Sunday morning, I hopped on to the Ramblers’ site again. The folks on Wednesday at told me that there were often group walks on Sundays as well. I found a walk that started out nearby. The rendezvous instructions left me in just a little bit of doubt. They said to meet at the Lower Cissbury Ring Car Park. I saw two parking lots near Cissbury Ring, which turned out to be another Iron Age hill fort with minimally visible earthworks. One of them seemed from the map to be both further south and at a slightly lower elevation – I figured that gave me a pretty good chance that you’d call it lower. I also had plenty of time to go there first and zoom to the other one if I didn’t find anyone.
I found a bunch of people at the first parking lot I tried, and got acquainted with a few of them while we waited for more people who were carpooling down. This Ramblers’ group was from somewhere much closer to London. Robin, the fellow who was leading the walk, has a weekend home in Sussex, and I think a few of the other members do as well, so some had driven there directly while a bunch of others carpooled. Very sensible, but it meant we had a certain amount of waiting around and nose counting before we could get under way.
There were nearly 40 of us by the time the last drivers got in. Robin had planned out a very pleasant walk that took us over a couple of downs for good distance views and through a few pretty villages. I’m not sure I could even trace the route. I got very lazy and left my GPS in my pocket and hardly looked at the map.
In one village, we stopped at the church shortly after services had ended. The minister was still there and he pointed out a few features of the church. He kicked back a rug to show us brass etchings representing ancestors of the poet Shelly whose family had been big landowners in the area. He was sipping a sherry to restore himself from his mornings work and pointing out various bits of décor to us. Allan, a fellow I’d been walking and talking with for much of the morning was amused to find that the minister knew a lot about the art history of the church but almost nothing of its iconography. Not a tremendous surprise, really, as the church had, like any its age, been created Catholic but had participated in the slow slide of the Church of England toward the protestant over the centuries. Unlike many others, no zealots ever went through it ripping everything down, so it had a lot of Catholic decoration left. It also had some much more recent décor – including some purpose made tile work by William Morris – but that had all been designed to work with what was already there.
We left the vicar behind, zipping his sherry and trying to commit the names of the archangels Paul had explained to him to memory.
We had lunch in a nice pub called, for reasons I could never establish, the World’s End. The sign was painted with the scene of a meteorite falling towards a village, so I believe the name was meant to be temporal rather than geographic, but that was as far as I got. I joined three other walkers who made justifiable fun of what they called my fishing vest and were good company.
One minor complaint I have developed about Sussex is that the vast majority of the pubs seem to be supplied by the same brewing company, so I saw nothing like the variety of ales available that I found along the Pennines and around Coleshill. Probably good for my health, as I always feel obligated to try new brews so less novelty meant less ale, but it made the pubs feel a little chainy.
As a finale for the walk, we went up to Cissbury Ring from the side opposite where we’d parked and walked most of the way around. There was a visible ditch and bank around most of the hilltop, though substantially eroded in parts. The views were spectacular. It was a very clear day, and I could pick out a lot of the other areas where I had walked. This is where I got the real benefit of having dropped anchor in Arundel for so long and done so much local walking. I really had a strong sense of orientation and organization for where the terrain, towns, and roads were. It helped me pull everything I’d seen into some kind of structure.
A few of us had gotten ahead of Robin, and we almost missed the turning down off the ring, not that I would have conceptually minded another lap to see what was to see from the other side, but I was getting tired. We zipped back to join the middle of the column on the long downhill to the car park.
Borrowed Garmin Facts: Robin’s GPS said we did 12 miles even in just under 4 hours for a 3 mph walking average. His doesn’t have an altimeter, but looking at the features we climbed on the map it was at least 400 meters.
My adventures for the day were far from over even as I parked back in Arundel. I lounged around a little and washed up then went downstairs to discover preparations for Quiz Night in progress. I was pretty much swept into participating and was almost immediately part of a team of 4 fiddling through a pair of questionnaires one of which wanted definitions for a bunch of terms each of which had a color as part of it. The only one we couldn’t get was blue john, and I still haven’t gotten that one. The other questionnaire had a bunch of photos on it, and we were to supply the names of the people in them.
I think these do it yourself quizzes have become a standard part of quiz night, because the main event takes time to pull together. There were about 8 teams scattered around different rooms of the pub. This was the first time the St Mary’s Gate had tried to do this, so there was a lot of improvisation. A fellow named Ted acted as MC and he had a hell of a time figuring out using the microphone they’d given him. Ideally, the way quiz night works is each individual or team has a set of answer sheets, one for each round. During each round the MC reads off a list of questions. Everyone listens attentively and hears the questions clearly. You attempt to answer the questions then swap sheets with someone else at the end of the round to score each others’ papers. I don’t know how often quiz nights achieve or even approach this ideal, but we were pretty far off.
Between the microphone problems and the participants’ difficulty in resisting commenting loudly on the microphone problems, I don’t think a single question was repeated fewer than four times. I also think a few teams decided to start a side game going in trying to wind up Ted and the other organizers, but I will give Ted credit, he maintained a perfect calm throughout. He also had a very impressive voice. If he’d been willing to take a vow of silence for Monday, I have no doubt he would have been better heard had he dispensed with the microphone and just bellowed.
Most of the questions were strongly British in derivation (The title of the first “Carry on” film anyone? The title of any “Carry on” film? The very faintest notion of what a “Carry on” film might be?) so I was almost no use at all. Those who know me will be astonished to learn that the only question I contributed significantly to was in the sports category. It was not, lest any of you become worried, because I remembered any significant sports trivia, it was just logic. The question was something like “What major international sports event commenced at Soldier Field in the city of Chicago on the 17th of June, 1994?” I knew from my time in Chicago that Soldier Field is an American football field, so would not usually be used in June. I remembered that the US had hosted the Soccer world cup sometime in the 90’s, because a friend had taken me to see a match in DC. Putting this together, I figured out it must have been the world cup. I think we were the only team to get that one since everybody else moaned and made “Well duh” noises when the answer was read out.
The whole thing was good fun, though I don’t see myself making a habit of it. My team mates, Paul, Trevor, and a blond woman whose name I never heard clearly above the noise, were extremely tolerant of the depths of my ignorance.
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