Country walk: West Dean Woods
Most years there is a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Not just in Wordsworth’s Lake District but in a hundred other locations throughout both Sussex counties.
Two hundred and twelve years ago, Wordsworth opened Pandora’s Box for the nation and the world exposing these bright symbols of ancient sunlight everlastingly bursting from the ground to cheers us forward out of winter lockdown and we have never looked back.
He further claimed that, ‘Oft when on my couch lie in vacant or pensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude; and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils’.
This walk, when permissible this year or next, takes you past a colony of three million daffodils.
They are the small uncultivated natives that have been in England thousands of years. They are untouched by the cultivated varieties that look like colliery brand brass trumpets with bulbs as big as duck eggs and which flood roundabouts and collapse in mad March gales.
The first wild daffodils here began to open on the third of March around my home but the multitude are ten days later in the gloomy woodland colony alongside the bridleway which this walk follows.
This is a circular walk of 2.5 miles (4kms) starting roadside along the minor road connecting West Dean village and Staple Ash in Chilgrove.
At the sharp corner in the road you drop down into the bridleway that runs north between thick hedges.
Ash trees have recently been felled all along the route due to the danger of ash die-back disease making the trees potentially dangerous to the public.
Sussex Wildlife Trust lease 40 acres of old coppice woodland from the West Dean Estate and this land lies on the right of your path until you have passed the daffodil colony.
The reserve has 300 species of flowering plants, 40 breeding bird species, 300 species of moths, and 30 of butterflies.
You will pass several large chalk balls, part of a network of waymarkers across this area laid out by sculptor Andy Goldsworthy.
Leaving the daffodils behind we come to Cowdray land with its tall fir trees. Look for a rather hidden large Bronze Age tumulus on left next to the track which has firs growing over it. Let us hope that when it comes to selling this timber the trees are carefully removed and not replanted, thus preserving this interesting archaeological monument.
A little way beyond this a bridle way takes you sharp left back down the hill with a good view ahead. The track descends and you may notice that you cross ridges roughly every 55 metres. These were Bronze Age field boundaries when the whole area was open farmland two thousand and more years ago,
You descend to a five cross-way in Sandy Bottom and take the track running south-west. Piles of dead ash trees line this route. You join the private road that leads away from Monkton House and follow it to the minor road where you turn left.
On the right are the remains of the cherry orchard once planted by Edward James. Here you can still sometimes see hawfinches feeding on the fruit and pips when these are in season.
At Staple Ash Farm keep left at the road junction, uphill where a new walnut orchard has been planted. The carpark area is ahead on that sharp bend.
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