Journal

I’ve been putting this off. I’ve been putting this off for twelve years, if I’m honest, but specifically I’ve been putting off writing it down for the website for about three weeks. I built the Research page. That was fine - footnotes, sources, other people’s words. This is different. This is the bit where I have to say what happened to me.

Well, OK.

September 2013. Late afternoon, maybe an hour before sunset. I drove up to Chanctonbury Ring to fly my drone. I’d been plenty of times before, though invariably early in the morning. It was always just a cool mini-forest at the top of a hill with a truly fabulous view.

I drove the MX5 out through Steyning, roof down, along the A283 and then onto Chanctonbury Ring Road - which is an unmade single-lane track through farmland. Parked in the muddy car park at the bottom. One other vehicle there, a battered Land Rover. I walked south through the woods, up the hill, onto the South Downs Way, then west to the Ring.

Nothing unusual on the way up. A woman with two dogs who didn’t smile back at me. Some exposed tree roots that looked strange. A thought - maybe just turn around and go home? - which I ignored.

I set up east of the Ring. Launched the drone. The light was good. Sunset along the ridge, the beech trunks going from grey to gold, the Ring’s shadow stretching east across the chalk. Decent pictures, as far as I could tell. Things were going alright.

And then.

I don’t know how to write this bit. I’ve tried a few times and it always comes out wrong - either too dramatic or too clinical, and neither version is what it actually felt like. So I’ll just say it as plainly as I can.

Something started watching me. From very close. Inches from my face.

I didn’t see anything. Nothing moved, nothing made a sound. The drone was buzzing away a hundred metres up and the hilltop was empty and there was absolutely nothing in front of me. But something was there. Right there, close enough that I could have reached out and touched it, if there’d been anything to touch. It was examining me. Patient, thorough, completely indifferent to whether I was comfortable with the examination.

My hands were shaking. I watched them shake.

I brought the drone down too fast, shoved it in the bag, started walking. The thing kept pace - in front of my face, maintaining distance, like it was walking backwards. I walked faster. Then jogged. Then, on the steep bit through the trees, I stopped pretending.

I ran. Full speed, backpack slamming against me, boots sliding on the chalk. A two-thousand-pound drone treated like a bag of shopping. I didn’t care. I needed to reach the car and just get the hell away. Got to the car park, threw everything onto the passenger seat, reversed out and hammered down the track, bottoming out on every pothole. Didn’t slow down until I was past Steyning on the way home.

Got back to mine. She was cooking. I could see her through the window. Bump where our son was growing.

“How was it?”

“Yep, fine.”

I am normally not lost for words. I can turn a mundane trip to the petrol station into a twenty-minute story. That evening I had just two words.

Went to bed with a dull headache and a ringing in my ears. I’d never had tinnitus before. I have had it, intermittently, from that evening onwards.

WIth sleep, there was a dream. I don’t remember the details - they were gone by morning. I remember the scale of it. Something vast. Not large like a building or a mountain. Vast in a way that made the word inadequate. And roots - tree roots in dark soil, growing, spreading, reconnecting where they’d been cut. The trees above were gone but the roots didn’t care about the trees. The roots were patient.

I woke up and made coffee and checked my phone and didn’t think about it.

Twelve years passed. I'd think about what happened from time to time, and occasionally mention it to others. But I filed it. Low blood sugar, atmospheric pressure, the particular weirdness of hilltops at dusk. I had a son to raise. I had a life. The folder of research I’d started sat on my hard drive and I never deleted it but I also never opened it and you can decide for yourself what that means.

Then last autumn my son found Chanctonbury Ring on TikTok and asked me to take him there. We went, how could I say no? I was initially nervous and watchful. And - nothing bad happened. It was beautiful and calm and nothing happened at all other than a lovely trip out with my son.

And here I am, twelve years later, building a website about it at two in the morning. Make of that what you will. I don’t know what to make of it myself.

I’ve been going back to the Ring. Not at sunset - mornings, daylight, the whole thing very sensible and deliberate. I tell myself it’s for photographs. It mostly is.

