Adam Nicolson said: “The Sussex Weald, whose beauty consists in its having been handmade, still bears the memory in its bones as a place of deep poverty and hard labor. Try digging a posthole in the clay or even burying a pet or a dead lamb in the corner of a field. You soon know how intractable the land is: the deep Wealden lanes were mostly impassable all winter or would have needed a team of oxen to drag a wagon through their clag, and hardly a day of sunshine passes before that stolid stickiness transmutes into an equally unaddressable concrete. No one who could have chosen to farm elsewhere would have opted for these difficulties.”