You can see why hospitals were built among pine woods once upon a time. King Edward VII north of Midhurst seems to have been an example in its day.
There is something very soothing about pine forests. There is a deep sanctuary of silence there, a green carapace for the mind as though exploring the water time of prehistoric life, when we evolved from out the briny depths.
It certainly almost f
elt like being underwater during this week's walk over the greensand hills of Sussex. The original pines have gone and been replanted, but in only 35 years new trees have formed a dark world of pine scent which feels so healing on the nose; of slanting bars of sunlight like the strong white arms of sea nymphs; of high and towering tips of pine like the points of Posiedon's lance.
There is here a thalassic power of good. It is dark in these woods behind the hill, but dark is not evil. Here is not the world of Nyads but of Nereids. Crepuscule is the light of dawn, not stealing night, for this wood faces east on many of its wandering folds of hillslope.
It is Oceanid's underworld, and the jolly world of Neptune swaying in his currents almost out of sight to skylights of Zephyrs high above.
Do you remember reading The Water Babies as a child? Here the chimney sweep, a battered and unhappy child of misfortune and cruelty, found release into a new thrilling underwater world of adventure in the rills and freshets of the moorland streams.
Well, you almost get that gleeful feeling of release here beneath the pines and their protection from the prying eyes of modern surveillance and deadening realism and materialism that sometimes seem to squeeze the life out of your every action.
The ancient sandy bed of oceans past still streams with water beneath these pines. It trickles into clear water pools and down the gills.
This movement gives more of a sense of busy life reforming than do the chalk hills which, though showing us all the time examples of their past many millions years of seabed life with sharks and shells and sea anemones, are now dry and crumbling. Water is life; it wriggles out the sandhills like elvers on migration in these pine wood hills.
The slopes and mini cliffs around the pools and linns are grown very thick with sea green moss. You feel you could just lie on this moss on a summer day and have sensation of buoyancy. Featherbeds could not be so soft. The green of this moss is the pale colour of a rearing wave just before the curl changes it to white. It is a glass green, as sharp and clear and almost glinting. Then there are hard ferns growing here which are so bizarre in shape they could surely only belong beneath the waves where weird plants and animals like sponges and seahorses live.
These ferns with their skimpy quill feather shapes are themselves like miniature pines. And it was here that I found another strange thing, what seemed to be the feather of a long eared owl. This highly secretive bird should be living in these kinds of woods in Sussex as it does in Scottish pine forests.
Every time I see one, which is not often compared to its more ferocious cousin the tawny owl, I am reminded of Neptune's trident. Not that the horns on this bird's head are always showing.
I searched these pine woods for that tell-tale lump growing oddly from the side of an otherwise smooth trunk, which is usually the give-away for the 'horned', 'tufted', or 'laughing' owl as the bird has been called in Sussex long ago. But I found nothing more.
The bird would slide silently like a ray through these pine pillars in the dusk. Wood pigeons burst out of hiding like bass diving and skimming around the underwater grottoes of the coast, and goldcrests were almost plankton high above among the surface crown of trees.
There is nothing that quite evokes the labyrinths of vasty deeps as does the pine woods on the greensand hills of Sussex. I have enjoyed this out of world experience many times and feel sure that convalescents in these places are helped to come back safely to the mainland of life after resting near the pines and their pelagian sense of peace.
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