As far as English counties go, Sussex is not usually viewed as a cultural heavy-hitter. It boasts no equivalent of the Brontës or Thomas Hardy. Wordsworth never took time off from striding the northern Lakelands to stroll across the South Downs. True, Shelley was born on his family’s estate in Horsham, but he got out as soon as he was able, and never looked back. Painters similarly voted with their feet. William Gilpin, pioneer of the picturesque, toured the southern coastal counties in 1774 and, inevitably, given his hatred for the way that chalk soil always gave everything “a blank glaring surface”, decided that Sussex offered little to delight.
But there was one man who, while not Sussex-born, got the proper measure of the place. In 1802, William Blake was staying near Bognor, when a walk on the beach prompted his ecstatic line about being able to see the “World in a Grain of Sand”. With this model of close-looking in mind, Alexandra Harris returns to her native soil to conduct her own fingertip search and discover the multitudes that lie within. The approach is properly hyperlocal. This isn’t just Sussex, or even West Sussex, but the few miles around West Chiltington, the village outside Horsham where she grew up in the 1980s. Her patch of what TS Eliot called “significant soil” stretches from the foothills of the Weald down to the sea and takes in Chichester, Arundel, Petworth and Pulborough.
What this home turf lacks in breadth it gains in depth. Harris digs down through geological and historical strata, unearthing life stories from the second world war (Canadian soldiers, Polish resistance workers), the days of the French Revolution (bedraggled refugees arriving on the beach), travelling back to the age of medieval iron-working on the Weald and beyond, to the prehistoric era when Sussex lay under a shallow sea, quietly knitting itself together from chalk and fish bones. Far from finding dull familiarity, Harris discovers that “everything was stranger and more full of life than I’d had the wit to imagine”.
She is particularly good on the late 17th century and the disturbances wreaked by the civil war. Although you might assume that the sympathies of such an agricultural county would skew conservative and royal, Harris finds plenty of men of the soil keen to shake things up. Take Richard Haines, a farmer and brewer from Sullington, who spends his days dreaming of scientific ways of coaxing new kinds of crops from the unpromising chalk crumble. He was likewise independent in matters of the soul: rather than attend the local parish church with its ancient yew tree and dozing marble knight, he rides 12 miles to a Baptist chapel to hear the hellfire rantings of Matthew Caffyn, himself recently expelled from All Souls College, Oxford.
Less surprisingly, Harris locates plenty of dissenting voices in Chichester, the county town. In the lanes that twist around the cathedral she finds Joseph Seagrave, a radical printer, and his life partner, Mary Shepherd, who refuse to marry because they do not believe in the institution and are prepared to bear the stigma. From Seagrave’s printing press in East Street pour all sorts of significant publications, including handbills, advertisements and a sparky new paper, the Sussex Chronicle. One frequent visitor is Blake, riding over from Bognor, who will turn Chichester with its Roman walls and pagan past into the model for the Holy City he is dreaming into being in his long poem Jerusalem.
Throughout this wonderful book, Harris demonstrates that local does not mean minor, nor parochial. In 1829 a prosperous family called Henty from West Tarring raised the money to buy 80,000 acres in Australia and set off from Littlehampton with their troop of prize merino sheep. Fast-forward to the 1930s, when a medieval sandstone bowl is discovered in an Australian garden doing duty as a planter. It turns out to be Tarring’s old church font, presumably deposited by the Hentys, who filched it for sentimental reasons. Such emotional yoking of a Sussex village to a suburb on the other side of the world is a striking example, suggests Harris, of the common, complicated habit humans have of making places from other places, “so that nowhere is simply itself”.
• The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape by Alexandra Harris is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
