Heartland Walks #2: Rookery Hill and Bishopstone

Ambiance: atmosphere, feel, setting, environment, mood, character, air, quality

Heartland: core, hub, nucleus, focus, centre, middle

Here: now, at this time/point/juncture

Locale: location, setting, place, milieu, area, locality, site, spot

Locality: area, neighbourhood, zone, vicinity, section, quarter, ghetto, district

Milieu: setting, environment, scene, background, situation, location, locale, ambiance

Neighbourhood: area, region, district, locality, zone, quarter, vicinity

Surroundings: environs, settings, environments, backgrounds, backdrops, atmospheres, ambiences

Vicinity: neighbourhood, district, locality, area, purlieu, locale

The rain is already close as Leo and I lock up and disappear into the weekend. The forecast predicts rain is still two hours off, but the dark phalanx of cloud marching eastwards suggests otherwise. The first spots are felt before we’ve walked a quarter of a mile and my wet weather gear is out and on as the curtain of rain washes over us. The ferry disappeared into it moments before and is gone, like disappearing into a waterfall. The wind is fidgety: a low breeze carrying the whiff of Newhaven’s industrial Saturday morning rises to a headwind, surfing the first enthusiastic rain wave, then settles back to near calm with the steady rain. We are crossing the chalk east ridge of the Ouse valley in search of the floodplain below. I have felt a growing appetite to watch and hear Curlew as they return from their upland nesting sites to coastal wintering grounds. We will explore the heartland of the Ouse floodplain. The tide is high and rising, so there is a good chance they will be sitting it out somewhere in or around the Ouse Estuary Local Nature Reserve. From a trig above The Rookery, the narrow ribbon of the Mill Drove shines wet and bisects the Tide Mills ruins. To its east the land stretches flat to the Buckle and curves inland through the old Pelham estate towards Bishopstone and its church sat slightly elevated above the once-marsh, where now a criss-cross of drains cut through damp meadows which still become a shallow wetland in winter. Curlews and countless other waders once would have piped the mudflats at low tide. Surrounding escarpment and steep ridges show where the tides would once have lapped up to twice-daily. This, then, shall be our starting point.

The road to the village at Bishopstone rises gently, so once over the stile built into the flint wall, one drops down into the floodplain below. A path into Bishopstone Wood - the Rookery - is a causeway between two ponds which dry out during good summers. Three other ponds lie nearby. They're alive with dragonflies then, but none are seen today as I pass towards the woodland edge. Great trees planted by Thomas Pelham-Holles, the Duke of Newcastle and twice Prime Minister, sometime after he inherited the land from his uncle in 1711, mark the boundary between the wood and pasture. They are outliving a decaying flint wall that follows the tree line and marks the route of Duke's Walk through the trees and up towards Norton Top. One of the largest sycamores I know stands over the corner with great vertical boughs reaching like outstretched fingers towards the sky. Its bark is thick with lichen-crusted scales. Elms and big beeches which may be nearly 300 years old mark the edge further up.

It takes a little imagination to see a harbour here with ships moored up, sailing between Rookery Hill and Hawth Hill to and from the river proper and the sea beyond, but this was once the scene. Perhaps the ponds are its last trace? To imagine this better, it is helpful to view the floodplain from Rookery Hill above. The hill was once a promontory bounded on three sides by the estuary. It has Bronze Age barrows and Romano-British and Saxon settlements which once looked across the tidal flats to neighbouring settlements on Hawth Hill and beyond across the floodplain to the sea. Much of this is buried beneath the bungalows of the Harbour View estate. The river followed an eastward course to the foot of Seaford Head until about 1567, and a ferry-boat operated at Bishopstone to transport people and livestock to and from the shingle spit and its road which stretched along the coast, beyond the parish of Sutton. In 1567 the river burst through the spit somewhere between what is now The Buckle and Tidemills. The channel beyond silted up and marked the end of Seaford as a Cinque Port. Only The Old Brickfield, The Salts and Martello Fields, the position of St. Leonard’s Church in the old parish of Sutton and the course of Steyne Road – steyne meaning a stony place – are physical hints of the old course of the river. Imagine the joy of being able to bypass the old port and its rules and taxes. Was there human agency involved with the change in the river’s course?

