A MODERN RURAL RIDE: SUSSEX.

IN THE mid-1820s William Cobbett, variously farmer, soldier, bankrupt and Radical MP, rode through the English countryside noting the condition of agriculture and of the people. The southern counties that he visited had neither suffered nor profited from the Industrial Revolution; the Agricultural Revolution, on the other hand, had changed the face of the landscape Cobbett loved forever. Subsistence farming, when there had been 'a pig in every sty', was a thing of the past. The land was now enclosed, paving the way for farming as a modem business; the agricultural labourers were penniless and struggling as never before -- at least never before within living memory.

Bigoted, big-hearted, intensely conservative yet radical, stubborn, self-congratulatory, polemical, irrational, inconsistent and compassionate, Cobbett set out to describe, in his own forthright way, what he saw on his tours, unstinting in his praise of what pleased him (a good field of hay; a well-dressed labourer; a sirloin of beef; an old-style yeoman farmer sitting down at table with his men; a flock of goldfinches) and unhesitating in his vituperation of what did not (Methodist ministers, economic theorists, bankers and brokers, turnpike roads, suburban squires and 'the Wen' of London).

Cobbett was born in Farnham in Surrey in 1762, the son of an agricultural labourer. Self-educated, he says that his 'birth of intellect' came through reading Swift's Tale of a Tub as a boy. Though he regularly attempted to settle down to a life of rural tranquillity, his perceptions of injustice kept dragging him back into the fighting line. His idea of a just society was one which would allow a man to live well by his own efforts. By 'living well', however, Cobbett meant sufficiency and no more. Anything that smacked of luxury or superfluity was anathema to him. And by a many s 'own efforts' he meant hard work: getting up early, eating frugally, and not frittering away one's time. He was neither a prude nor a Puritan, but he was scornful of self-indulgence, and though he earned a reputation as the champion of the poor, it was only of the deserving and never of the idle. His romanticised image of his own childhood convinced him that the late 18th century had been England's golden age; that it was a time when men were honest in their work, simple in their habits, undemanding in their tastes, content with the station in life that God had allotted them. His failure to understand human aspirations made Utopias hard to find. As a young soldier in America he developed a revulsion against the 'democracy' which he witnessed there, and returned to England first a Tory and then a Reformer, embarking on a career as a journalist. Too much close contact with the politics of Pitt and Fox, however, turned him into a fierce Radical.

In the weekly Political Register which he founded, he published an article deploring military flogging, for which he was fined [pound]1,000. In later life he found himself imprisoned for debt and prosecuted for sedition, as well as winning a seat in Parliament as Radical MP for Oldham. But Cobbett's output was more than just a collection of indignant tirades. His descriptions of the countryside of the South of England, his understanding of its life cycles and his appreciation of its beauty, and the robust, unsentimental but very feeling language in which it is expressed in his Rural Rides, is perhaps unsurpassed in English prose literature. His conversational style, emphasised by his use of italics and capitalisation, has attracted generations of readers.

The urbanisation and suburbanisation of Britain today, the alienation from rural life that is the lot of most of us, and the hardships tat farmers and farm workers are currently enduring, mean that the time is probably right for Cobbett to ride again. Beleaguered by a Common Agricultural Policy whereby one size is supposed to fit all, and finding their way of life increasingly under threat, misrepresented, or simply sneered at, farmers are once again looking for robust voices to stand up for them, and make their point of view heard in a large, noisy, consumerist, leisure-filled, street-wise, sophisticated world, where the 'stock-jobbers' and the 'funding system' seem to have come out on top.

Horsham (West Sussex)

Friday, 9 June, 2000

Came from the Wen through Croydon, and am got here to sleep, intending to set off for ARDINGLY in the morning, with a view of visiting the South of England Show. From Croydon my road was through Reigate, Horley and Crawley, and from there westwards to this place, though had it not been for the signposts I should scarcely have been aware of crossing from one parish boundary into another, for the country is so built-upon that there are no green spaces in between, though between Crawley and HORSHAM there is a thing which terms itself a forest, a shabby, villainous affair indeed, a mere rascally tract of fir-trees. This is all a very stock-jobbery kind of country, with brick boxes of a very loan-mongering sort of complexion strung out beside the road, and some that are mere cottages too, though I saw very few termed as such, for while thirty years or so ago it was all the vogue to get a new-built brick and timber barracks of a place christened a cottage, it is now become rather the mode to have a low, cramped, el derly dwelling labelled a house. My road was straight, with tall garden trees and rhododendrons grown very high on either side, giving a sense that they were hiding something, and though their aim is to create privacy for the houses to which they are appended, their effect is to give a very vivid idea of superabundant population. I should have had views to the Surrey hills on my right and the South Downs on my left, having got up onto some pretty high ground, but the roadside trees were so tall as at times to form a tunnel above my head, so I had views of neither beyond the merest glimpse, and every so often the beggarly contours of the fir-trees would rise up between and mar the scene entirely.