This morning I drove up early. Parked in the usual spot, walked south through the woods, up the hill. Cold, clear, nothing remarkable. Got to the Ring and there was a man inside packing up a tent.

He’d camped overnight. On his own. I didn’t ask why - it's something people do. It’s a beautiful spot and wild camping on the Downs isn’t unusual. We got talking the way you do when you meet someone in the middle of nowhere at eight in the morning.

He told me he’d heard noises during the night. Metallic banging. Rhythmic, like hammers. Not random - deliberate. He couldn’t explain it and he wasn’t trying to. He wasn’t frightened. Just slightly confused. He said it was at about 3 in the morning, went on for a while and then stopped.

I stood there and listened and didn’t say anything about what I know about this place. Didn’t mention the legends, the folklore, the academic papers I’ve been reading for months. I just let him talk.

In the car afterwards I sat with my hands on the steering wheel for a while. This man had no context. He hadn’t read Simpson. He didn’t know about the Romano-Celtic temple or the Devil or the soup. He pitched a tent on a hill because it was a nice hill and he heard something he couldn’t account for.

I've got a field recorder in a drawer at home somewhere. If the Ring makes sounds, I’d like to know what they are. A recording is data. You can’t argue with a waveform.

Saturday. Drove the van out to Bostal Road and parked in a layby a couple of miles east of the Ring. Cycled up with the recorder in my bag. A Zoom H1, a good few years old, nothing fancy but decent enough for the task at hand. I attached it to a branch near the centre of the Ring with a bungee cord, pressed record, and cycled back to the van.

Leaving the recorder was harder than I expected. Which is a stupid thing to say about a recording device on a tree. But there it is.

Back in the van well before sunset. Wrote for a bit, then slept. Slept brilliantly, actually - best night’s sleep I’d had in weeks.

Dawn: cycled back, retrieved the recorder. The Ring in early morning is beautiful and ordinary. Birds everywhere. Picked it up, cycled back to the van. Done.

The recorder had stopped overnight. About seven hours captured, which was less than I’d hoped. And slightly strangely, the battery was still half full, so I don't know why it stopped. But anyway, when I played it back - and I left it playing all day, in the background, while I worked - it was genuinely lovely. The whole evening on the Downs: birdsong thinning as the light goes, owls, foxes somewhere in the distance, wind through the canopy, the occasional car on the road far below. Hours of it. I was in a brilliant mood all day. Didn’t really think about why.

I’ve uploaded it to YouTube. Trimmed, cleaned up a bit, nothing dramatic. It’s just ambient sound from a hill in Sussex. If anyone wants seven hours of nightfall on the South Downs, it’s there.

Seven hours isn’t enough. I need to go back with better batteries.

Went back. Attached the recorder to a battery charger this time. Same routine - van to the Bostal Road layby, cycled up to the Ring later in the day, clipped the recorder to the same branch, pressed record, cycled back. Wrote for a while in the van. Slept.

Morning. Went to get on the bike and found a puncture. So I walked. It’s a couple of miles and it was foggy - proper fog, thick, low, the kind where you can’t see more than about thirty metres. I filmed the walk on my phone.

The footage is something else. You can’t see the Ring at all until you’re right on top of it. The trees loom out of the murk at about thirty metres and then suddenly it’s just there, this enormous dark shape that wasn’t there a second ago. I couldn’t have staged that if I’d tried.

The recorder’s LCD said fourteen hours. Fourteen. Using the battery charger worked. I picked it up and walked out of the Ring still filming on my phone, talking to myself about how it was a bit spooky in the fog. Got outside, said “I think we’re done,” and stopped filming.

The recording is beautiful. The deep night hours are very still - occasional wind, foxes, what I think are tawny owls, then rain around 3am. The dawn chorus builds slowly and then all at once, the way it does. Fourteen hours of the Ring at night. I’ve split it into two parts for YouTube - dusk to midnight, midnight to dawn - because fourteen hours is a lot to ask of anyone.

There’s about thirty minutes of audio weirdness right at the end, after I picked the recorder up. Distortion + glitches, some kind of looping. I’ve trimmed it from the YouTube uploads because it’s not exactly relaxing ambient sound. I’ll look at it properly at some point. I recorded the retrieval on my phone as well, so in theory I can sync the two and see what’s going on. Haven’t got round to it yet.

