Along the Cliff Edge Seaford to Newhaven Sky Blue

Seaford Head, Seaford Town, and Newhaven

Newhaven lies at the mouth of the River Ouse, in the valley the river has cut through the South Downs. There was a Bronze Age fort on what is now Castle Hill, and around 480 AD the Saxon people established a village near where Newhaven now stands, which they named Meeching.

Seaford is a coastal town in East Sussex, on the south coast of England. Its history began in the Middle Ages as one of the main ports serving southern England. However, changes in the coastline led to its decline, and it was not until the 19th century, with the arrival of the railway connecting the town to Lewes and London, that it became a small seaside resort town.

Seaford Head is a Local Nature Reserve east of Seaford in East Sussex. It is owned by Seaford Town Council and managed by the Sussex Wildlife Trust. The site has diverse habitats including chalk grassland, chalk cliffs, scrub, vegetated shingle, wet grassland, saltmarsh, and rockpools. Grassland flora include kidney vetch, squinancywort, moon carrot, and clustered bellflower. In season, you can spot butterflies such as the silver-spotted skipper, chalkhill blue, and adonis blue.

Eric Slater, Arthur Rigden Read, Seaford Head and Newhaven

This print echoes the work of two artists who lived in Seaford and nearby, and who created a series of Japanese-style woodcuts depicting Seaford and its surroundings. Friend and teacher to Eric Slater, Arthur Rigden Read (1879–1955) was an internationally acclaimed woodcut artist who used colour to produce his artworks from his studio in Winchelsea. He and Slater were awarded gold medals by the Society of California Printmakers.

A expression of love

The sinuous marks of the parallel paths of grass and earth, with fragments of white chalk, convey an emotional response. The earth paths somehow relate to the shapes of the lifelines on a hand that a fortune teller might read into the future, or to the unanswered questions of life.

The two figures walking down the slope are my partner and me during a walk on a clear winter afternoon. We are holding hands in a gesture of remembrance of the missing arm from the 1966 painting Aldeburgh’s Double Concerto of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears by Maxwell Ashby Armfield. Back in 2018, I visited The Red House in Suffolk, the residence of Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears. They are one of the most iconic same-sex couple in the UK. At The Red House, I learned about a portrait of them that initially, in a gesture of affection, showed Pears’s arm over Benjamin’s shoulders. But Benjamin asked the artist to remove Pears’s arm to avoid possible negative repercussions. Fortunately, those days are gone, and that is why I chose to show my partner and me holding hands, walking in the countryside.