Horsham always used to be a decent, pretty sort of town, at least so I remember it from the last time I saw it, ten or more years ago. I arrived at about six o'clock, the very worst time, I believe, to arrive anywhere, for at six o'clock all towns are at their shabbiest, and one can obtain no true idea of them, the shops having recently closed and the people not yet got out onto the streets. In the centre of Horsham, I found a scattering of handsome houses, but no sustained harmony of aspect in any angle of it; indeed it seemed much altered, and though these alterations have been carried out in the character of improvements, while it is churlish to condemn any sort of well-intentioned effort, I cannot altogether commend them. There was all manner of ugly trash blowing about the streets, and these same streets are now given over to pedestrians, so that only commerce of the idling, perambulating sort may use them, which makes idling and perambulating very much more pleasant, to be sure, but which never lends a place the air of honest industry that I like. Here, in the words of the Scripture, is desolation of abomination, or at any rate its beginnings. All the commerce was centred on the periphery of the town; the centre was abandoned, and the few people that I did encounter in the streets were for the most part young, insolent-looking coxcombs, with the stamp of the Wen of London very much imprinted on their manners. The only shop remaining open for trade was the THRESHER off-licence, and the Friday-evening activity of liquor-purchase was being eagerly prosecuted by almost everyone I saw, all of them under 40 years of age, all of them with an air of very urban prosperity about them, and not a man among them, I am willing to wager, engaged in any sort of rural work. I had thought to have come far enough from the Wen at Horsham to be truly in the country, but I was mistaken in this, for the circumference wherein the Wen exerts its influence is grown so wide that there is little enough to be gauged about the state of the countryside from a great many of our former country towns. Though a glance at a map shows numerous 'farms' in the area, upon enquiry these are revealed to be got up as mansions for the bond-jobbing crew, and in the parish of SOUTHWATER, not three miles from Horsham, there is only one working farm remaining, and even that may not long survive. That Horsham's market traditions are ancient is but of small account; it possesses what they are pleased to call a heritage; it has no very evident present reason for existence, except in that it is a place where people eat and sleep. But, as Mr SIMON HUGHES MP, speaking recently for the Liberals, has told us: 'If jobs are inappropriate in support of a particular activity then they may have to change'. I cannot remember that such a depth of wisdom and noble resignation to altered circumstances was much in evidence in Whitehall at the time of the miners' disputes. But we must assume that the lesson has now been learned and that farmers will be the first to benefit. H orsham market hall has a shuttered and slovenly air about it. Horsham Bacon Factory, I am informed, is to close the very week after I am here. Courage, Mr NICK BROWN, Minister of Agriculture! You have brave fellows like Hughes to explain your policies for you. Bravo! In allowing the closure of the Bacon Factory you are permitting the European Union and its edicts to lead the few farming folk who yet exist in these Wen-tainted suburbs a merry dance indeed, but at least they will no longer slaughter hogs in a manner that the congregation of meddlers in Brussels deems displeasing. Such practices as they have indulged in until now are indeed inappropriate, and may have to change, nay, are already changing, for the slaughterman of Horsham will no longer be slaughtering pigs in any manner at all, for their factory is to close. Thus the tax-eating Eurocrat gets rich, and the poor devil of a farmer is squeezed into the poor-house. What a sect of non-labourers these Euro-politicians are! They make nothing; they produc e nothing; they breed as well as other men, but they cause none of the food to come. All the farmers that I meet tell me that their work has now but little to do with the land or with husbanding what the land will best produce and sustain, and everything to do with interpreting the latest directive from the tax-gorgers and placemen who rule us.

