The Legend of Chanctonbury Ring

 by Honor G

Over the May Half Term I completed my Gold DofE expeditions by walking the South Downs Way with a group of my friends. As you might guess, conversation after seven days of walking was unpredictable, and on the fourth day, as we walked past the Chanctonbury Ring, I remembered a legend that my parents had told me when I was planning our route out. 

The story tells us that, if you walk anti-clockwise around the Ring seven times, the Devil can be summoned, who will consequently offer to buy your soul from you with a bowl of soup. As strange and comically bizarre as this might seem, Chanctonbury Ring has been hailed as a centre of ghostly activity on the South Coast since its origins as a hillfort from the Iron Ages, and leading Sussex Living magazine to title it as one of ‘The Spookiest Locations in Sussex’. 

When we trekked up there in the early afternoon, the weather had quickly turned into heavy rain showers and fog - which created some comical moments as we lost various maps in the wind and quickly discovered that we could barely see two metres ahead of us. This made it even more spooky when the trees of Chanctonbury Ring came looming out of the distance, just at the moment when we thought we had walked clean passed it. Understandably, this made for a creepy atmosphere, especially when we saw a man and his dog simply standing at the edge of the ring of trees, a silent statue that, for a moment, made us all believe in the myths surrounding the fort. 

On arriving home, I stumbled upon an article from July 2012 about the ghost stories surrounding the South Downs Way, and found it intriguing to read Robert Macfarlane’s account of his night slept under the trees of Chanctonbury Ring, which I have inserted below: (Macfarlane, 2012)

‘I heard the first scream at around two o’clock in the morning. A high-pitched and human cry, protracted but falling away in its closing phase. It came from the opposite side of the tree ring to where I was sleeping. My thoughts were sleepmuddled: A child in distress? A rabbit being taken by a weasel or fox? No, impossible, for the sound was coming from treetop height. A bird, then – an owl, surely? Yet this was like no owl I had ever heard before: not the furry hoot of a tawny or the screech of a barn owl. I felt a rasp of fear, then dismissed it as ridiculous.

Then another cry joined the first, different in tone: slightly deeper and more grainy, rising at its end; the shriek of a blade laid hard to a lathe. Also more human than avian, also unrecognisable to me, also coming from treetop height. I lay there for two or three minutes, listening to the screams. Then I realised, with a prickling in my shoulders and fingers, that the voices had split and were now coming towards me: still at treetop height, but circling round the tree ring, one clockwise and one anti-clockwise, converging roughly where I was lying. I felt like standing up, shouting, flashing a torch; but instead I lay still. The cries met each other almost directly above me, 20 or 30 feet up in the dark. After 15 minutes they stopped and eventually, uneasily, I fell back to sleep.’ (Macfarlane, 2012). 

Therefore, if you are ever walking over the South Downs and come close to the Chanctonbury Ring, I’m sure Macfarlane would warn against sleeping there, but definitely go and see it, as its rich legend is a vital part of the South Downs’ history. 

Bibliography:

England’s ghostly South Downs Way, Robert Macfarlane, 24th July 2012, accessed: 12 June 2024, https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20120710-englands-ghostly-south-downs-way 

The Spookiest Locations in Sussex, accessed: 12 June 2024 https://www.sussexliving.com/hidden-county-fascinating-sussex/the-spookiest-locations-in-sussex/#:~:text=Chanctonbury%20Ring&text=Stories%20vary%20but%20walking%20seven,Julius%20Caesar%20and%20his%20army.