Country walk: Quebec to Nyewood

You are walking across the open pages of a history book on this 5.6-mile (9kms) ramble through the Weald. First, park your car along a narrow lane at SU779205, which is also the Sussex Border path, a mile northwest of South Harting.

Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, from his village house nearby, must have ridden his horse across these lovely meadows and oak forest.

H G Wells would have walked the dusty lanes. His early life was in the dungeons, as his imagination glorified the cellars of nearby Up Park, and which blossomed into The War of the Worlds. The Duke of Wellington was offered Up Park from a grateful nation after Waterloo but turned it down. The hill being too steep for his horses.

We set out north along the road, with a steep slope to our right that rises to a green dome of a hill called Torberry. Iron Age tribes lived there, hiding their corn in underground chambers, burying their dead as close to heaven as possible, making metal spears, watching the night fires of neighbouring tribes on other hill forts along the Downs.

Then we come to a place called Quebec. Troops trained here before sailing off to fight the battle of that name in 1759. General Wolfe was killed but four years later Canada became a British colony. We pass under some splendid oaks which might have been planted then with perhaps an idea that would one day make more battleships for the empire. Just a thought.

Turn right and leave the road eastward on a footpath. In dry weather the next mile is comfortably passable. We are close to the Harting stream that drains from Harting Pond.

Much of this farmland becomes a bit of a quagmire in winter with some interesting plants such as reed mace and reed grass, conglomerate rush and hard rush, which the Romans used to make ropes. There are dragon flies, and even grey wagtails skipping along above the stream. Keep right-handed around the old barn. The hedges here are habitat for lesser whitethroat and common whitethroat warblers. The footpath splits and the right one makes a short cut back, the left takes us on to Nyewood, with its one-time new plantations giving it the name.

Turn left along the main street for 300 yards, and then before the route of the dismantled railway turn right down a twitten on a footpath into marshy land of soft rush, Juncus effuses. I once sprung a snipe out of this bog, as it made a scraping alarm cry and then flew high away to the meadows yonder.

Keep right at the stream, soon finding a lovely sunken lane with old gnarled trees, that brings you to a road where turn right. After 400 yards turn left on yellow arrow into south Harting valley with a stone bridge over the stream. Left at the next road. After a while Trollope’s house comes into view, but you must turn right over a stile and across a meadow to find your car again.

History runs like the streams out of Harting Hills. There was once a cottage industry of grommet making for the Navy. And stranger still – a woman who turned herself into a hare and was caught by the beagles but managed to escape.

Callum Woodgate, associate, Flude Commercial, Chichester office and Chichester BID board director