There are few districts in England and certainly none south of the Trent where old customs and queer legends persist with so much vitality as in these lonely combes and hollows.  The effect of being out of the world is perhaps enhanced in these western Downs by the ring fence of dark woods through which we have to pass to reach the bare, wind-swept solitudes and lonely hamlets within them.  The northern escarpment and southern flanks of the hills are clothed in vast forests of beech which add that grandeur to the great ramparts of chalk which the eastern ranges lack.  Seen through the ever-shifting sea mists which creep up from the channel these heights take on an appearance of greater altitude and an added glamour of mystery.

South-east of Harting is the isolated Beacon Hill, once a semaphore station between Portsmouth and London; but instead of taking at once to the heights, the pedestrian should first visit Elsted up on its own little hill, and Treyford a mile farther; both churches are ruined and deserted.  A new church with a spire that forms a landmark for many miles, stands midway between the two and serves both.  Elsted has an inn from the doorway of which the traveller has a superb view of the Downs.  From Treyford a bridle-path leads directly south to the summit of Treyford Hill, where are five barrows called “The Devil’s Jumps.”  From here the track running along the top of the Down will bring us in two miles to the bold spurs of Linch Down (818 feet), the finest view-point on the western Downs, the views over the Weald being magnificent in all directions.  A track will have been noticed on the west side of the summit, and a return should be made to this, and then by striking southwards through the Westdean woods we eventually reach Chilgrove.  We might then climb the opposite spur and keep southwards until the ridge rises to the escarpment of Bow Hill, but the finest walk of all and the most fitting termination to our tour will be to keep to the rough road which runs down the valley south-east to Welldown Farm.  Here a road turns right and in a little over a mile drops to the romantically beautiful Kingley Vale.

This vale is a cup-shaped hollow in the south side of Bow Hill; its steep sides are clothed in a sombre garb of yews and at the farther end of the combe is a solemn grove of these venerable trees amid which broad noon becomes a mystic twilight filled with the spirit of awe; a fitting place for the burial of warrior kings with wild, barbaric rite.  Tradition has it that many Danish chieftains were here defeated and slain and that here beneath the yews they rest.  But who shall say what other strange scenes these lonely deeps in the bosom of the hills have witnessed before Saxon or Dane replaced the Celt; who in turn, for all his fierce and arrogant ways, went, by night, in fear and trembling of those spiteful little men he himself displaced, and whose vengeance or pitiful gratitude is perpetuated in the first romances of our