Eric Ravilious print in my study: coastline dotted with mysterious hill figures, dramatic cliffs and traps for marauding Germans
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We had a painting of Cuckmere Haven on our wall before I ever went there. It was by Eric Ravilious: a gift from my husband a few birthdays ago. It’s a landscape of the estuary, the River Cuckmere winding away in a tightly folded ‘S’.
The Eric Ravilious print of Cuckmere Haven, which hangs in our study.
I first became aware of Ravilious’s work at an exhibition at Compton Verney a few years ago, where his pictures were presented alongside a number of his British interwar contemporaries. All of them were masters of a familiar landscape made strange: John Nash with his paintings of the Wittenham Clumps and abstract interpretations of the Avebury megaliths. Ravilious was no different: he made many paintings of the South Downs area near Cuckmere.
View of Alfriston Church from the Cuckmere River.
With its washed out colours and watery depiction of the river snaking its way through the strangely lighted flatland to the sea it evokes the sense of space I’ve felt at other estuaries: canoeing down the river Mawddach, in North Wales, as a teenager, beneath the viaduct that carried us on the toy railway from Barmouth to Fairbourne as a child. The latter part of this journey is described in the novel Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, when the eponymous main character travels by train to visit a school friend in Barmouth:
“…gentler slopes fell to the estuary of Mawddach, which reaches far inland like a fjord. Finally, when we left the southern bank and crawled to the opposite side over the bridge, almost a mile long and supported on mighty posts of oak, on our right the river bed, inundated by the sea at high tide and looking like a mountain lake, and on our left Barmouth Bay stretching to the bright horizon, I felt so joyful that I often scarcely knew where to look first.”
The painting hangs in my study: I often look to it when I feel in need of escape.
Looking back inland, up the Cuckmere Valley.
One weekend we escape there for real: driving down to the Downs late on a Friday night, waking up to a wind-whipped and drizzly Saturday morning. We decide anyway to head out, on the South Downs way, down the thin rush-lined River Cuckmere as it winds towards the sea.
The Litlington White Horse.
The valley is home to a specimen of one of Ravilious’s favourite subjects: white horses carved into the downland chalk. The Litlington White Horse is just visible in today’s rain and drizzle, a faint stencil against the grass of the steep hill on the opposite side of the valley. This appears to be one of the few White Horses he didn’t paint: it isn’t a particularly good one, missing all the movement of, say, the one at Uffington, where you can stand on the eye and almost feel the energy of this three-thousand-years galloping horse.
The Long Man of Wilmington, on the (sunnier) Sunday.
Ravilious did make an etching of another hill figure nearby: the mysterious Long Man of Wilmington. Thought initially to be an ancient figure, similar to the Uffington White Horse, the first record of it is from 1710 when the surveyor John Rowley made a drawing of the figure. Though the figure itself is probably not this old, on the brow of the hill over the giant’s left and right shoulders sit two long barrows; in fact the shoulders and spines of the hills all around are dotted with Neolithic burials, along with later Bronze Age tumuli and settlements. Perhaps there is something about the sparse upper landscape of the downs that better bears these fossils. Indeed, on the top, in whipping wind and rain, fog coming down, you could be in any century: trudging across grass, over the featureless rolling surface, through the squat wind-bent trees.
And the real deal — Cuckmere Haven, where the river meets the sea.
When we finally round the brow of the hill to the sea, it is like walking into the painting: even the light today is the same, pale and gloaming. It is smaller than I expected: in my head I’d blown up the scale to be more like the Mawddach estuary, a stretch of water, at high tide, almost a mile across. There are no people in Ravilious’s painting but today a steady stream of them tramp up and down the tarmaced path by the river; crunch along the beach gravel, taking photos of the wind-riffled waves.
The beach at Cuckmere, which once had admiralty defences beneath the water to deter invading Germans in WWII.
Under that sea there used to be defences to prevent ships from landing, for fear of the aforementioned Germans. Many defences such as tank traps and pillboxes still dot the surrounding landscape. A German merchant ship, the Polynesia, was wrecked with a cargo of sodium nitrate in 1890: still visible at low tide. This is a small, sparsely inhabited inlet between Brighton and Eastbourne; it was definitely a weak spot. This was well known by smugglers, who favoured it for centuries as a landing place, a fact to which the numerous ‘Smugglers’ Inns’ nearby bear witness. In the middle of the village that morning, we had seen an old WWII mine that had washed up; the whole river was mined, for fear of German invasion. People much cleverer than me have probably already commented on how national identity can be strongest in the borderlands, where it is most threatened.
Stone atop the hill above Exceat, marking the site of the former parish church.
It’s an astonishing prospect here at the top of the hill, battered by the wind and waves. So perhaps it’s not surprising that there’s a squat cuboid stone in the ground, marking the site of what once was the parish church of Exceat, the tiny hamlet in the valley. The village was virtually depopulated by 1460, possibly because they suffered badly from the Black Death. As a result, it was combined with a neighbouring parish, and the church pulled down. But the airy location still preserves a certain something: a closeness to the heavens, perhaps, or a bid for shelter against the bracing sea.
Looking along the Seven Sisters cliffs. The lighthouse at Beachy Head just visible in the distance.
We walk on along the coast over the top of the Seven Sisters, the vast chalk cliffs marching in line until the mother of them all: Beachy Head. Well known for other reasons — a daily chaplaincy team now patrols for people who seem at risk — it is in fact the site of an ancient settlement. Burial mounds crown the hill: their location spectacular and exposed.
The dragon mascot outside Ye Olde Star Inn, Alfriston, retrieved from a Dutch ship after the Battle of Beachy Head.
In July 1690 it was the backdrop to the Battle of Beachy Head: engagement of the Nine Years war, and France’s greatest victory over her British and French opponents. A mascot from one of the Dutch ships — a red dragon that’s had a few licks of paint in the years since — is outside Ye Olde Star Inn, currently being renovated on Alfriston’s High Street. Finally, the skeleton of the Beachy Head Lady was uncovered here: a woman of sub-Saharan African origin who appeared to have lived her whole life in the south of England around 200AD.
The view back along the Seven Sisters cliffs.
She is just one of many people in this area who have been lost and found at sea. Eric Ravilious, for his part, was lost in 1940: he was a war artist, and was on a flight in Iceland when his plane went missing.
If you’d like to follow the route we took, you can find it here (we bailed out at Eastbourne due to weather).
Cultural titbits for this week —
Podcast. I’ve recently discovered the Great Lives series on Radio 4 and don’t know what I’ve been missing. Just 30mins, light hearted hosting from Matthew Parris and a great mix of people, from the well known (Emma Hamilton) to the deep cuts (Tove Jansson, author of the Moomin books). A personal favourite was Tom Holland’s episode on Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians: an Anglo-Saxon woman who I’d never heard of but who did much to civilise our country and defend it from the Danes. You can listen on all podcasting platforms.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s adventure! Please send me your comments, feedback and recommendations for places to visit… is there somewhere in your area that deserves a little more attention? You can comment directly on this post, or reach me on Twitter or Instagram: I’d love to hear from you.
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Sincerely,
Ruth