Imogen Lycett Green trundles up The Trundle, a most historic hill.

When you get to the top, how far will you be able to see, in all directions? It’s so high! To run up The Trundle is irresistible. Except, from the car park on the side of the road, the plateau on the top looks like a place you might leave dead bodies to be picked at by vultures.

‘Trundle’ comes from ‘tryndel’, an old English word for circle or hoop. Standing (panting after the run) at 676 feet above sea level in the centre of that hoop, on springy green grass pinpricked with yellow hawkbit and mauve scabious, you can not only look down over the whole of Goodwood Racecourse, but you are above the birds: below you, three crows heckle a kestrel and two kites rest on the wind.

Look north and it feels like you can see London, though it’s likely your eyes will rest on the long line of the Surrey Downs, an undulating patchwork quilt of fields and towns in between you and those very English hills. Face south to the sea and your mouth will fall open at a view so wide it stretches from the Seven Sisters in the east all the way to the west end of the Isle of Wight. In road terms, that’s from Seaford to Cowes, which is nearly 100 miles. You may as well be on the Serengeti! Or on the moon!

Breathe deep: salt wind and the smell of hay. This is England. Ancient and modern, as it turns out, because in the middle of that sea view between Seaford and Cowes sits (or rather floats, as if by magic) the Rampion Offshore Wind Farm with its ‘116 turbines on a 70 square kilometre site located between 13 and 20 kilometres off the Sussex coast’, generating enough green electricity to power 350,000 homes. The ameliorating owners called it Rampion after a Sussex wide school competition, giving Sussex children a sense of ownership over the hundred white windmills in the sea.

They named the wind farm after the Round-headed Rampion, the Sussex County Flower which used to be common across Europe but now is only rarely found on chalk grasslands. And here it is, on The Trundle! I find not one, but at least ten. Thirty centimetres high, with its brilliant blue petals, the Rampion makes a tiny globe in which to see a world. Or a heaven? The poet, painter and mystic William Blake might well have been thinking of the Rampion when he wrote the opening stanza of Auguries of Innocence:

 To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Rumour has it that Blake wrote his poem Jerusalem while sipping on a pint at the Earl of March pub in Lavant in 1804, looking up at the very green ‘mountain’ which is The Trundle. And did those feet, in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green? Set to music in 1916 by Sir Hubert Parry, to rally patriotic spirit after so many lives lost in the Great War, Jerusalem has become that most rousing of national anthems, sung at rugby league matches and on the last night of the Proms. But the truth is that Blake wrote his poem less as an ode to England and more as a comment on society after the Industrial Revolution, questioning the future of humanity ‘Among these dark Satanic Mills’ (ie. post-mechanisation), which is why Jerusalem is an official hymn of both the Labour Party and the Trade Union movement.

Each successive generation will bring to the artefacts (or poems, or songs) the story they need to tell.

There is a radio mast on The Trundle now, but underneath that lies a Neolithic causewayed enclosure from c3800 3500 BC. Archaeologists have been arguing for a century over these circular earthworks, surrounded by a ditch and entered and exited by several ‘causeways’, since there is in most cases no evidence – no postholes, or palisades – of habitation or fortification. What were they for? While there are over 100 in France, and more scattered across Europe, there are 70 Neolithic causewayed enclosures in England, mostly built on high ground in chalkland, with three on the South Downs. Were the enclosures used in the fourth millennium BC as easily visible gathering points for scattered families and tribes? Market places? Festival venues for ritual feasting and dancing? All of the above, I hope. The joy of prehistory is that it keeps you guessing.

It was later, in c400 BC, that the Iron Age Regni tribe made weapons with new technology, using wood to smelt iron. Once armed, they fought more with their fellow men than their Stone Age ancestors had. To protect themselves from their neighbours, the Regni fortified their settlement on The Trundle with circular ramparts, the remains of which you can see today: the uneven polygonal ridge. The Romans named and wrote about the Regni, which is how we know about them. But the discussion is still heated. If you ask why the Regni abandoned the Iron Age hillfort they built, you’ll enter a whole other debate about climate change. In the late Iron Age, carbon data tells us, there was a change in the weather from dry and hot (like today’s South of France) to cold, wet and windy, for about 500 years, which sent the farming, animal-keeping, weapon-wielding Iron Age tribes off the treeless high places into the more sheltered wooded lowlands, where their metal working could flourish. Then there’s another story, that the Regni came down off the hill in peace to live with the Romans, who arrived in AD 43.

Warmth returned, and the Romans planted vines, settling in the sunshine in Chichester. The Trundle then lay empty for over a 1,000 years, home only to larks and wildflowers. Until a plague chapel, dedicated to a French medieval saint named Roche, was built there in 1475. On the OS map, you’ll still find The Trundle called St Roche Hill. Two hundred years after the plague chapel, 1,000 ‘Clubmen’ gathered on top of The Trundle in September 1645, during the English Civil War. A history of England can be told through this hill! Clubmen were local defence vigilantes, mostly clergy and farmers, who, opposed to both Parliamentarian and Royalist armies, fought soldiers with cudgels and scythes to protect their women from rape and their land from plunder.

Next up was the inaugural public Goodwood race meeting in 1802, when locals could watch the horses from the hill and cheer on Rebel, owned by the Prince Regent (later George IV) as he beat Cedar, owned by the Duke of Richmond. Even now, during Glorious Goodwood in the last week in July, punters gather in camping chairs to eat sausage rolls, drink wine and watch the racing with a bird’s eye view of the track. The bookies have followed them up there, chalking the odds on their boards and shouting out from Trundle Hill.

So The Trundle has been, variously: a Stone Age marketplace; an Iron Age fortified settlement; a place of prayer during the plague; a violent battleground; a racecourse grandstand… as well as a lookout tower during the Napoleonic Wars, a gibbet, and an 18th-century open-air masonic lodge. In WW2 a radio shack was built there and manned by soldiers.

Exhausted by the history under my feet, I sit down on a bench looking west to think about Cromwell and Napoleon, flint axes and iron brooches. The South Downs roll away under me towards Winchester, willing me to walk on. Then I notice, tucked under the bench, two Orangina cans and an empty packet of McCoy’s Ridge Cut Flame Grilled Steak crisps.

If prehistory keeps you guessing, the story of 21st-century man on this bench may be similarly elusive. Two tongue-tied teenagers in a tryst? Two geography teachers from a school in Midhurst unable to admit their love for one another? Two pensioners on a Wednesday afternoon not discussing their dead child but feeding crisps to their King Charles spaniel? Who knows? With just two cans and a crisp packet to go by, we can only imagine. I scoop the litter up into my rucksack and walk once more around The Trundle before heading home.

To find The Trundle: From the south, leave the A27 at Westhampnett and follow signs to Goodwood Racecourse. Go past the racecourse to The Trundle carpark on the right side of the road. From the north, leave the A286 at Singleton, follow Town Lane and the carpark will be on your left.