Home to the iconic skylark, the chalk downlands are as colourful and botanically diverse as rainforest.

Climbing up on Caburn hill, I could see the town lights of Lewes, but, on the summit, time had stopped still long before the age of electricity. In the tall grass around the dim earthen walls of the Iron Age fort, the warm night wind whispered the echoes of past voices. I tried to catch their sense, but it was seemingly babble. Babel.

Looking out over the South Downs under the moon, the dark mound of Firle Beacon assumed the geography, with its long smooth flank, its fluted limbs, of a giant sleeping dog lain on its side. Indeed, the whole of the Sussex downland, it occurred, might be composed of the bodies of enormous downland creatures slumbering under a cloak of grass, with Caburn their gargantuan alpha pack leader, heaving its head up from sleep. Rolling and rounded, shapely buried bodies.