Alfriston (East Sussex)

Saturday evening

Ardingly is about four miles from Haywards Heath, which is at the border of the western and eastern parts of Sussex, on the Brighton Road. In my way here I came through the very pleasing town of LINDFIELD, a long, wide main street, with pavements of clean brick and nice grass verges, the houses all of brick, clad on their upper storeys with weather-boarding or tiles, as all the older houses in this part of Sussex are, and many of the better sort of newer houses too. The grass looks very well everywhere, not yet mown, but rusty on the top, and it will not be long, I should think, before it is got in. After Lindfield the traffic began to be very bad, and if one were to select the thing above all others that blights this part of England, it would be this damnable fact of every man having his own conveyance and using it at his own convenience, myself not being any exception, so that although there were regular buses to take people to the Show, they were for the most part empty. After a turning to a place called H orsted Keynes, the road became so choaked that I abandoned my car and went for the remaining distance (which was not two miles) on foot, which was a wise decision as I reached the showground much sooner, and with the added advantage of being able to see something of the country I was coming through. This is not a rich soil, as it is on the Sussex downlands, and I saw almost no crops at all, but plenty of grass plats, and fields of cattle. The

day was sunny, but with frequent cloud, the air clean and cool; full as beautiful a morning, I think, as I could have wished for.

At the Show I spoke to a woman who breeds Gloucester Old Spots. She was aggrieved by the proximate closure of the Horsham Bacon Factory, for it will mean her animals shall have to be transported farther away to be slaughtered, which causes discomfort to them and more cost to her. But, as we have learned, the Bacon Factory does not conform to the new EU rules, or it did not, when the EU's policy-control battalion made its report, except that this woman told me that they did adapt their methods to comply with the new rules, so that now it does conform, but that the policy-controllers regretted that their report had already been submitted, meaning that it was now too late to halt the closure. She told me that her situation was 'desperate', which I should think it must be, together with that of anyone in a like position, who discovers that though they do all in their power to bend to new regulations, this still avails them nothing. And while the pretty fellows at Whitehall will blame BRUSSELS for all this bunglin g, I feel bound to point out, addressing myself chiefly to Mr BROWN, that the people whom it affects impute their calamities to the House of Commons, for advancing so little opposition to the contrary rulings of the Commissioners, and even permitting situations to obtain whereby our agriculture is not merely ill served, but worse served than that of all other members', as in the case of abattoirs that must pay charges based on the number of hours worked instead of on the number of animals slaughtered, which is the system adopted in all other EU states.

There were a great many stands at the Fair with printed leaflets and brochures available offering 'advice'. This gives a merry impression indeed of the state of the nation's agriculture! There is now a new breed of agricultural consultant grown up, hovering about the farmers like a company of quacks around a sickbed -- and what can they offer but inefficacious remedies tendered like so many straws to a drowning man, and which make but little impact upon the ailment, and certainly none whatever upon its root and cause? I do not mean to inveigh against the consultants more heavily than they deserve, for it is impossible not to believe that they act with a good motive. And yet it is possible not to believe that it is productive of good. It must create hypocrites, and hypocrisy is the great sin of the age. No farmer will of his own choosing keep a flock of sheep on prime com land, but where there is subsidy to be had, he will do it, for in these artificial times a farmer can expect to earn at least one third of his income from the accursed subsidy system, if he can but be clever enough to see how it operates. It is not enough for a farmer to do what is natural, namely drawing a living from the land, for in these days of control from the centre, he is forced to do much that is unnatural, altering the composition of his farm to catch the subsidy payments as they come. Thus it is that many farmers, while they understand the land, find that this puts them behind the times, and they must occupy themselves instead with much that they do not understand, namely schemes and projects and directives and incentives from Brussels and MAFF [Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries], who annually issue a good many dozen of reports and guidelines, and set up 'advice centres' to explain and clarify what they mean by all their ceaseless gabble, which can generally be assumed to amount to a state of affairs where fewer farmers can keep clothes on their back and more MAFF officers are required to explain the muddle. They never speak this out plainly, of course. Their method for hinting to the farmer that his breed is no longer wanted is to tell him to diversify.

