Today, when you go out on the Downs, you see the world on the move, cars on the horizon, aircraft, people walking and cycling, ships at sea. Back in ‘Covid’, when you were in the countryside, there was only stillness. The world had stopped. The streets were empty, the A27 was silent. Millions were confined to their homes communicating only through electronic media. Where you did see people it was mostly anxious punters queuing along the pavement outside Sainsburys, everyone in masks, some even in respirators. I was lucky enough to have a dog and an excuse to slip past the metaphorical roadblocks and out onto the hills.
I have written already about how I started my lockdown project. It began with visiting the 30 or 40 trig pillars, or ‘triangulation points’ as they are properly known, that were within a reasonable walking radius of Brighton but then grew into trying to visit all the trig points of Sussex. These ‘trigs’ were erected by the Ordnance Survey between 1936 and 1962 to undertake the accurate mapping of the nation.
When they were first put up, it was possible, in clear weather, to see at least two of them from any other one, making it possible to take precise readings with a theodolite. They formed an invisible web which covered the entire nation.
These days, the function of trigs has been superseded by modern tech and they are abandoned and forlorn, many swallowed up by bush and undergrowth, others locked behind the intimidating fences of modern ‘developments’. Most people have no idea what they are. They probably know they are some relic of the past, but beyond that they might as well be the Moai statues of Easter Island.
The bostals, the valleys, the folds and Don Quixote
As the Covid rules relaxed I was able to notch up the numbers, getting out to the distant reaches of the county, the highways and byways, the bostals, the valleys and folds, the very nooks and crannies of Sussex.
Not unaware of the Don Quixote parallels (knight-errant unable to see the world for what it is, imagines he is living in a world of metaphor, ends up losing his marbles), I reflected on the unexpected places I was winding up: a muddy vineyard near Chichester in semi darkness; the derelict and very spooky observatory at Herstmonceux, with its cameras and threatening notices about ‘the police know you are here’; the swamps at Torrington where the trig is below sea level, not to speak of the historic views at the Beachy Head cliffs. Eventually I managed to find 136 pillars.
Robinson Crusoe
As I was making these journeys I had a lot of time alone, especially in the early days. Quite often I would walk for hours and see no one. There was frequently no phone signal and occasionally I felt uneasy. The endless days of hot weather and blue skies were also getting to me. I was anxious partly because sometimes I had a feeling that maybe I shouldn’t have been where I was and this was intensified by the silence and the extraordinary blue and the obvious reality that the world was out of whack. A world-shaking epidemic, no people and cloudless skies.
I remember wondering if I was picking up premonitory signals, ominous noises off. I heard somebody on the radio talking about the glorious summer of 1914, and 1938 when everyone knew the war was coming but they just didn’t know when. I’d let my beard grow and allowed a degree of delirium to creep in. On one occasion, somewhere above Goodwood, I ran into some kids who shouted ‘You look like Robinson Crusoe’.
Finishing the quest on Camber beach?
I finished the quest in mid 2022 with photos at all 136 trigs, latterly with friends and family that I managed to persuade to come along. The last one was on Camber beach, far beyond what I had thought was the Sussex boundary, virtually off the edge of my known world, sunk into the Broomhill Sands Coastal Defences Protection Wall, along the bleak shoreline before the nuclear power station. This did nothing to reassure me. If the sea was rising, this was where it was going to break in.
Some days were more heartening than others. There was a trig near Rye, actually in somebody’s garden, but they were nice people and welcoming and let me stumble through their house and snatch a photo. There was another in Rottingdean where, on the foggy day I had deliberately picked, I had to crawl under several electric fences, only to be apprehended just as I was setting up the tripod. To be fair, the guy was not too unfriendly.
As I left Camber, I told myself that, like an art project, this had a beginning and an end and it was time to stop. I could see that some of my friends were becoming apprehensive as to what they perceived as a growing obsessiveness. They saw my notebooks and maps and the spidery drawings. They watched me spiral into a maze of arcane conjecture: was the web of trigs connected somehow to the ancient pathways and the hidden history of those who walked them over the thousands of years since the ice retreated? They knew my reading had progressed from Robert McFarlane’s account of his meeting with witches at Chanctonbury Ring on to Baudrillard’s explorations of hyper-reality.
I was genuinely caught up in the invisible web the trigs generated. Of course, I knew they were just a collection of concrete blocks which had enabled our world to be accurately mapped but, on another level, I wondered whether these fragments of the old technology, alone and mouldering slowly now, out there in the woods, were not perhaps a synonym of a reality which only a handful of people knew existed. Or could even grasp.
The journey that has no end
By mid-2022, I was done and and thought I could relax. Then again, it’s never that simple. Long story short, the family was in Fife and I found myself thinking I would just grab a pillar or two while we were walking in the hills. Why not? What harm would it do? Then there were a few more opportunities and then some more. And then the chance for some repeats of old favourites.
I don’t think anyone knows definitively how many trigs there are but best estimates suggest 6,190. Doesn’t that number get your blood pumping? My target now is to get to 200 by the end of this year, a mere scratch on the surface. It’s not easy though because all the ones I haven’t done are at least 50 miles away. But as some old fraud from the past once said: ‘every journey begins with a single step’.
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