What really happens at Chanctonbury Ring?

In 2013 I went up to the Ring one evening to fly a drone and take some photographs. Something happened to me there that I have never been able to explain. I stayed away from the Ring for twelve years.

Then my son asked me to take him last year, so we went up on a nice afternoon and had a lovely time, and I've been going back ever since. That visit prompted me to reopen some research I'd started in 2013 and abandoned.

Over the past year I've been pulling together everything I can find about Chanctonbury Ring.

There's the documented history: the Iron Age fort, the Roman temples, Charles Goring planting the beeches in 1760 and the story that he carried the water up the hill himself. There's the 1987 storm and the replanting. There's the academic work, which is better than you would expect - Jacqueline Simpson was a well-known folklorist from Worthing who spent twenty-five years researching the folklore of this hill. So I built a website to put it all in one place.

Now I've started collecting first-hand accounts of visits to the Ring, and that is why I'm writing.

I'm interested in everything people have experienced - including nothing at all. Nobody writes anything down about the afternoon they walked up a hill, looked at the view and went home again. Which means almost everything ever collected about Chanctonbury is the dramatic stuff, and the record is badly skewed as a result.

If you have been up there hundreds of times over forty years and nothing has ever happened, that is genuinely useful, and at the moment almost nobody is writing it down.

But if you did accidentally summon the Devil and exchange your soul for a bowl of soup - yes, I'd like to hear about that too.

The site is at chanctonburyring.com, and if you have something to tell me it is chanctonburyring.com/send. I read everything myself, and I will leave your name off unless you tell me not to.