Chichester Live Cam

Nature’s strange collection

Last week I was looking at wild flowers in Fort Southwick. There were such splendid displays of other species that I thought it worth continuing this week. The old fort lies up on Portsdown hill with Southwick village to the north and Portchester to the south below. Frightened silly by Napolean Bonaparte’s excursions across Europe as far as Moscow a few decades earlier, we as a nation still feared French expansionism. Agincourt, Trafalgar, and Waterloo loomed in the psyche. Palmerston imagined an attack from the land this time, after the French had landed somewhere to the east and surprised us from the rear, as Lawrence of Arabia was to do 80 years later at Aqaba, when he took the Turks and their naval guns pointing south, from the north after crossing the deserts south of Petra.