Page:Highways and Byways in Sussex.djvu/461

 right Mr. Tupper's farm and the field which contains the famous Bignor pavements, relic of the palatial residence of the Governor of the Province of Regnum in the Romans' day; or better still, pausing there, as Roman officers faring to Regnum certainly would in the hope of a cup of Falernian.

The track winding up Bignor Hill is still easily recognisable, and from the summit half Sussex is visible: the flat blue weald in the north, Blackdown's dark escarpment in the north-west, Arundel's shaggy wastes in the east, the sea and the plain in the south, and the rolling turf of the downs all around. Henceforward the road is again straight, nine unfaltering miles to Chichester, which we enter by St. Pancras and East Street. For the first four miles, however, the track is over turf and among woods, Eartham Wood on the right and North Wood on the left, and, after a very brief spell of hard road again, over the side of Halnaker Down. But from Halnaker to Chichester it is turnpike once more, with the savour of the Channel meeting one all the way, and Chichester's spire a friendly beacon and earnest of the contiguous delights of the Dolphin, where one may sup in an assembly room spacious enough to hold a Roman century.

Or one might reverse the order and walk out of Sussex into London by the Roman way, or, better still, through London, and on by Erming Street to the wall of Antoninus. Merely to walk to London and there stop is nothing; merely to walk from London is little; but to walk through London ... there is glamour in that! To come bravely up from the sea at Bosham, through Chichester, over the Downs to the sweet domestic peaceful green weald, over the Downs again and plunge into the grey city (perhaps at night) and out again on the other side into the green again, and so to the north, left-right, left-right, just as the clanking Romans did; that would be worth doing and worth feeling.

The best knower of Sussex of recent times has died since