I'd been sleeping in the van, parked up in the Bostal Road layby. Woke up just after 1am and couldn't get back off. The recorder had been running since the previous evening and I started thinking about the batteries - whether they'd last the full night. Probably. But I was awake, and it's only a mile or so.

Cycling along the South Downs Way at the darkest point of the night is an experience I cannot, on the whole, recommend. No lights, obviously, apart from the moon. The light on my handlebars lit up about three metres of track ahead and everything else was just - gone. You forget how dark the countryside actually is until you're right in it.

In the end I didn't go in to the Ring. AS I got closer I felt unsettled for some reason. I stopped on the track maybe a hundred metres out and pointed my torch up towards the trees. You can't see the shape of the Ring at all at night - just the nearest trunks catching the light, and then black. During the day it's a clump of beech trees on a hill. At night it could be anything.

I filmed a few minutes on my phone. It's up on the YouTube channel

Cycled back down to the layby, got in the van, locked the doors.

Picked the recorder up the next morning by which time the sun was shining and everything was calm and beautiful again. There's about twelve hours of audio. I'll get round to uploading it at some point.

That last 1am visit put me off a bit, if I’m honest. I wrote it up all calm at the end - sun’s out, everything fine - and that part was true. But I didn’t fancy going back up for a while after it, so I didn’t. Left the recorder in its case. Didn’t touch the twelve hours of audio. Didn’t think about it much. Well - you don’t not think about it. But I mostly left it alone.

A month or so went by like that.

Then last week I bumped into an old mate at the gym. I've known him for years. Straight away he told me that his son had almost died a week or so back. Burst appendix, one of the worst the hospital has seen, with accompanying sepsis. They’d spent half the night in A&E then a few days on an ICU, and at several points the doctors told him and his other half the boy might not make it. He’s just a year or two younger than my lad. It all came out in a rush, like he hadn’t said it out loud to anyone else yet.

By the end of it we were both on the verge of tears.

The boy is out of the woods now, hopefully. Home, recovering, a long way still to go, but alive and mostly alright.

The bit my mate really struggled to get out was that at the worst of it, in all that pain, his son had asked him if it was time for him to die now. And he said that if it had gone the other way, that would have been the end of him as well. He’d have drunk himself to death, sooner or later, probably the former. He didn’t say it for effect. He said it like something he’d already sat down and worked out.

So there we are. Two blokes built like wardrobes (OK maybe an armoire in my case), just about clinging to our composure while all around us people are getting in their reps, possibly wondering what the hell is going on with those two. I gave him a big, teary-eyed hug. It felt like the right thing to do.

I cycled home. My son was at his mum’s. I rang him about nothing in particular - asked what he’d had for tea, let him talk at me for a bit about a game he’s playing.

And I’ve decided I’m going to go back up to the Ring. Daytime. Soon. I’m not going to sit here and explain why, because I’m not sure I could. The last time something sent me back up that hill, it was my son. That’s all I’ll say about it.

Next time I write anything here, it’ll be from after I’ve been.

OK. I've been back up. A few times, as it turns out.

Three, to be precise, over one weekend, if we're counting, which is faintly ridiculous. Friday morning with a couple of mates, just for a bit of fresh air, and to tuck my field recorder up there under a tree so it'd catch the rain that was forecast for the Saturday. Then back up again Friday afternoon, because it turned out I had left the battery charger thing sitting on the kitchen table, like a complete div. And once more early Sunday, on the bike, to fetch the thing back.

And every time it was lovely. Sunny on the Friday, grey and still on the Sunday morning, the whole place just calm. Same as it felt when I took my son up last year.

On the Sunday I sat against one of the beeches for a good while with a can of San Mig, in no hurry to be anywhere, and then cycled home feeling better than I have in months. Slept like a log, the way I always seem to after I've been up there now.

The recorder recorded the whole night. My favourite bit is Saturday's dawn chorus coming up alongside the rain, birds having a lovely time and not a bit bothered by the damp. It's genuinely lovely. I've put it on the YouTube channel and I have it playing in the background a lot. Here's the link if you fancy doing the same.

