The Rising Down: Lives in a Landscape

Harris digs down through geological and historical strata, unearthing life stories from the second world war, the days of the French Revolution, travelling back to the age of medieval iron-working on the Weald and beyond, to the prehistoric era when Sussex lay under a shallow sea . . . Wonderful . . . Harris demonstrates that local does not mean minor, nor parochial.

I admired Harris’s empathy for the creative types who visit her Sussex homeland, and her remarkable immersion in archaeological research . . . A book stuffed with stories of nature’s transcendent power to move, comfort and inspire.

Harris is already well known as a stunningly knowledgeable and perceptive cultural historian. Her decision to scour this small patch for meaning is a refreshing and radical act in its way. She majestically reclaims local history, wiping the slur off provincialism. She breathes life into the scantest records of ordinary existences . . . We see the world in a grain of sand here, eternity in an hour.

Harris’s beadily researched history of Sussex takes us on an evocative journey with poets, bailiffs and a moose. . . Starting at the moment Roman remains are disinterred from Sussex’s undersoil, [Harris] tracks down the people who walked the lanes, knapped the flints, thundered from the pulpits. And through scholarly willpower, plus a bit of imaginative whimsy, she forces them into life . . . another fascinating, evocative ramble, which belongs on the shelf of every reader in the county.

The Rising Down is a beehive of voices and aspirations, ahum with busyness; all these people, often treading the same soil, through the same trees, by the same sea . . . Thrilling, occasionally raising hairs as one epoch tumbles unexpectedly out of its own orbit and into the next. Alexandra Harris writes tenderly and beautifully of the human experience of land and describes with acuity how the places we know are often linked through our experiences, thoughts and memories to other lands . . . she makes a small part of England sing.

I will return and return to The Rising Down. I haven’t read anything at all like it before. The imaginative intelligence at work here makes the landscape of Sussex come to life. A masterpiece of observation, detection and meditation.