Evidence of a prehistoric “farming collective” has been discovered after aerial laser scanning was carried out in the South Downs National Park.
Sites in West Sussex
Articles
A 4,000-year-old skeleton found on farmland in West Sussex was probably a warrior chief who was killed in battle, scientists have revealed.
Dozens of tools thought to have belonged to Neanderthals have been dug up at an archaeological site called Beedings in West Sussex.
...It is the first modern scientific investigation of the site since it was discovered in 1900.
...The tools were only recently recognised to be of international importance, following research by Roger Jacobi of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project.
The Devil was angry at the conversion of Sussex, one of the last counties to be converted from Paganism, and especially at the way churches were being built in every Sussex village. So he decided to dig right through the South Downs, a range of hills along the south of Britain. He swore that he would dig all the way through the hills to let the sea flood Sussex in a single night and drown the new Christians. He started inland near the village of Poynings and dug furiously sending huge clods of earth everywhere. One became Chanctonbury hill, another Cissbury hill, another Rackham Hill and yet another Mount Caburn.
Towards midnight, the noise he was making disturbed an old woman, who looked out to see what was happening. When she realized what the Devil was doing, she lit a candle and set it on her windowsill, holding up a metal sieve in front of it to create a dimly glowing globe. The Devil could barely believe that the sun had already risen, but the old woman had woken her rooster who let out a loud crowing and Satan fled believing that the morning had already come. Some say, that as he fled out over the English Channel, a great lump of earth fell from his cloven hoof, and that became the Isle of Wight; others say that he bounded northwards into Surrey, where his heavy landing formed the hollow called the Devil’s Punch Bowl.
Jacqueline Simpson, The Folklore of Sussex (1973). Quote ‘borrowed’ from Encyclopedia Mythica (who may have swapped the word ‘cock’ for rooster).
pantheon.org/areas/folklore/folktales/articles/devilsdyke.html
Some of the ancient hill-top sites of Southern England are named in this poem by Rudyard Kipling:
“The Run of the Downs”
The Weald is good, the Downs are best -
I’ll give you the run of ‘em, East to West.
Beachy Head and Winddoor Hill,
They were once and they are still.
Firle, Mount Caburn and Mount Harry
Go back as far as sums’ll carry.
Ditchling Beacon and Chanctonbury Ring,
They have looked on many a thing;
And what those two have missed between ‘em
I reckon Truleigh Hill has seen ‘em.
Highden, Bignor and Duncton Down
Knew Old England before the Crown.
Linch Down, Treyford and Sunwood
Knew Old England before the Flood.
And when you end on the Hampshire side -
Butser’s old as Time and Tide.
The Downs are sheep, the Weald is corn,
You be glad you are Sussex born!
From Kiplings ‘Rewards and Fairies’ online at hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/kipling/Rewards-fairies.pdf