A man I met at the Fair told me that the obstacles to diversification were often full as bad as those mounted against farming itself, for his wife had attempted to diversify into catering, providing afternoon teas for walkers at his farm near Lewes, but that the Tourist Board had forbidden her to offer sandwiches or anything freshly prepared, giving as the justification the fact that she had only a single kitchen in her farmhouse, not a separate 'facility' within the barn where the teas were to be provided. There, diversification experts! What advice will you offer this woman? Why, that she should apply for a grant to build a kitchen in her barn, to be sure, for one is never at liberty to do anything for oneself, either the money being lacking, or the permission or the licence or whatnot, so that in the end one may quite as well go upon the parish, or accept money to set one's land aside, which comes to the same thing as being paid to be idle, and though few farmers are naturally inclined to idleness, if the re is a living to be made from it, they have little enough alternative. But what advice can there be for a man who is so sorely pressed that he is reduced to selling all he has? There are more farms on the market today than I ever recall seeing at any time before, and I should dearly like to know how many are purchased as a single lot, for I should think it not many, except those that go to a broker in the Wen, one that understands the whole gambling, exchange-rate system and who has been huffing and puffing hot air into the THING to keep it afloat these ten years and more. To be sure, he will not farm the land. Anyone who understands the exchange-rate system will never consent that his security and happiness should depend, in any degree, upon so fluctuating a thing as a currency. As soon as the land is bought there will be some flashy sort of stables getting up or some other kind of leisure amenity, and a great deal of pallid gravel laid down for the lustrous 'four wheel drives' to drive over, flashing their occupants from the Wen to the 'country' and back again, without so much as a thought for what the country is, and who makes it, and how it is to survive to be 'enjoyed' by such as they if the present accursed system be allowed to continue.

From Ardingly I pursued my road to ALFRISTON, through Keymer, Ditchling and Lewes. As soon as you come. near to the South Downs, you get into the chalk lands, and all the older buildings begin to have knapped flints in them. The South Downs are a broad and beautiful ridge of chalk running from Eastbourne in Sussex to Petersfield in Hampshire. This is capital corn country. Nature has shaped the ground into deep, wide troughs and broad, well-drained escarpments that spread over miles without a boundary or a hedge to be seen. A stiff, insistent breeze was blowing as I came along, of excellent, healthy sea air, and there being no coppices, nor buildings nor obstacles of any kind on the very highest points, I made swift and unimpeded progress.

Just after BRIGHTON the Downs meet the A27 from Eastbourne to Southampton, an execrable fast, busy road, which turns all around it into a sort of wasteland. There is nothing more to say about this damnable road; it is best to hasten along it if one must, and to turn off it as soon as one may, which I did at a place called Beddingham. At a number of points as I came along I saw great signs placed by the roadside announcing that more land is required for house-building. I heard yesterday that around Horsham the Council is looking for places to site 8,500 more 'homes'. When I arrived in Alfriston, I began to understand something of the nature of the problem, for the briefest glance at its main street was enough to satisfy me that almost nobody inhabits it, for it is all taken up with hotels and gift shops and places to attract and accommodate a temporary population. I do not see how I can much begrudge it them, however (though I would dearly like to see town centres more populated, and town fringes creeping less dissolutely outwards), for Alfriston is indeed a most charming place, neat and pretty as many Sussex towns and villages are, with a beautiful broad green behind the main street, and a handsome church, not small and squat like many in this area, but of generous proportions and with a fine spire. I would be loth to quarrel with a good inn besides, and we must be grateful for them whenever we find them, and for any sort of activity, however frivolous, which causes a village to retain a shop, for almost half the villages of England have no shop, and it is getting to be about a third that have no public house. Alfriston sits on the Cuckmere, a reedy, rather marshy sort of river, which falls into the sea at Cuckmere Haven, just near BEACHY HEAD, which as the crow flies cannot be more than four miles distant. I am to remain here tomorrow, when I will meet a farmer who can tell me something of the condition of things in this country.

Alfriston

Sunday night 

I made a rather bad breakfast of sweet cake and a slop of foul-tasting tea and skimmed milk in the inn where I was staying. But I had no choice in the matter of the milk, for skimmed was all that was available. I do most heartily despise these pedants who with their great ignorance and conceit will destroy as nutritious a product as milk with their everlasting skimming and skimping in the name of health. Why, the fat content of full-cream milk is only 5 per cent at the very most. But I do not wish to make a great argument out of this, nor to make any mention of the fat content in a bag of potato crisps or any of the other trash that most people are apparently willing to eat where they are unwilling to drink natural milk, for logic is never a weapon that can prevail against the prejudices and folly of a vain public. I set out to meet Mr B______, who, together with his sons, has the tenancy of some farms near here and a little of his own land besides. Mr B_______ has a beef herd of fine-looking Charolais and Li mousin cattle. He told me he could get around [pound]500 for a finished steer, although not many years ago the same animal would have fetched nearer [pound]1,000. He also said that he had recently sold his farmhouse near Newhaven, together with the whole of his dairy herd (some 100 beasts), for though his family had been farming there for over 70 years, there was now no possibility of making a living as a dairyman. And if one consider that a pint of milk, which in a shop is adjudged to be worth around 34 pence to the consumer, is at the farm gate adjudged to be worth 10 pence, which is the sum the farmer receives, who can wonder at his decision? It is fortunate indeed that he sold his cows and his milk quota when he did, for had he attempted to sell them this year instead of last he would have had a miserable time of it. Six months ago milk quota would not trade for any money, not even the paltriest sum. Now it is moving but grudgingly and milk prices are somewhat improved, but this is only as a result of the poor devils who sold, for now there is considerably less milk produced, and among those still working, the talk is all of giving up. This puts me in mind of a scheme I heard had been advanced by someone in Canada, aimed at relieving the misery of arable farmers, whereby all growers would agree to cut production by 10 per cent, thus causing a shortage which would force prices to rise.

