‘Uh oh, look at these!” I call to my friends, Annie and Mike. “Ominous,” remarks Annie. Mike raises an eyebrow. We’re hiking the Pevensey Levels, marshland first drained in 772, home now to sheep and cattle, but also water spiders, living underwater in air-filled webs. The ground is pocked with endless impressions of horseshoes.
“It’s almost as if an army came this way,” I say.
And we laugh, but only because we missed that army by 959 years. Annie, Mike, Fflos the dog, and I are on our first day of following the 1066 Country Walk across East Sussex, beginning at Pevensey, ending in Rye. At the midpoint is the town of Battle, where we have rented an outbuilding conversion for three nights. Battle is known as the probable site of the Battle of Hastings: the brutal killing field where about 2,000 Normans, 4,000 Anglo-Saxons and 700 horses died one day in October 1066, according to various sources, leading to William the Conqueror defeating King Harold for the crown of England.
History commands an immediacy outdoors that it doesn’t in books. You ask different questions on foot. We were on the Levels at the same time of year, September, as the Normans: did they note the blackthorn heavy with sloes? Spot blackbirds feasting on blood-red hawthorn berries? Hear the wind in the rushes alongside the River Pevensey? Did they remark how faded yet abundant this land was on the cusp of autumn? Doubtful, but the contradictions of war-making in such a gentle place – gentle light, gentle breeze, birdsong and river currents – make an impression on us. We notice how the landscape offers the same russet, sage and ochre hues as the Bayeux tapestry.
The 1066 Walk covers 31 miles, and we’ve given it four days: Pevensey to Herstmonceux, 6 miles; Herstmonceux to Battle, 11; Battle to Icklesham, 9; and Icklesham to Rye, 5. Our second day is the longest and steepest, and yet my favourite, as it establishes a pattern that continues throughout. We pick up the well-signposted route in the green secrecy of Wartling Wood, carpeted in acorns, lined by blackberries, and follow it around sunny fields. We emerge into the neat village of Boreham Street, plunge down a holloway guarded by beeches, and roll out into more fields with windswept, distant horizons. The impression is of a settled, well-inhabited landscape – a feeling augmented by morning tea at the Ash Tree Inn in the hamlet of Brownbread Street – but another deeper, more enduring impression underlies it.
Perhaps because the route is designed to call the distant past to mind, with every shift of scene we experience a slippage of time. One moment we’re walking down a contemporary street being passed by speeding cars, then we slip through a small opening in a hedge and plunge not only into fields or woods, but out of the present into time immemorial. There’s a constant weaving in and out of darkness and light, wildness and cultivation, close-grown tunnels of greenery and wide-open, windy spaces, and with each shift comes a hurtling from present to past and back again. The effect is of a temporal quilt sewn with our own footsteps. We encounter few other walkers to break the spell.
Elasticity of time is most apparent on Tent Hill, where, as Mike puts it, “the reward to effort ratio is quite good”. Sources suggest one army or the other – no one knows which – camped here, hence the name. Instead of troops, we discover an ancient horse chestnut with branches so immense they have touched the ground and put down roots of their own, creating a family of trees around a living, central ancestor. Joining their company is occupying past and present at once.
Because Mike has had the good sense to rent accommodation at Abbey View Cottages – there is indeed a view of Battle Abbey’s towers – we set forth on day three from our own digs. Another plunge off a country lane lands us on a bridle path in Battle’s Great Wood, where Mike announces: “My fungi sense is twitching.” Soon he is giving a mushroom tutorial: fly agarics; edible boletes and parasols; great penny buns (“the Rolls-Royce of mushrooms,” Mike pronounces).
And then the temporal hopscotch continues. One minute we’re crossing a golf course, the next we’re in deep countryside with venerable oasthouses tucked into hill folds. Shortly before arriving at the welcoming Three Oaks pub, we come upon one of artist Keith Pettit’s 10 Bayeux tapestry-inspired sculptures on the route: six hollow, Celtic-carved oak pillars planted inside with hawthorn. Together they form a circle of growing, living wonder on a hillcrest.
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Our final hike brings us to medieval Winchelsea, rebuilt by Edward I in the 1280s after the original town was washed away. We have traversed apple orchards and spent the morning in mellowness reminiscent of Dutch landscape paintings. To our joy, the modern stained glass windows of Winchlesea’s St Thomas church, created by Douglas Strachan as memorials following the first world war, bloom on the route like colour-saturated rainbows.
From Winchelsea, we head to Rye across the silted-in, coastal lowland that would have been underwater in Edward’s day. With Rye in eyeshot, we depart from the official 1066 Country Walk to detour past the ruin of Camber Castle, pressed into the flatland by a big, heavy sky. Begun in 1512, finished in 1544 and demolished in the 1640s by parliamentary forces in the English civil war, it’s a reminder of vulnerability – the waves and threats of invasions this coast has seen – and hubris, simultaneously.
With a final shift of perspective – pastureland to townscape – we fetch up in pretty, comfortable Rye, town of Henry James, antique shops and good food. We are more energised than exhausted, and grateful we didn’t have to conquer this place with anything more than our imaginations.
The Bayeux tapestry is on display at the British Museum from 10 September to 11 July 2027’ tickets now on sale. Abbey View Cottages sleeps four, from £200 a night; rooms as the Ship Inn in Rye from £75.
Pamela Petro is the author of The Long Field, published by Little Toller (£14). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
