Furlongs

The farm where we camped every year from when I was five until I was around 20 was called Furlongs. It was quite near Lewes but nearer to the villages of Firle and Glynde and was actually in the parish of Beddingham – always pronounced Bedding HAM. Overall I lived on Furlongs for six months or so and in many ways that place was more important to me than my real childhood home in Crawley. There is always, in me, a yearning to be there.

And that’s where we were heading, from Eastbourne.

This was the farm house which often gets referred to as a shepherd’s cottage. Dick Freeman, the shepherd farmer, only occupied one room at the right hand end. The rest of the cottage was let out to the artist whose exhibition we had been to see in Eastbourne. As an artist she was Peggy Angus. To us she was Mrs Richards. She had first come to Furlongs in the 1930s and it had become an artist community and it still was. My dad used to put on his Sussex accents and refer to the people there as ‘the aartists’. Some of them had children of about our age and we used to play with them. By and large I was more interested in the farm and I enjoyed the company of elderly (I thought he was ancient) Dick Freeman.

A different view of the house which may have grown since those long ago days when I knew it well. My dad’s photo, from 1958 is not very good.

But even so it’s a lovely period scene when we see all of the photo.

In 1958 my dad also experimented with colour for the first time so I can show the Furlongs barn back then. It has entirely vanished.

That’s mum, sister, me and brother on a harvest wagon. I’m the sole survivor!

Some views from the farm

That looks to near the point where camped but we’ll get to that later – and below, lovely, iconic Mount Caburn.

We left the car and made our way on foot to the camp site. We could now start looking back to the farm.

And there, before us was the ledge where we used to camp.

Just to be sure, I’ll point it out!

I made my way to our old camp site.

And that’s me on the ledge.

The farm from ‘camp’ 2014 style

And 1954 style.

Mount Caburn, from camp. It’s a view etched into my brain and really, not a lot has changed until you get a modern camera and start seeing detail.

Cameras back then just couldn’t have taken this picture, but had they done so in colour they’d have seen a green coloured train looking quite similar and a complete absence of streetlamps along the road.

When we camped, we had no car for some years and kept our bicycles under the trees. Water was collected from a little further away and had to be carried up to the ledge. The strange circular item was probably a small bomb crater.

Our ledge and the view up the downs. I can remember my brother and I, on the first morning we were there, 60 years ago, climbing straight up the steepest part of the hill to the top. Like mountaineers before us, we did it because it was there. Back then the hill was used for motorbike uphill trials (which we never saw) so there was a clearly defined track.

My favourite chalk land flower is the scabious and here’s one on ‘our’ ledge.

There were always a few bullocks and young cows in the field. After some damage to tents my dad rigged up an entirely home made electric fence around the tents.

Many happy hours were spent in that field – which by any stretch of the imagination is huge. Those trees opposite were made for climbing and just on the ridge, above the cultivated fields there’s a chalk pit ready made for keen fossil hunting boys. It was all a wonderful playground.

We returned to the car where I snapped this view including a Cambridge roller.

The cart track to the farm.

And that matches a Peggy Angus painting.

Here we can see our camping ledge from the cart track.

I decided to digitally move that Cambridge roller into this photo.

To make a 2014 version of a 1934 Eric Ravilious painting.

And with that, and a tear in the eye, we’ll move on.