This weekend, my housemate Ruthanna Emrys is in Brighton, Sussex at the World Fantasy Convention for the release of her new novella, The Sheltering Flame. Thinking about fantasy literature and Sussex reminded me of a poem her wife is very fond of, “Puck’s Song,” from Rudyard Kipling’s 1906 children’s fantasy novel Puck of Pook’s Hill, in which the fairy Puck takes two Sussex children on adventures through fictionalized and magical events in English history.
“Puck’s Song” consists of a catalogue of places in or near Sussex that, Puck tells the children, are associated with important events from English history. While the events are not all entirely accurately characterized, most of the locations are at least plausibly identifiable, so I decided to make a map of them.
“Puck’s Song” has twelve stanzas, of which the last two are a general reflection on England as a whole, and do not seem to correspond to specific locations. For the locations in the other ten, I used notes by Donald Mackenzie and Philip Holberton published by the Kipling Society as guidance, along with my own judgement.
The town of Burwash, where Kipling lived when the poem was written, and which is indicated to be the location of the fictional Pook’s Hill, is marked with a red “0” on the map above. The locations mentioned in other stanzas are marked with the stanza numbers in red as closely as I can assign the stanzas locations. The boundaries of the historic County of Sussex are shown in blue and of the forest known as the Weald mentioned in the poem are shown in green.
See you the ferny ride that steals
Into the oak-woods far?
O that was whence they hewed the keels
That rolled to Trafalgar.
The first stanza cannot really be associated with any specific location, since Britain had a number of shipyards across the whole coast of the island by the time of the Napoleonic wars, and timber was presumably cut from forests across the island.
And mark you where the ivy clings
To Bayham’s mouldering walls?
O there we cast the stout railings
That stand around St. Paul’s.
The second stanza directly references Bayham Old Abbey, a Thirteenth Century abbey that has been in ruins since the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. While the railings around the rebuilt St. Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of London are believed to have been cast in Sussex, it’s not clear that there is any basis for Puck’s assertion that they were cast near Bayham.
See you the dimpled track that runs
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Philip’s fleet.
The third stanza is a bit ambiguous, but a plausible location it might refer to, just outside the bounds of Sussex, is the Royal Navy shipyard at Portsmouth, which was the main royal shipyard at the time of the Spanish Armada.
(Out of the Weald, the secret Weald,
Men sent in ancient years,
The horse-shoes red at Flodden Field,
The arrows at Poitiers!)
The fourth stanza takes the form of an aside, referring to the Weald (outlined in green on the map) as a whole as a source of weapons of war, and mentions two that took place far from Sussex: Flodden Field in Northumberland and Poitiers in France.
See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
Ever since Domesday Book.
The fifth stanza cannot really be assigned to a particular location. All of Sussex, along with most of the rest of England (except for the areas that became Westmorland, Cumberland, Northumberland, and Durham) were included in the land survey under William I known as the Domesday Book.
See you our stilly woods of oak,
And the dread ditch beside?
O that was where the Saxons broke
On the day that Harold died.
The sixth stanza, on the other hand, clearly specifically refers to the Battle of Hastings, which in fact occurred near the current site of the town of Battle, Sussex, about seven miles northwest of Hastings.
See you the windy levels spread
About the gates of Rye?
O that was where the Northmen fled,
When Alfred’s ships came by.
The seventh stanza mentions the town of Rye, Sussex, which was located on a large embayment of the English Channel in Alfred the Great‘s time that has largely been filled in with land by silting.
See you our pastures wide and lone,
Where the red oxen browse?
O there was a City thronged and known,
Ere London boasted a house.
The eighth stanza is a bit ambiguous, but the Kipling Society notes suggest that Kipling may have been influenced by the ruins of the Fishbourne Roman Palace and Bignor Roman Villa, the two best-known Roman sites in Sussex. Both seem to date from the Third Century, a bit late to be characterized as a city “ere London boasted a house,” but I have marked Bignor on the map above.
And see you, after rain, the trace
Of mound and ditch and wall?
O that was a Legion’s camping-place,
When Caesar sailed from Gaul.
The ninth stanza could potentially refer to either of Julius Caesar’s two invasions of Britain. It’s obviously impossible to assign only a single location as a legion’s camping-place during the invasions, and it’s not clear to me whether either invasion actually passed through Sussex, but I marked the hamlet of Ebbsfleet in Kent, the location of Caesar’s first landing in Britain, on the map above.
And see you marks that show and fade,
Like shadows on the Downs?
O they are the lines the Flint Men made,
To guard their wondrous towns.
The tenth stanza seems to be a reference to Neolithic earthworks called “causewayed enclosures” found across Britain, Ireland, France, Scandanavia, and Germany. Several of these can be found in the South Downs in Sussex; I’ve marked five of them on the above map.