The Ouse

At school, we all learned that the earliest civilizations formed along the banks of the Indus, the Yellow Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris and Rio Pativilca rivers. While civilisation galloped ahead in Africa and the Middle East, we Sussex people were only just giving up hunter-gathering for farming, but yes, we lived along the river too. The main Sussex Neolithic sites in the Ouse Valley overlook the river – long oval barrows at Cliffe’s Hill and Money Burgh, Piddinghoe and the causewayed enclosure at Offham.

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Boxgrove Man

ROSA: Good morning, Boxgrove Man, I hope I didn’t wake you up.

Boxgrove Man: It’s ok, I’m happy to hear your voice. Buried in chalk for 450,000 years, it’s been, shall we say, quiet.

ROSA: 450,000 years… freak me out! Do you know where you were buried?

BM: Where I lived, I guess, on a chalk cliff.

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Pelham Crescent

On a wild November day, when foaming white horses gallop up the beach hellbent on crashing into Hastings seafront, Pelham Crescent shrinks back into the cliff face, lowering its lashes, gathering its skirts… Read on

Alciston Church

Alciston feels the most untouched, and its church, hidden by trees on its circular mound enclosed with flint walls, the most mythical… Read on

Stane Street

The full length of Stane Street is 91 miles. Now a stony track in Eartham Wood, elsewhere a greenway flanked in wild garlic, in Halnaker a tree tunnel… Read on

The Litlington White Horse

The myth of Sussex’s Litlington White Horse is still in the making… Read on

The Devil’s Jumps

Just as the trickster god Loki ran riot through the nine Norse realms, so the Devil scampered all over Sussex, the last of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to succumb to Christianity. Legend tells us that the Devil fought hard to maintain his final stronghold… Read on

Cissbury Ring

Flint shards in myriad shapes litter the chalk path which runs along the steep ramparts enclosing the 26 hectares of Cissbury Ring… Read on