I understand the plight of the arable farmer, who today is in a most desperate condition, prices having halved in the last five years, which losses, together with those in all other branches of farming besides, have meant that farmers have been induced to borrow, and credit has of course been made available to them, although I am convinced that were it not for this infernal funding, loan-mongering system by which we are all made everlasting paupers, they would not now be in such a degree of present distress. As I came out this morning I saw many fine-looking fields of wheat and some of barley, with a good amount of rape too, the flowers all done now and the crop gone to seed. I have no wish to say any more on the subject of rape, for quite enough has been said already, or at any rate enough to satisfy me. That the government has been weak and shilly-shallying, that the public are dupes and the farmers paying the price seems to me to be very much in the current run of things. The land here is everywhere excel lent, especially upon the higher slopes, and so well drained, that despite the tremendous drenching we have endured this spring, the crops are well advanced. And yet these poor wretches are ruined if their all be embarked in wheat! Wheat will not now fetch [pound]60 a tonne, where it has formerly fetched [pound]90 or more. But is cutting production the solution? I have no general love to solutions that smack too much of an economic trick, and a deliberate cutting of production seems to be very much in that line. It was our paternal Governments, anxious to prevent over-production, who invented 'set-aside'. But would not sound management of the soil, fewer agro-chemicals and correspondingly lower yields produce. much the same result without the need for any hoaxing? For if a chemical is developed which allows for more produce to be taken from fewer fields for less labour, this would seem like a desirable thing, but if it means that the land in use is thereby poisoned, and that we are left with other land that h as no function and must be set aside, and if there are men whose hands are thereby made idle, it is an injury to us.

Last year 1,000 farmers joined the ORGANIC FARMING SCHEME, and I fully believe that it provides a way forward, or at any rate I should believe it had the scheme's funding not been drained dry. To be sure there are those who will rave at it, setting up a fractious bleating about how organic farming must inevitably produce 'a new peasant underclass, which the eco-toffs and their nouveau-riche hangers-on would supervise from the balconies of their country houses', but this type of overstrung, hysterical heckler always lets himself down in the very first sentence of his argument, for the chief ingredient that gives fire to his opinions is always a gross personal dislike of certain classes of his fellow men. Organic farming may not be all the solution -- no man of complete sense, I believe, ever argued that it is. But I do know this: that it is widely understood in the medical world that the more an organism doses itself with chemicals, the less resistant to general disease it becomes, and the more resistant, aft er a lapse of time, to the chemicals themselves, so that new and more powerful varieties must be developed. Is the situation materially any different in the case of the soil and its crops? Let us assume not. Around 90 per cent of wheat and barley in Northern Germany last season proved resistant to the 'miracle' strobilurins, designed to combat mildew, and this is a case where higher application of the chemical makes no difference to the resistance. Why should the same not happen here?

There are those who will argue that England cannot compete on price. All the farming people I have spoken to are very aware that countries like Poland and Hungary may within a few years join the EU, and that there will afterwards be less money to spread around. And though the EU Agriculture Commissioner FISCHLER has said that these countries must wait for up to seven years before collecting their EU subsidy, the farmers here feel that their situation must be ultimately precarious. In Hungary at present there is a great drive afoot towards organic methods. And what will be the result of this? That the farmers of Hungary are able to produce products that the public wants at a price far less than our native farmers can ever achieve. For the public most assuredly does want them, whatever the anti-organic lobby can say. The public is prompted by instinct and not by science. Try to sell a man a loaf of bread, informing him at the same time that the wheat or barley from which it is made was treated with kresoxim-me thyl, quinoxyfen, morpholine, azoxystrobin, trifloxystrobin, epoxiconazole, chlormequat, imazaquin and liquid nitrogen (which it assuredly was), and he will not buy it, no matter how low the price. But will this availability of cheap produce from abroad prove a ruination to our own production, as the flapping tongues of the scare-mongers predict? I cannot think so. It may present a challenge, but a challenge is not equivalent to a calamity except to the idle.

