A Guide to England's 1066 Country by Greg Cook

1066 country. A landscape of moated castles, steam railways and seaside towns with pleasure piers and steep-cobbled streets; scenes overlayed through the passing centuries, now surviving in composite to create the archetypal image of England. An England which, nearly a millennia ago, had its fate decided here in this beautiful coastal pocket of East Sussex, where the last recorded invasion force to successfully land on these shores won a famous victory, forged a new nation, and forever changed the course of this island’s history.
   
Surrounded by countryside and coastal reaches so abundant with the historical evidence of the past thousand years, it’s impossible to imagine how this island may have evolved had Harold Godwinson, later to become Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king, won a resounding victory at the Battle of Hastings on the 14th of October 1066, a date since etched into the national consciousness. As it was, the day and the crown belonged to William, Duke of Normandy, and was doubtless in his view the just compensation for the broken oath of fealty made to him by Harold two years earlier.

The Battleground Today   

Thankfully the area today, ringing with the history of events born from perceived betrayals and false promises, never disappoints but offers its visitors a myriad of famous historic sites, from the crumbling fairytale ruins of ancient castles to immaculate country houses set in Arcadian gardens scattered across a backdrop of rolling fields and woodlands, intersected with steep-banked lanes that weave their way through tiny hamlets and charming villages. To the south lies the region’s celebrated coastline, encompassing the towns of Bexhill, Hastings and Rye, cradled to the west by the chalky bolster of the South Downs, soon to become a national park, where bracing walks along gorse-lined ridges provide sweeping sea-views to rival those of the buzzards and sparrow-hawks riding lazy circles in the thermals above.
   
Most of us will dimly remember (from history classes that may seem as distant as the epic events which unfolded here) that Hastings was in fact neither the location where Harold and William’s forces met nor where the invading Norman army landed, their beachhead being some twelve miles west at Pevensey Bay. Today the village of Pevensey makes for a charming visit after roaming the crumbling ruins of Pevensey Castle, originally a fort dating from the Roman era, improved with a new gateway and inner bailey by Robert de Mortain, William’s half-brother. Once set against the waters of the Channel and reinstated five-hundred years later for defence against the Spanish Armada, its picturesque ivy-covered walls now stand on a prominent headland half a mile back from the retreated sea.
   
From here William moved along the coast to Hastings, making his base of operations here, before marching his army inland where seventeen days later he finally encountered the serried ranks of Harold’s Anglo-Saxons commanding the ridge of Senlac Hill. It was here that Harold so famously met his demise, pierced through the eye by a Norman arrow, and it is here that ruins still survive of the Abbey that William erected in thanks to God on the site of his most famous victory, the high-altar said to be positioned above the very spot where Harold fell. The thriving rural town that stands here today with a predominantly Georgian high-street offering a wealth of shops, pubs and restaurants that run down to a square in front of the Abbey, now managed along with the fields to the rear by English Heritage, has been known simply as Battle ever since. 

Seafront Pleasures and Smuggler's Caves

Although Hastings may not have been the actual site of conflict its history is no less rich and fascinating. The town today provides visitors with a profusion of activities; from the simple pleasures of a traditional seaside town whose Victorian seafront provides fish-and-chip shops and a beach complete with a handsome pier proclaimed ‘peerless’ in the pun that hyped its opening in 1872, on to the Old Town quarter east of the pier, an area with a somewhat Bohemia air, dotted with a plethora of tiny shops selling antiques, second-hand curios and vintage treasures along picturesquely winding streets and paved passageways that have made a broader impact recently after forming the backdrop for the popular ITV drama Foyle’s War.
   
The shingle beach here, known as The Stade (an old Saxon term meaning landing place), has a character all of it’s own. Here the candy-striped deckchairs are replaced by the last boats of what remains the largest beach-launched fishing fleet in Europe. A fleet which has put out to sea from here everyday for the last thousand years, bringing back a delicious sustainable catch ranging from crab to Dover sole, much of which is sold immediately from beachfront stalls centred around the unique net huts whose three-storey wooden-boarded sides provide the beach’s defining characteristic.

Include a visit to the fascinating catacombs of The Smuggler’s Caves open to the public in the rocks above, along with the town’s Shipwreck and Coastal Heritage Centre, which offers intriguing exhibits and accounts of sunken ships dating from Roman times to the Second World War, and bear in mind that the very best time to visit Hastings is during the town’s September food and wine festival, when the fruits of the sea can be appreciated along with its perils.

