The soft, hilly countryside and lovely flint-faced houses of Sussex seem somehow welcoming. I spent some time in Sussex and, whenever I return, it feels like a comforting second home. Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell, seemed to have felt similarly over a century ago when they took up residence a seven-mile walk from each other in the Sussex Downs, near Lewes.
We began our three-day exploration at Vanessa’s Charleston House. We had planned to recreate the walk, over fields, to Virginia’s seventeenth century retreat, Monk’s House. Sadly, the weather was awful, so we drove to both.
In the village of Rodmell, Monk’s House is a charming, modest, sixteenth century, white board-clad cottage, used initially as a retreat from London for Virginia and her husband, Leonard.
In the subsequent…
