Country walk: Temple of the Winds
This walk was once Tennyson’s daily constitutional from his house at Aldworth: roughly ‘a mile out and a mile back’ for the Victorian poet when he was not on the Isle of Wight. Actually ours is a total of 2.5 miles (4 kms) round trip from the National Trust Car Park at the end of Tennyson’s Lane which runs for 2 miles east of the A286 in Haslemere at SU 922307.
I once visited the house where a lifesize statue of the poet sitting on his seat wearing a shepherd’s plaid and wide brimmed hat and staring beyond the Sussex Plain brought back very forcibly those famous lines of his: ‘You came and look’d and loved the view / Long known and loved by me / Green Sussex fading into blue / And one gray glimpse of sea.’
Take the Summer Border Path which comes to a cross-ways after 500 yards above Boarden Door Bottom. Leave SBP, turn left up sandy track
past 280m. trig. point. Beacons were lit here in 1588 warning of the Spanish Armada. Smugglers used the maze of tracks 300 years ago. Some say a barrel of brandy still lies waiting to be discovered.
From the hilltop the view west shows Butser Hill in Hampshire, Woolbeding Common, Selborne with its memories of Gilbert White. Western gales roar from the sea and rear as violent waves of air up the steep slope below. They crash into the beech trees, making this a lively walk at times. In moments of calm the pine trees stretch and crack their cones and give that heavenly scent of pure turpentine while the plain shimmers in the heat below.
Heather and bilberry bushes grow along the way and in high summer the lesser gorse opens yellow flowers that have their own scent of coconut. You have to search for the Temple of the Winds at the far end of the hill where a buttress of land holds you high above the abyss below, like the Amalfi coast at Ravello in Italy. There you find a hidden half circle of stones, put there to commemorate Mabel Elizabeth Hunter who in 1944 donated the land to the National Trust. A stone plinth gives the distance and line of view to places such as Ashdown Forest, Malling Hill and Lewes, which is 33 miles away, while Worthing and Reigate are both 22 miles away.
The way back is along the top of the steep scarp slope. Here the poet’s words ring in the head: ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ‘Break, Break, Break’, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and ‘Crossing the Bar’. I read the latter at a dear friend’s funeral last year in Devon, and very effective the words were too as they summed up his life on that western sea-board. But mainly that wind from the west brings the hint of Lyonesse. This hilltop is as wild as King Arthur’s Tintagel.