As a town that fuses an ancient sea-faring past with the classic attractions of the British seaside, Hasting proves the perfect jumping-in point for exploring the rest of this coastal stretch. To the west lies Bexhill-on-Sea, a town that remains the embodiment of an elegant Victorian seafront resort, the crowning glory of its shoreline being the De La Warr Pavillion, a grade-one listed Modernist masterpiece of the Art Deco era, rendered in ocean-going curves of glass behind tiers of balconies, the building is now a centre for the contemporary arts, housing gallery spaces and terrace cafes as well as hosting concerts by musicians from across the globe.

Literary Connections 

To the other side of Hastings, in complete contrast, lies the picture-perfect Medieval fishing port of Rye, although now fed by river from the retreated sea, the maritime maze of its steep, cobbled streets flanked by a stunning mixed architecture of Georgian and half-timbered Tudor facades has scarcely changed in centuries, making it all the easier to imagine the lives of the many literary residents who for a while called this town home, from Edith Wharton and even H. G. Wells, to possibly Rye’s most celebrated expatriate, the American author Henry James, who wrote Wings Of A Dove and The Golden Bowl during his time living in Lamb House, the stunning eighteenth-century property still to be found at the top of West Street.

It’s easy to lose hours roaming around the gradients of Rye beguiled by its natural charm, but when the hill-climbing finally takes its toll the perfect antidote lies just a couple of miles away at nearby Camber Sands, where the cobbles and shingle that define the beaches of the south-east coast finally give way to a beautiful broad tract of un-spoilt sandy beach and sheltering dunes that are enjoyed just as much by dog-walkers, horse-riders and kite-surfers in the winter months as by sunbathers and swimmers during summer.   

Beguiling as this coast may be, neither the region’s beauty or its history diminish as you journey inland, and while Rye may have had its adopted son in Henry James, one of the country’s most passionately patriotic literary exponents also made his home in the countryside of this special part of East Sussex, where he composed this most appropriate piece of poetry;
   
    ‘England's on the anvil - hear the hammers ring, -
     Clanging from the Severn to the Tyne!
     Never was a blacksmith like our Norman King,
     England's being hammered, hammered, hammered into line.’

So goes the first verse of The Anvil, a poem in praise of the forging of a unified English nation under the governance of William The Conqueror, written by an author born nearly eight-hundred years later, in 1865, Rudyard Kipling. His family home of Batemans, situated here just outside the delightful village of Burwash, is now owned by the National Trust and remains the essence of the pastoral idyll safely hidden at the heart of the Empire.

Castles Fit For a King    

The perfect solution to enjoying the countryside at the heart of this region in a manner that Kipling would surely have approved is a journey on the Kent and Sussex Steam Railway. As the country’s finest example a light rural railway, you can even dine during your journey in restored Pullman Cars, drinking in the view through a gentle puff of steam as the line wends through the unspoilt Rother Valley to terminate at Bodiam, the location of one of England’s true ‘fairytale’ castles. Bodiam Castle, with its beautifully preserved and spectacularly turreted quadrangular walls, built in 1385 and still entirely surrounded by a broad moat, provide an image that has become the personification of an English Medieval castle.
   
Another example of a truly spectacular moated castle can be found at Herstmonceux, situated just few miles north-west of Hastings. Here though, rather than deserted keeps ringing emptily with the deeds of days gone by, this ancient complex still thrives. Constructed here in 1441, Herstmonceux Castle became the temporary home to the Royal Greenwich Observatory shortly after WWII in a bid to avoid London’s increasing light pollution. The observatory moved again, this time to Cambridge in 1990, yet the legacy of it’s six working telescopes survives, with three still open to the public for guided evening observations, while the castle’s new science centre is proving a huge success with space-fixated children of all ages.
   
With a 26” Thompson reflector telescope such as the one housed at Herstmoncuex, you wonder if Harold could have seen what was in store for this island, long before that fateful arrow found its mark in his eye. Yet had the tables could so easily have turned on that momentous day, creating a millennia of collective history so radically different it’s impossible to imagine. One thing in this tiny part of the world however would doubtless have remained the same is the timeless beauty of this rural landscape - but whether this region would still contain one of its most recent Gallic-influenced attractions, the profusion of small vineyards that have sprung up in recent years among the hop fields, we can only guess.