Below are quotes supporting the proposition that the Weald and Chalk Downs are an indivisible whole.  Please use them, if useful, in your letters to Defra arguing for the inclusion of the Weald in the South Downs National Park (see blog page for full details of the campaign   I The Downs have never been self-sufficient.  They always need to be associated with the villages and towns of the Weald, in the past for timber, food and markets, now for accommodation, restaurants, and shops—and possibly a museum development. This interdependence has age-old recognition and should be enhanced rather than dislocated.   The Weald and Downland are geologically and therefore culturally linked. Since the time of the South Saxons, the land was divided into north-south strips so that every community had a share of the different land-types.   Weald and Downland Museum Guidebook introduction The Museum’s title, Weald and Downland, is more than just a name. The geological character of the region, with the older central Weald, surrounded by the younger chalk Downs, has a profound impact on the landscape and human activity within it—settlement patterns, industry and agriculture   A history of the landscapes of the parishes of South Harting and Rogate  E.M.Yates ( Phillimore: Chichester) 1972 p.3…The parishes were originally one, as shown by the place-name Harting Combe in the north of Rogate parish…together (the parishes) form a strip of country extending from the Sussex-Surrey boundary to the southern slopes of the South Downs. They lie at right angles to the geological strike…   Sussex, Esther Meynell (Hale: London) 1947 p.253…(Sussex was divided into 6 strips or Rapes by the Saxons.) …They (the Rapes) stretch from north to south, running right up the county, and therefore include a portion in each Rape…of Downland, Weald and forest.   Water Cottage Tale,  Esther Meynell (Chapman & Hall: London) 1946 p. 104-05 …the chalk is like a sponge, the rains soak down through it till they are…held by some impervious layer and then through the between the two layers the springs gush out. These springs are the cause of villages—of that long string of lovely villages which lie at the northern foot of the South Downs, very old villages, on a very old road.        In the Weald itself, here and there, are little risings and hillocks on which villages grew for the double reason that there was good water…and the height kept the feet of the village out of the marsh or clay.     II Writers link the Weald and Downland  The Weald and Downs are felt to be complementary in a single landscape.     Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, Gilbert White, World Classic Edition (OUP: Oxford) 1902 reprinted 1965 p166..Though I have travelled the Sussex Downs upwards of thirty years, yet I still investigate that chain of majestic mountains with fresh admiration year by year; and I think I see new beauties every time I traverse it….As you pass along you command a noble view of the wild or weald, on one hand, and the broad downs on the other.  ( written in 1773)    Kipling : ‘The Weald is good, the Downs are best.’   Meynell Sussex p.258…On the dullest day, the wonderful forms of the Downs…and the way their spurs and bays and bosses shape into a kind of intricate pattern against the chequered floor of the Weald, are a sight whereof the resurrected dead in the barrows, could never tire. But when these contours flush to warmth under a sky of interchanging sun and cloud, and the valleys between are suffused in amber mist, and the little river slips in folds of silver into a grey-blue sea, soft as the flocks of cloud, earth has nothing to show more fair’  H.J.Massingham    English Downland      A Sussex Peep-Show, Walter Wilkinson, (Bles: London) 1933. p.204…I realised the essential, significant Sussex, the warm, sleepy Weald of deep lanes, leafy woods, and comfortable farms out of which rise the gentles pastures on the warm, sunny hills. That enchanting range of grassy mounds—the Sussex Downs.   p.25...A few miles distant, on the southern side of these reedy marshes, rose the Downs. Across the valley…hill after hill of bare green pastures with great fields billowing up from the Weald…smaller and fainter they receded into the distance, until they merged with grey mist of sun and sky into an impossible world of loveliness and poetry.   III Visual links: Views    Are the views‘Borrowed Beauty’ as the assessor asserts or the essence of the region’s beauty ?   1,)    The Downs viewed from the Weald—from far more than 4km away. --on the contrary these distant views are for many the best way of appreciating the beauty of the Downs   The Edward Thomas Country, W.M.Whiteman (Cave: Southampton) 1978  ISBN O-86146-067-7 p. 5  In the distance the skyline was a long line of hills, ’sixty miles of South Downs at one glance’.   The South Country , Edward Thomas   ‘Even in the bosom of the South Country, when the bells are calling over the corn at twilight, the westward-going hills where the sun has fallen, draw the heart away and fill us with a desire to go on and on forever, that same way.’  Quoted by Boogart p.11:     Sussex Cottage, 1936 Esther Meynell ( Chapman & Hall:London) 1936 pp.213-14 ...a vision of the Downs—a vision which differs according to whether the essential view is near or far, close under their steep escarpment, or distant enough to see the whole line as a whole, a faint blue writing against the horizon….their line against the sky, in spite of the softness of its curves, is always firm and clear.   p. 240….to see them ( the Downs) from the Weald is to see them breathe and change as one gazes—every fleeting cloud shadow is a pulsation, and they alter every hour of the day….It is impossible to tire of looking at these huge images of creative calm’ ( Edmund Blunden)   But we take the words of another Sussex poet ( Belloc):                         And along the sky the line of the Downs                         So noble and so bare.   …When it comes to description words are not any use—only eyes and memory.   Sussex,Esther Meynell, (Hale: London) 1947 p.99…the changing views of the Weald…with the Downs all along the right hand side, may be taken to be the epitome of essential Sussex….On one side the immemorial turf of the Downs…; on the other  the stretches of corn and roots, the little farmsteads with their groups of ancillary buildings, the narrow, deeply hedged lanes going northwards, and the dark woods…   p.255…Our blunt, bowheaded, whalebacked Downs, ( Kipling)   Meynell. Cottage Tale p.174 The Downs, remote to the southwards, looked more like dreams than anything tangible.   Wilkinson, Sussex Peepshow p.11…you look out over all the trees of the Weald, across the heart of the county, away to the South Downs, a blue, inviting line on the horizon.   p.29 ..to look along the Weald and to admire the steep escarpments of the Downs, receding one behind the other as they rose sharply and boldly from the plain.   p.75…This was Sussex again, a world of rich pasture and heaping hay…shapely fields and a distinguishing note of the blue Downs in the background. It was the natural spacious world of beauty…with which the human body and spirit could mingle easily and harmoniously.  The eye was pleased with the variety of form and colour….   p.80 This village on its southern (greensand) slope looks out over the Weald to the Downs…   Meynell, Cottage Tale p.87 …in sight of the full sweep of the South Downs…                   ‘ Unworthy they of Heaven that will not view the skies’   Meynell, Sussex p. 255… the line of the Downs against the sky is always delicately sharp and clear.     Gilbert White, Selborne p.6                               …there spreads the distant view,                         That gradual fades till sunk in misty blue:’ The Invitation to Selborne’   p.18…The prospect is bounded to the south-east and east by the vast range of the Sussex downs … which…form a noble and extensive outline.     p.167….I never contemplate these mountains (the Downs) without thinking I perceive somewhat analogous to growth in their gentle swellings and smooth fungus-like protuberances, their fluted sides, and regular hollows and slopes, that carry at once the air of vegetative dilation and expansion.     2.) Views from the Downs into the Weald   Wilkinson p.180..shows you the village a mile away, and all the fair, far-spreading Wealden country about it.   Wilkinson p.84-85   As you look over the vast, natural scene of woods and fields you wonder what you mean when you say that it is beautiful, and if anything but those fields and trees could have any permanence in that place. A great part of that world may become urbanised…when villas supported by some trade alien to the district, a trade more rich and luxurious than that simple earth has power to provide, when such villas come to be built among those fields then disproportion and ugliness will creep in. I was glad to have seen that view in the days of its poverty and beauty, but when it is rich and urbanised…May I, for one, be further afield.   Wilkinson p. 139…We sat among the herbs, surveying a world of hills and other dales, all radiant with sun and varied with woods and deep shadow….In the open valley a large farm basked in the sun, and thither, as evening fell were led the plough horses, and the hay wains, and the slow placid manoeuvres of the few fortunate inhabitants of this Happy Valley.   References to Tennyson and Blackdown p.67. From his eyrie overlooking the green meadows and dark woods of the Weald he (Tennyson) wrote to a friend:                         You came and saw and loved the view                         Long known and loved by me,                         Green Sussex fading into blue,                         With one grey glimpse of sea. Wilkinson p.82…the poet (Tennyson) had lived among the firs and heather, nine hundred feet above the sea:                         There on the top of the down The wild heather round me and over me June’s high blue…,   Wilkinson p. 84..perched on the southern point of the hill you look down on the roof of the lower woods to the heights of Blackdown Hill;, and over the wooded Weald, over all the sunny , misty miles to the South Downs.   IV   The A272, the road through the Rother Valley is given as a reason for excluding the Rother Valley from SDNP. It is the traffic rather than the road itself. WSCC and local residents are at present pressuring the Highways Authority and Central Government to remove the road  from the Primary Road Network. In itself the road has been more than usually celebrated, e,g,   ‘Dutchman is driven to poetry by 272’   A272: An Ode to a Road    Pieter Boogart, (Pallas Athene: London) 2000. ISBN 1-873429-29-0 Pieter Boogart explained to the press why he had written the book.   ‘It is a beautiful, curving road. It represents England. It captures the Englishness of English life. English roads are beautiful, a fact the English may need to be reminded of. Traffic may not be beautiful, but the roads are. One day my wife and I just stumbled across the road and we’ve loved it ever since….There’s nothing like it in Holland. In fact there’s nothing like it anywhere else in Europe   Sussex Car Tours, Judy Moore 1976 p35…From Rogate the road (272) leads eastwards….continue through beautiful, undulating country-side to Midhurst, one of the most attractive towns in Sussex…     General beauty West Sussex, John Montgomery (Spur Books: Buckinghamshire) 1977 ISBN 0 902875 78 7 p.19…the western part of Sussex, which is claimed by many admirers to be the most beautiful part of southern England.