4 April 2010 Easter Egg Hunt at Devil’s Dyke

Legend has it the Devil dug the Dyke so he could fill it with water and flood the churches of West Sussex. But his noise awoke an old woman who lit a candle. A rooster saw the light and crowed, and the devil, hearing the cock crow, believed it was morning and ran off, leaving his trench unfinished.

He’s not been back since. In the last several thousand years the Dyke has been an Iron Age hillfort, fertile farmland, a Victorian fairground complete with railway, and lately the site of the National Trust Easter Egg hunt.

We took the bus up for the hunt. Sam was rushing us out the door, having already discovered the whereabouts of her Easter eggs in the flat. We paid 2 pounds for a map and were instructed to find 10 paper “eggs.” Each egg would have some information on it about the Dyke and we had a questionnaire to fill out, to prove we’d really found all the eggs. A completed questionnaire would reward us with one chocolate egg.

We set out. The wind was fierce. There were several hang gliders soaring above and loads of fellow egg hunters. Also, there were lagoons of mud, which we could mostly avoid.

The eggs were pretty easy to spot.

And they were indeed informational. We learned that natural history scoffs at the devil legend and holds that the Dyke was cut at the end of the Ice Age by a river. Cut by a river in one or two days. That’s not a river in my book. That’s a killer tsunami with waves of sharp steel. That’s a force of unnature. The devil legend is looking better and better.

We ran down one side of the Dyke, thinking it was a shortcut to an egg (it wasn’t) and then we trudged up the other side. The sun was shining and there was no wind in this part of the valley. I had just loosened my scarf and unbuttoned my winter coat when we came into a thatch of forest and a cloud of chill rain.

Up go the buttons and on go the hats and inside the pockets go the map and cameras. AC determined that we needed to head around and up the forested hill. There was a muddy path through the trees which led to a gate and set of steep stairs– I think they had once been stairs–but now they were entirely made of mud.

I’m sorry the picture is so blurry. I was trying very hard not to drop the camera. This was the sludgiest, fudgiest, trudgiest mud I’ve ever trudged. This was mud that grabs your boots and lets go reluctantly with a slow suctiony thwop. It was deep and sticky and whipped in places like a thick chocolate mousse, or–dare I say–a Devil’s food cake batter? I was wishing for my walking stick except it probably would have done me little good. That mud would have slurped it up like a licorice stick.

After a long climb we came out of the mud, out of the rain, and found another egg. Now AC proposed that we avoid the rest of the muddy ascent and head up the hilly meadow. One of the eggs had talked about sheep tracks and shepherds’ trails, claiming that the various footpaths in and around the Dyke were made by shepherds 4000 years ago.

Now I have an idea why there are so many poems and paintings about sleeping shepherds. They’re not pastoral and lazy, they’re exhausted.

But AC’s sense of direction was superb because at the top of the hilly meadow was a stile leading to a chalky path. I love stiles. Coming across a stile in a field lets me know I’m in Britain. It’s such a beguiling gateway that invites–or rather, demands–trespass. It is made to be climbed over. Passing through a stile feels daring and mysterious. I think always of Jane Eyre sitting upon a stile when she first spies Rochester and thinks he and his horse are a great beast, while he in turn takes her for a sprite.

I had no time to see if the stile transformed AC and Sam because after they passed through they dashed ahead on the path toward the last egg.

10 eggs won us our chocolate prize and as a special treat, Sam was invited to have her face painted. She asked to be a snake and the painter gasped in surprise before she said, “You can be a bunny or a chick. Because it’s Easter.”

I suppose it wouldn’t do for the National Trust to paint kids up as snakes at Devil’s Dyke. They really don’t like that legend.

So Sam chose to be a chick:

And she was pleased:

So were we. What could be better than hiking for chocolate?