The voyage out

When I open the garden door, I enlarge the garden so far as Mount Caburn. There I walk in the sunset, when the village climbing the hill has a solemn sheltering look . . . emblematic.
Virginia Woolf in her diary, 1920.

I took the photograph above at the end of March 2011 as I cycled toward Southease in the East Sussex countryside (almost identical, it turns out, to Google Street View's from the same road). It marks the end of the first half of a regular journey.

Less than a mile further on is Monk's House, Virginia Woolf's final home and where she wrote Mrs. Dalloway. I notice now that a week later was the seventieth anniversary of the author's suicide. She would have walked out of the cottage into the meadows to the right of this picture, meadows surrounding the River Ouse flowing left to right towards the port of Newhaven. In the background is Mount Caburn.