Later still, in the 1750s, a storm disturbed the shingle spit and the river broke through to the west at Meeching, soon to become the New Haven. Between these two events the floodplain at Bishopstone was a harbour. It’s fascinating to imagine ships moored where the seasonal ponds remain. Shapes in the ground today suggest banksides where the land rose out of the estuary. Water still influences this land, even if only as the dregs of its former glory.

Back below Rookery Wood, the lush grass and damp ground is no good for sheep grazing and a small herd of well-behaved cattle spends most of the year here and through the open gate leading into the field to the north, by the few houses. This land has lived different lives throughout history and the peaceful inertia of today may once have been rather more influenced by the tides and industry of the local people. This is a common theme that will recur as I walk south and then westwards through the floodplain. Standing now though in the once-estuary, where trees and pasture have replaced the wooden ships and their harbour, ripples of history can still be felt. The lowest levels are still inundated after the winter rains each year and the land is usually off limits during the early months. At these times it might even be navigable by boat.

Ghosts of East-side beach

Many wrecks are stranded along this beach.

I am walking along the western half of Seaford Bay towards the mouth of the River Ouse, where waters and silts from the catchment between here and Upper Beeding bloom in a final flourish from the river mouth into the sea. I have walked from Denton over downland via Bishopstone and The Buckle. The shingle underfoot gulps the energy from every stride as I trudge along it. I pause and ponder the past and see that this land is one of relics and ghosts. There is much happening close to here, but very little here itself occurs, little other than the circadian pulses of wavelet and tide, of morning and afternoon dog-walkers, of weekend beachcombers, and the passing of the weather and the seasons - each beating its own rhythm like the mainsprings of many clocks.

There is plenty of wildlife here to be seen. Amongst the birdlife alone one could see Ringed Plovers nesting in small undulations amongst the shingle and Purple Sandpipers picking at low tide amongst the encrusted skeleton of the east pier or hunkered down waiting at high tide for its ebb. Great Crested Grebes and Red-breasted Mergansers dive in sheltered, shallow water at quiet times; and gulls own the air above us all.

Short Type 184 seaplane, (public domain picture credit)

The sea to the south and a tidal creek to the north have created an in-between spit of land which is caught between the heartbeat of human habit that speeds past by boat or train, discarding relics in a multifarious eddy. Here are the old creek and its ruin of Tidemills, here also the ghosts of aircraft hangars and a slipway serving a First World War seaplane station, where Short Type 184 seaplanes performed anti-submarine patrols until the end of the war, and here also the ruins of the Chailey Heritage Marine Hospital, a recuperation home built in 1924 for disabled boys. It is hard to imagine now that the  Newhaven Marconi Radio Station operated from just in front of where I am standing, its tall white antenna visible from miles around. The ghosts of an astonishing array of spent industries all wither before me and before the eroding effects of the sea and the wind, run aground by time and progress like some sad Golgotha of storm-weathered bones. These and other less mighty structures have been swept up by the unforgiving temporal wave and cast high and dry upon on the strandline.

Newhaven east-side beach - seaplane station under construction (credit)

Chailey Heritage hospital, Newhaven East-side beach (photo credit)

Standing in mute reflection on this tongue of vegetated shingle, I am in the midst of activity: trains, ferries, tankers, container ships and fishing boats are all within sight and earshot. Yet here I find myself on a temporal hard-shoulder watching life surge past. I am in a grey, marginal world and, while I am here, I feel that I am entangled in the sidelines of time itself. The weather adds to this feeling: it is a grey, calm, silent day and the horizon is suspended somewhere between sea and sky in a vast sheet of brushed aluminium.

Along the strandline rests the remains of innumerable shellfish. We are taught as children that the some of the shells contain echoes of the sea when placed against the ear. Each shell is an echo of a former life reborn as a pretty, collectable trinket, a memory-echo of a seaside visit. If innumerable shells are here at this moment, how many shells, how many spent lives have stacked up along this one beach throughout history?

