This perfumed arcadia

Home to the iconic skylark, the chalk downlands are as colourful and botanically diverse as rainforest. John Lewis-Stempel explores England's oldest manmade habitat

- John Lewis-Stempel

'The Weald is good, the Downs are bestI'll give you the run of 'em, East to West. Beachy Head and Winddoor Hill, They were once and they are still. Firle, Mount Caburn and Mount Harry Go back as far as sums'll carry...' Rudyard Kipling, from 'The Run of the Downs'

CLIMBING up on Caburn hill, I could see the town lights of Lewes, but, on the summit, time had stopped still long before the age of electricity. In the tall grass around the dim earthen walls of the Iron Age fort, the warm night wind whispered the echoes of past voices. I tried to catch their sense, but it was seemingly babble. Babel. Looking out over the South Downs under the moon, the dark mound of Firle Beacon assumed the geography, with its long smooth flank, its fluted limbs, of a giant sleeping dog lain on its side. Indeed, the whole of the Sussex downland, it occurred, might be composed of the bodies of enormous downland creatures slumbering under a cloak of grass, with Caburn their gargantuan alpha pack leader, heaving its head up from sleep. Rolling and rounded, shapely buried bodies.

Death was never so attractive as in the making of the South Downs. There are English geologies, such as Cornwall’s granite, composed of the earth heaving up, unwanted, its hot guts, for these to cool and thus prove the truth of ‘stone cold’. Mere mineral geologies. Not so the Downs, which were formed during the Cretaceous period (about 145 million BC– 66 million BC), when southern England was covered by a tropical shallow ocean filled with coccoliths, microscopic shelled phytoplankton. As the coccoliths died, their bodies sank; a perpetual submarine snowstorm, depositing sediment on the seabed. Eventually, this sediment compacted to form chalk rock. Caburn and the Downs of England are a necropolis of poor small things.