A visit to Lewes and Monk’s House

Steep roads, ancient cottages, medieval houses, the pungent smell of centuries stacked like old books in antique bookshops: this is how Lewes, a small town in East Sussex visited this September, presented itself to me. A place I was unfamiliar with has become one I am certain I will return to often. 

The few tourists and the calm that could be felt on the streets of its center made it immediately enjoyable for me. I didn’t expect to find a fifteenth century bookshop  nor modern, stylish cafes, art galleries, and a surprisingly high number of independent shops, corners of respite for the eyes and mind.
There are many things to visit, from the castle to Anne of Cleves’ house, the beautiful Southover Grange Gardens, and what remains of the Priory of St Pancras. 

However, having already booked a visit to Monk’s House, my husband and I had to give up exploring in depth all these places, and after a cake break (a slice of coconut and passion fruit vegan cake for me, and a banana chocolate cake for my husband) at the delicious Flint Owl Bakery, we set off to reach the cottage where Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought in 1919, restored, and where they lived full-time from 1940 to 1941, the year Virginia died. Following the path along the River Ouse, an hour after leaving the town, we arrived, tired and slightly behind schedule, at our destination. 

It’s difficult to describe the emotions that swept through me at the sight of the places where Virginia lived, suffered, wrote, and gathered ideas. The famous room of her own is a shed in the garden that she built to work in during summer. I imagined her thoughts crowded there, along with her chair, her desk, her books. Just as I imagined her characters, one by one, with her, lying on her bedroom bed, or sitting on one of the low walls or benches adorning the garden.
The cottage, inside, is a gallery of splendid works of art, furniture, and refined details. After going through the few visitable rooms that compose it, and admiring the colours that warm it (Virginia painted the interior walls herself in shades of blue, yellow, pomegranate, and her favourite shade of green), I wrote these lines below that perhaps will better clarify the emotions felt during my visit.

“Green. 
Leaves beating against the windows, the roof tiles, knots on gate handles; puffs of paint on ancient walls; lumps of colour on canvases. 
 

Gold. The ceramics, the lamps, the upholstery of armchairs: the house is frozen at sunset, in the season when flowers bloom and, once picked, perfume the rooms; when the ripe fruits grow in greenhouses where still stand the old chair, the bucket, the pruning shears, and the door is open for the prowling fox, for the rabbit, for the wind. 
 

White. Clouds tremble behind chimneys like the reflections of passersby against the veranda windows. On empty benches, under apple trees, under sunflowers tremble the ghosts who have chosen to stay. To touch them is a glare that forces eyes to close. 
 

Blue. The distant river tells a story that the mouths of statues vainly try to free themselves from. In every open book is a variant of it, but whoever reads it pronounces its words too softly. 
 

Black. The shadows dancing on lawns, on walls, on the mirrors of ponds, do not follow us into the street. They continue to grow amidst twirls, to intertwine and blur into one another, waiting for the night to arrive, for the solitude to return”.

And so I left a house full of memories, images, fantasies.
The photos I decided to post today are all the visible things my eyes captured.