Each individual shell and half-shell holds within it the story of a life passed. For each half a bi-valve (a valve!), where now is its counterpart? How long since they hinged and jointly protected soft tissue within? There is something horrific resting quietly amongst these emaciated strandline shells which can be given flesh and made tangible by imagining their number replaced with the equivalent of something more charismatic: a wreck of dead seabirds, a beached pod of whales. Imagining this reveals something of the true extent of the horror. Do they now become something more than simple shells? Does the thin veneer of grey periostracum, violet in life, but soon to fade and peel in death, reveal something stark about the exquisite fragility of life itself?

Amongst the myriad species is the Rayed Trough Shell (Mactra stutlorum). This is an edible clam which lives burrowed in sand and gravel beneath shallow seas. The rays radiating out from the umbo suggest captured sunlight through water. Just a stone's-throw from where I am standing, in 1861, when the mouth of the Ouse river was being deepened, the Rayed Trough Shell became the object of a feeding frenzy. Paul Chambers, in his book British Seashells (2009), describes the drama:

...a harbour channel in Newhaven was being deepened using an industrial steam dredger but as the sediment was churned up, so thousands of rayed trough shells were disturbed and washed onto the beach, much to the delight of the local inhabitants. The Newhaven fishermen took advantage of this bonanza by clustering their boats around the steam dredger to haul up both the shells and fish that were being thrown up with the sediment.

Mactra stultorum - the Banded Ray Shell (credit)

One can imagine the noise from screeching gulls, excited townsfolk and booming industrial machinery. The commotion is long since silenced, broken today only when children fish and jump into the water from the skeleton of the eastern arm on hot summer days, or when dogs race excitedly across the wet sand at low tide, and of course with the passing of marine traffic and the awesome bass hum of ferries.


I make my way down the shelving shingle and to the sea, which is high but just on the ebb. Wavelets lap against the stones and disappear in tiny raptures. Several Purple Sandpipers are dotted along the pier, waiting for the tide to fall. The strandline contains a wealth of natural flotsam: cockles, otter-shells, common and American limpets, banded ray-shells,  scallops, oysters, razor-shells, mussels, netted and common whelks and their familiar spongy egg-balls, various sea weeds, crab-shells, cuttle-fish, mermaid's purses. Their Latin names slip off the tongue and conjure oceans of wonder: Patella vulgata, Littorina littorea, Crepidula fornicata, Ostrea edulis, Chlamys varia, Pecten maximus, Acanthocardia tuberculata, Laevicardium crassum, Mactra stultorum. I have counted more than two dozen species of marine mollusc here, but the natural flotsam is dwarfed by the volume of non-natural, human-induced filth. This is the swill and slop of a castaway consumer culture, the dreck and dregs of our age, a loathsome littoral litter, the feculence of efficiency. One cannot help but cast a sheepish eye back to 1861 and wonder how we came to navigate so far off course from a comparative harmony with the natural environment*.

Modern strandlines are a depressing example of human disregard for the natural environment. Amongst the world's litter along this beach there is a scum of palm oil or paraffin wax. This is a wreck of marine pollution cast adrift by humans, swilled out of some passing ship's hold to form a polar sea in miniature as fat-bergs bob and drift coast-bound at the mercy of tide, wind and wave. Plastics abound - memories stirred up by a stormy sea.

Nobody knows how long plastic remains in the marine environment. It doesn't biodegrade; it is broken into ever smaller pieces and is inadvertently ingested by the smallest marine species all the way up to the largest. Once it is deposited into the water it might remain in the sea or along strandlines for a very long time. Our grandchildren, nine or ten generations into the  future, or perhaps a hundred or more generations of marine molluscs into the future, might still be affected by what we fail to properly dispose of today. This is not my prophecy: we could end up with as much plastic in our oceans as fish. But it is complicated: food wrappers have helped to protect humans from typhoid and other infectious diseases and reduced food costs by prolonging shelf-life. Plastics are useful as well as harmful, but we need to do better when we have finished with them. People the world over urgently need to support the use of biodegradable and compostable plastics and avoid persistent plastics where possible.

Forget the echoes within those empty, spent shells which pepper the strandline. The longest, loudest echo on this beach is made in a faraway country and made of plastic.




*Comparative harmony with the natural environment - even back in 1861 catastrophic environmental change was old news, even if the concept of it had not been fully cultivated.

Reference:
Chambers, Paul. 2009. British Seashells - A Guide for Conchologists & Beachcombers. Remember When: Barnsley.