Camber Castle, where the author took a detour en route to Rye. Photograph: Noble Images/Alamy View image in fullscreen Camber Castle, where the author took a detour en route to Rye. Photograph: Noble Images/Alamy Sussex holidays ‘The landscape offers the same russet and ochre hues as the Bayeux tapestry’: walking the 1066 trail in East Sussex With the British Museum’s blockbuster Bayeux tapestry exhibition opening soon, we follow in the footsteps of William the Conqueror and King Harold’s armies around Battle and Rye
Prefer the Guardian on Google ‘U h 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.
View image in fullscreen Battle Abbey. Photograph: Maciej Olszewski/Alamy 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.
With each shift of scene comes a hurtling from present to past and back again. The effect is of a temporal quilt sewn with our footsteps 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...