‘And for that minute a blackbird sang’

WHEN the poet Edward Thomas was leaving his home at Steep in Hampshire permanently in 1916, to go to war, he wrote of his love of the Shoulder of Mutton Hill in the nearby Ashford Hangers. In When First, he recalled the first time he had seen the hill:

…fast beat my heart at sight of the tall slope of grass and yews, as if my feet Only by scaling its steps of chalk Would see something no other hill Ever disclosed.

The view from the hill encompasses the South Downs, stretching from Butser Hill to beyond Chanctonbury Ring: ‘Sixty