Sussex footpaths to Bodiam Castle, 2006
Sussex is a very pretty part of the country, and it's easy to get there from London by train. There are a lot of nice towns and stretches of beautiful countryside; it's a bit like Kent. At some point I'll post photos of the south coast in Sussex, which I visited during the spring. But on a more recent Sunday Andrea and I took her friend Susanne out to do a walk called the Robertsbridge Circular, which is covered in Time Out's Country Walks volume 2. It involved visiting a castle called Bodiam Castle, which I first visited as a student in 1995.
Sussex got its odd name from the South Saxons, who settled the area over a thousand years ago.
The start of the walk is in the small Sussex town of Robertsbridge. Here Susanne, Andrea, Sandra and Thomas pause to look around.
(Who, you might ask, are Thomas and Sandra? They're a couple we met at the Robertsbridge train station, and they did not have a guidebook.
We planned to do the short version of the walk, and they were also interested in that plan, so we all walked it together.)
The Robertsbridge town sign.
Another view of Robertsbridge.
Just across the A21 we encountered The English Countryside, which we'd heard was nearby. These fields are mostly farmed, but the farmers keep the right-of-way open to walkers. Much of the English countryside is like this.
A bull. We used him as a landmark later on, because he was large and recognizeable. He is so large, in fact, that you can see him on the ground in aerial views on Microsoft's
Live Local (a Google Maps equivalent), where he appears as a brown splotch in the middle of the small,
hedge-lined green field surrounded by buildings. He's standing more or less exactly where my photo shows him:
check him out.
More fields in the countryside.
Buildings with this unusal shape are called oast houses. They were built to store grain and hops and to keep them dry, but these days most of the oast houses you see
are converted into residences.
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A footpath sign. Most country footpaths in England are marked like this, and though they cross private land the landowners are obliged to keep them clear.
Except, of course, when they are closed. In 2001 Britain had a major outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, and many footpaths were closed to the public. This laminated sign is probably a remnant of that closure, which happened while my sister Emily was living in London.
A field full of cattle.
This road sign shows some of the nearby places of interest, including Bodiam (where we were headed) and Battle, where the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066.
A hillside view, looking out over the Rother River Valley.
A more prominant footpath sign.
In the last stretch we started to encounter sheep.
Sheep live in a state of perpetual startlement. They always look surprised, and a little worried, to see you. Thomas pointed out that it is even worse for them if you mention mint sauce as you approach.
If you look very closely to the left, just behind these sheep, you can see Bodiam Castle. The row of trees separating the sheep from the castle lines the track of the Rother Valley Steam Railway.
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A wet field near the castle.
The Castle Inn pub. There has been a pub on this plot of land for centuries, and these days it is owned by a brewery called Shepherd Neame,
who serve an absolutely stellar Autumn ale called Late Red. They also do a decent ploughman's lunch.
Bodiam Castle, just across the street from the pub. It was built in 1385 to guard the south coast against French invasion during the Hundred Years' War, became partially ruined,
and has been used in photos, film and television ever since.
It is particularly famous because it is quadrangular and has a wide moat, and because it looks more or less whole from the outside. Now that you've seen these photos, you're
likely to occasionally spot the castle in other places.
This shot of the castle is nearly itentical to one in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the exterior of the castle was used as an establishing shot as Swamp
Castle, shortly before the line "Some day, son, all this will be yours." (What, the curtains?)
Bodiam Castle, oast houses in the distance.
Andrea at Bodiam Castle.
The inside of the castle is mostly a ruin.
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A walkway to what was once another bridge over the moat.
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There is quite a lot of graffiti inside the castle, some of it dating back a couple hundred years.
Andrea and Susanne at the top of one of the towers of Bodiam Castle. While the center of the castle is a ruin, the outside walls are in good shape.
The large courtyard.
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They don't get much more authentic looking than this.
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A rare photo of me. This is the bridge over the River Rother in Bodiam, near the pub. We decided to walk along the river most of the way back because the sun was getting low and we found
ourselves in a hurry.
Andrea, Susanne, Thomas and Sandra on the footpath along River Rother.
We startled some more sheep along the river. Again, oast houses. Look: oast houses.
Sunset. Never saw one quite like this.
Susanne also took some good photos of it.
It was like a sea of burning plasma.
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Yes, the colors really looked like this.
And this.
No more photos after that, because the sun set, and we suddenly found ourselves having to naviagte through the woods in the dark, using a book that only described the path outward, and that we couldn't see clearly anyway. But we found our way back, fortunately.
