This is the path to Firle.
A flat path high, high up in the air, falling away – soft, rounded forms of the Downs to the left and a plump line of sky and sea to the right.
This is the path to Firle. The Beacon being it’s starting point and its way, leading on to way. There is a magic here and it is a place that I love, that we love as a family.
In high summer, the cow pats, hot and sticky, plop into the green of Firle. In winter – the sky seems to take over with the flat streak of the sea. Folding, pleating and rolling - green and blue and grey.
The dogs run and run and freedom is here. A place as a colour, or a colour as a memory of place. The inherent greenness flecked with chalk and stone, carrying a cultural and metaphysical freight.
Edward Thomas roamed the Downs and his melancholy poem ‘Roads’, spoke of war and men lost and never found. Of times changing and the landscape of life altered. Diving deeply and roughly with verse into the relationship of Man to town and countryside.
Although over 100 years old, the verse is enduring, with many of us roaming emotionally and conceptually into our current relationship with home, bricks, mortar, land and sky.
The lines and shapes of buildings being replaced with looping landscape and a need for man/one to burrow further into nature. His last verse – “Crowding the solitude of the loops over the downs, Hushing the roar of the towns And their brief multitude.” – encapsulates what many of us are feeling now. A new knowledge that we have disconnected from nature and the realness of living - and that what we have sought and seen as necessities, simply aren’t.
It is unsettling – how do you spin a life or lifestyle in a time which is unstable and many choices are being made for you. Or perhaps this is the only time, the best time.
Being rooted of place – a very local sense of home is a good place to start. Whether this is land, people or town it isn’t important – what is - is the asking of the question and the delicate and dedicated listening to the answer.
Cassandra
I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.
Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.
On this earth ’tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:
The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.
They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.
From dawn’s twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.
The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.
Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary
As it winds on for ever.
Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion tales
Is one of the true gods,
Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,
And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead:
And it is her laughter
At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer
Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps’ press,
As Helen’s own are light.
Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:
Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,
Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.
Edward Thomas