Prehistoric Man in the Crowlink Valley
[FROM A CORRESPONDENT.]
rrHE South Downs are almost everywhere rich in A- vestiges of early pre-historic man. These high, bare summits which look out on one side to the waters of the " Narrow Seas," and on the other to the Weald which of old was one vast dark forest, affording safe ground and unbroken- vistas for races which now seem to belong to the skyline of human history.
In these pre-historic vestiges, the Crowlink Valley, which the " Seven Sisters " Preservation Fund is seeking to retain in its ancient silence, is rich and plentiful. They are not massive and conspicuous as at Cissbury, Caburn, and Chanctonbury, but they are abundant ; they dimple everywhere- the surface.
There is a path, trodden from neolithic days, which runs from Crowlink Gap past Friston Church to Willingdon Hill. Here, on this high point, where giant barrows rear themselves, was held the Hundred moot of Saxon and Norman days. Across the trail in the Crowlink Valley runs a Roman road, a type of path greatly different from the earlier one ; it is cambered; well-metalled, and at the point where it makes junction shows with distinctness its ancestry.
Ancient field divisions are frequent. They are of two types : the earlier, which belongs to the most primitive form of .field culture in this country, shows from a little distance, in certain lights, an irregular chess-board pat- tern. These divisions belong to an age when cereals first found their way here, probably over the neck of land, between where are now the Straits of Dover, at a time When Britain was still a peninsula jutting from the main- land of Europe. The other field:divisions are . of early mediaeval date.. They are firmly marked out by a series of " dooles " in parallel lines. Above these, where the erowlink Valley approaches Friston Chureh, a building IA Saxon foundation, are traces clearly. outlined of a homestead, also of the mediaeval period, and, near it runs a dry division dyke, with • two or three dewponds of the earliest kind Mr now dry and The. _Sussex Archaeological Collections contain :an Recount in .the earlier volumes (V. and X., 4C.),,of. the 'opening of round barrows on the Crowlink hilltops, and of urns, bones, weapons, amulets, &e., , found belonging to races which had passed out of sight before the- Roman entered this land.
It is this bit of downland, rich in beauty and historic interest, that the public are being invited to preserve, with a view to its being handed over to the National Trust.
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