So we're in some kind of new phase. In 2013 that place frightened the living daylights out of me and I didn't return for twelve years because, let's be honest, I was scared. Now I keep finding reasons to go up, and every time bar one (when I got most of the way up there at 1 in the morning, which was its own weird thing) it's been like this. Each time I feel more at home. I feel welcome.

Writing this one from the very place, if you can believe that. Back against a beech tree, laptop on knees, about half four in the morning. I came up in the dark to film the sunrise, which should be happening in about half an hour.

The plan was simple enough. Recorder's been up here since yesterday afternoon catching the night. This morning I cycled back up before it was light, set the camera going pointed roughly north-east, and now I've got an hour and a half of doing absolutely nothing while it films the sun come up. The idea is to marry the picture to the dawn chorus off the recorder and put the whole thing up as one piece. Ninety minutes of the world waking up. If it comes out how it looks right now it'll be a lovely thing.

And it is lovely. Properly. The birds started before the sky did but now it's summer they seem a lot more chilled out. And there's a mist sitting in the Weald that's just starting to go pink at the edges. It's comfortably warm. Not another soul about.

So I'm sat here with nothing to do but watch it, and the laptop's open, and somewhere in the last ten minutes I've been working something out.

Everything I've got of this place, I've got from a distance.

The recorder does the nights. It sits up here on its own and captures the sounds and I collect it in the morning like a milk bottle. I've been up here after dark exactly once, in April, and I stopped a hundred metres short and pointed a torch at it and then cycled home. I'm not in a rush to repeat that.

But people keep offering. There was a bloke on Reddit a few weeks back, lives near here, goes up regularly, said if I ever fancied doing any evening investigating he'd be up for it. And there've been a few messages since off people who like that idea considerably more than I do.

So maybe that's the thing. Get a few of them up here for a night, proper kit, cameras, recorders, the works, and let them tell me what it's like. I'll be at the bottom of the hill with a flask and my phone on.

Anyway. Sun's nearly up and I don't want to be looking at a screen when it clears the horizon. I'll let the camera do its thing and just sit for a bit.

Something I keep doing while I'm reading about this place is disappearing down rabbit holes. Last week was old photographs.

There are more of them than you'd think. The Ring is the sort of thing people took pictures of. My favourite is a postcard I found online from about 1930, cattle standing round the old dew pond, the trees behind them thick and black and completely full. Then there's one from 1990, taken in winter, and it's a different hill. Half the ring is just gone. Gaps you could drive a car through.

That's the 1987 storm. It came through the Downs overnight and took most of the trees with it. Nothing mysterious about that, it's just weather, and anyone round here over about fifty will tell you where they were for it without needing to be asked.

I've also got loads of my own. Probably dozens that I've taken with the drone. I also took one with my phone the other day from the chalk track going up at roughly the same angle as the postcard. So I put the four of them in order, 1930, 1990, and the 2 new ones, and stuck them on the r/brighton Reddit page. Nothing clever about it. Here's a hill, here it is largely flattened, here it is all beautiful and verdant again.

About twelve thousand people have looked at it, and a hundred-odd have given it an upvote.

Which is way more than have ever paid attention to anything I've put anywhere about what actually happened to me up there. I'll try not to take that personally.

The comments were just people being generally fond of the place. Someone who prefers it to nearby Cissbury Ring and wanted to tell me about the sunrise there at midsummer. Someone who prefers it to Devils Dyke and Ditchling Beacon due to better scenery and lack of vehicular access. Someone mentioning the Roman Temple. All genuinely lovely, and all pretty mundane.

Then one bloke looked at the 1930 photo, the one with the cows in it, and decided it was well-known occultist Aleister Crowley and his lot having a good day out.

Joke, obviously. I said something about how I'd been under the impression they were cows, and left it at that.

What I didn't say is that there's a book about Sussex witchcraft from the sixties which mentions that Crowley's man Victor Neuberg lived in Steyning, at the bottom of the hill. I only know that because I've been reading.

The only thing I wrote under the pictures was that you'd never know the storm happened. The Ring is back to how it once was.