The South Downs then were not quite what they are today. They were described in a Sussex newspaper report in 1783:

“Alfriston races begin on Tuesday next. It is only three miles from Seaford. I never was in so mountainous country in my life. Go where you will, you are surrounded by hills and mountains, and, what seems extraordinary to me, the whole is in a state of cultivation; in some places corn, in others turnips, potatoes and all kinds of vegetables, without even a wall or partition to be seen. The variegated colours of the earth have an amazing pleasing effect. Those who have herds, have shepherds to keep them on their own ground. I rode yesterday about seven miles over these mountains, upon the top of which, when I looked down, it made my head giddy.”

Today, with our appetite for scenery made blasé by travel and television, we may smile patronisingly at the thought of the South Downs as “mountains” – although standing on Beachy Head can still make many heads giddy – but we must envy the freedom young Richard had to wander freely over downland unwalled, unpartitioned, unfenced and totally without the barbed wire that now so harshly restricts the walker’s freedom of access. In his day the Downs were in particular the domain of sheep – of which there were 3,725 in Alfriston alone in 1801 – and of a breed of man long since disappeared: the South Downs shepherd.

This man was a key servant on a downland farm and one, rare amongst agricultural workers, who might even be able to save enough for his eventual retirement. Not only did he earn wages considerably higher than those of labourers, he also obtained a second income from birds; not by poaching – an activity that for many a Sussex cottager meant the difference between his family eating and not eating but which could also put him before the local Justice of the Peace – but by trapping wheatears in small coops which he could watch whilst tending his sheep.

In a recollection of childhood, Richard Lower wrote: “This in a good birding year was known to produce a shepherd ten to twenty pounds. And woe betide the clown who dared thrust his paw into one of those sacred coops! For if he was captured, which he was almost sure to be (since all, whether immediately interested or not, would join in the pursuit of the culprit) he suffered the penalty of a good ‘nowling’. From the spectators he received no sympathy at all, all concurring in the verdict – Sarved him right!”