The boy that sings on Duncton Hill

One of our most accomplished writers of the early 20th century, Hilaire Belloc had a lifelong love affair with West Sussex. His words still echo in the hills 150 years after his birth, finds Jack Watkins

- Jack Watkins

IN 1901, Hilaire Belloc, an ardent Catholic, embarked on a lengthy pilgrimage of faith. Starting near Nancy in southern France, he trekked across the Swiss Alps and headed down into central Italy, through Tuscany and on to the Holy City. He called his account of the journey The Path to Rome (1902) and said it was ‘the only book I wrote for love’. It certainly became among the best-loved—and most widely read—of his books. Yet it’s hard to read his writing on his beloved county of Sussex, where he lived for much of his life, and not detect great warmth and affection for his adopted county.

Belloc wrote more than 150 books in his long career, churning out material at a rapid pace and not always letting scruples about factual accuracy stand in the way of a torrent of words. He spanned politics, historical biography, novels, satirical verse, Catholic apologetics and military strategy. He was invariably trenchant and his immoderate tone accrued many critics. When it comes to Sussex, however, Belloc’s nostalgia, melancholy and sensitivity to history’s footprint leaves a more sympathetic memory.

Born 150 years ago this July, he liked to think of himself as a true Sussex man, a kindred spirit of its small-scale farmers, the sons of the soil whose heritage predated the industrialized capitalist society he so detested. Yet the writer was half French.