The ruination will come if our own production is unable to keep pace with a demand that is growing at a rate of 40 per cent a year and thus fails to end the present state of affairs whereby 70 per cent of organic food consumed in the country is imported. But how is a farmer who has not the resources to keep himself in all the noxious substances which intensive farming requires to make spewy, exhausted soil productive and to prevent puny, sick crops from entirely perishing, how is such a farmer, I say, to find the resources to plant trees, to grub up weeds, to hire labour, to tend hedges, to create grass banks and 'wildlife corridors', in short to do all the things that extensifying farming practice requires? Let us hope that the hints dropped by MAFF (or perhaps by someone else in their name) about [pound]70 million to be made available in annual 'stewardship grants' prove to have some truth in them. To be sure, farmers will have to apply for these grants, which will necessitate the submitting of a good deal of information and the answering of a good many impudent questions, but conservation it seems is all the fashion now, and it being, as fashions go, a good one, I hope that farmers will embrace it.

Rodmell (Sussex)

Monday Afternoon, 12 June

I came off from Alfriston at about eight o'clock, walking up a chalky lane to the very top of the Downs. On the lowest slopes there is grazing land, with wheat and barley above this, and sheep at the top, with skylarks and swifts very plentiful everywhere. Many of the farms I have passed on this ride have been sorry-looking, ill-kempt affairs, with none of the nearness and pride that used to attend a farmyard of 20 years ago. But this must surely be a result of there being so few men on the land. Agriculture now accounts for 2 per cent of the working population of the country, which when one consider that all men need to eat, seems a very poor figure, and even poorer still since this same 2 per cent of the people husbands two thirds of the country's land. Most farms will have no more than two men to harvest as much as 600 acres when the barley is got in in July. We are told more people now work in sandwich catering than in agriculture.

There was a good deal of cloud about as I came along, much of it rather dark, though flat-bottomed and so benign. On my right I had views across into the clay lands of the Weald of Sussex, with its arrangement of smaller fields and hedgerows and areas of woodland. To my left, as I came up higher, I began to see the sea, and had a clear view of Newhaven, though the horizon was more or less indistinct. My route took me across Itford Hill and down through the hamlet of Southease (which has a very pretty Saxon church) to RODMELL. Mr B_____ had told me that on a still day from the top of Itford Hill his mother had heard the gunfire of Passchendaele in 1917. His sister remembers seeing a demented Virginia WOOLF running down towards the OUSE (this may have been, by-the-by, the very occasion that she drowned herself), which is here a rather wide and deepish channel, bordered by beautiful watermeadows, and providing grazing for a herd of the most beautiful Charolais steers that I ever saw in the whole course of my li fe, clean and healthy and prime butcher's animals.

Rodmell was, within the living memory of men not yet much older than myself, an honest farming village. Today I do not say that it is dishonest, but it is a commuting village, pretty enough in a tea-garden sort of a way, composed of one main straggling street bordered by tallish, flint-built walls and lined with tile-hung cottages, the homes of labouring men -- aye, labouring men, for though their life of toil be in the Wen, where they travel -- and back again -- every day, it is a life of toil indeed, the fruits of which I wonder if they can much enjoy, once half a million pounds of them are sunk in an old cowman's cot. The road at the end of the village leads into a path, from the end of which there are fine, extensive views across to Itford Hill. This is just the kind of scene I like. I love to look at the side of a broad, high down and see the farmsteads sheltered at its foot. Here at Rodmell there is a landfill site on the hillside to remind us that this is not quite the Garden of Eden; from that we hav e truly expelled ourselves. There is talk, or so I heard, of installing an incinerator at this landfill site, and though the residents of Rodmell are much minded to oppose it, I should think that the project had better go ahead, for while we all choose to live in a manner that generates trash and causes contamination, we are not very well placed to refuse to confront its consequences. I left Rodmell in the late afternoon, and went with a man I had met to a public-house in Glynde, one of the best sort of public-houses; plain and neat and with no odorous whiffs of pretension hanging about the public bar. The local beer, which is brewed at LEWES, is very good. Tomorrow I return to the Wen, early in the morning.

Annabel Barber is a writer and translator based in Budapest. Her guide book to the city, Visible Cities: Budapest, was published last year.