There were dozens of mornings in the 20s and 30s when the novelist Virginia Woolf left her home in the village of Rodmell for the six-mile walk across the river and along the South Downs to see her sister at Charleston Farmhouse. Once you've climbed out of the valley, it's an airy, exhilarating route, whatever the weather: the English Channel and the harbour of Newhaven appear suddenly on your right, and the chalk-and-green escarpment stretches in front of you like a breaking wave.
But there was one day in 1941 when Virginia, suffering from deep depression, never got beyond the low ground: instead of crossing the footbridge near Southease station for the ascent of Itford Hill, she threw herself into the river and drowned.
It was the most tragic and probably the best known incident of the long association of the Bloomsbury group of artists with this stretch of rural Sussex between Lewes and Eastbourne. Her last impressions would have been the ramparts of the South Downs before and behind her, the gaunt silhouette of Lewes Castle off to the left, the sedge hissing and rustling in the breeze, and finally the deep waters of the Ouse, running between embankments and tinged a strange glacial colour by the surrounding chalk. If you know the story, and whatever you think of Woolf's books, it's a place that brings a shiver to the spine.
But when you leave the river valley and reach the crest of the Downs, the sense of doom gives way to space and freedom: the cropped turf is springy under your feet, windswept hawthorns survive on the steep northern edge, and you can see for miles across the green chequerboard of the Weald. You pass dew ponds and radio masts and ancient tumuli, and soon you're on Firle Beacon, 700ft above sea level, looking down on Woolf's usual destination of Charleston Farmhouse.
A glance at the map offers any number of walks, of any length, up and down and along and beneath this classic stretch of the South Downs, and the Bloomsbury group shrine of Charleston is a natural landmark for all of them.
Next month sees the start of half-a-dozen exhibitions of the group's work, including important shows at the Tate, Courtauld and National Portrait Galleries, and the expected surge of interest in their country retreat means that the farmhouse, which normally closes at the end of October, will remain open through the winter months.
Two other Bloomsbury sites are close enough to Charleston to come within the same walking route: the church of St Michael and All Angels in the village of Berwick, where the murals were painted by the Bloomsbury group artists Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell (Virginia's sister) and Quentin Bell; and the churchyard in the lovely brick-and-flint village of West Firle, where the same three lie buried side by side under simple headstones.
Charleston - rendered brick, and a red-tiled roof spattered with orange lichen - was recommended to Vanessa Bell in 1916 by the Woolfs, who already lived in the area. She moved in with her two young sons, Julian and Quentin, and two men - Duncan Grant and the writer David Garnett, who were both conscientious objectors and took jobs on local farms. Vanessa was estranged from her husband Clive, an art critic, who stayed in London with his mistress.
Their long association with the house went through three phases: a refuge from the Great War, a holiday home between the wars, and a permanent home for Vanessa (joined once again by her husband) and Grant from 1939 until their deaths in 1961 and 1978 respectively. Relationships went through phases as well: although Grant was homosexual and at one stage the lover of Garnett, he had a short affair with Vanessa; their child, Angelica, was born in 1919. Despite the bohemian attitudes of the group and her physical resemblance to Grant, she was not told the truth about her father until she was 19. In a further twist, the ageing Garnett later married Angelica, who told her story in 1984 in her book Deceived with Kindness.
This unconventional household was frequently visited by other members of the Bloomsbury Group, who had begun meeting at 46 Gordon Square in London from the early years of the century. They included Roger Fry, the artist who brought the first post-impressionist exhibition to London in 1910; Lytton Strachey, biographer and author of Eminent Victorians; and the economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote his critique of the Versailles peace treaty at Charleston, taking occasional strolls through the fields in his city suit and Homburg hat. Later he moved into a pink-washed farmhouse nearby.
"We were full of experiments and reforms," wrote Virginia Woolf of the group. "We were going to paint; to write; everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different; everything was on trial." At Charleston, that approach meant, among other things, that the house itself became a canvas for experimentation in decorative art - hand-painted wallpapers and door panels, brightly-coloured fabrics and furniture, lamp bases made from chunks of telegraph poles.
Although £1 million was spent on restoration after Grant's death, this was rough and ready art, not necessarily intended to last. Wall paintings were done on a whim, such as the cockerel and hound above and below Vanessa Bell's bedroom window, intended by Grant to wake her in the morning and protect her at night. A painting now on a bedroom wall was found by restorers cut in two and used as shelves.
One surprise about visiting Charleston is that the local landscape, with its powerful sweeping forms and subtle colours, was rarely in itself a subject for Grant and Bell. It seems only to have been a backdrop, glimpsed through doors and windows, for more personal and domestic subjects. The house, the garden and the pond were depicted more often than the Downs, the beech-filled combes, and the chalky fields. The strongest paintings on display are portraits and self-portraits - Grant in 1910, looking haunted and sleepless; Vanessa Bell in 1942, grim and withdrawn after her sister's suicide and the death of her son Julian in the Spanish civil war; and a 1931 bust by Stephen Tomlin of the tragic, heron-faced Virginia.
Perhaps their most lasting contribution to the local community came during the war, when bombs jettisoned by German raiders knocked the stained glass out of the windows of Berwick church. Bishop Bell of Chichester, a great supporter of art in churches, proposed replacing it with plain glass to illumi nate a set of murals by Grant, Bell and their coterie. The local opposition, led by the Hon Mrs Sandilands, fought it all the way through the consistory court.
The whiff of conscientious objection still hung about, and Mrs Sandilands apparently felt that painting was an inappropriate activity for a male in wartime. "Mr Grant must be a strong and very clever man," she wrote to Bishop Bell, "to be able to do this strenuous job of mural painting. Let him turn his talents to other directions for the time being and help his country as so many others are doing."
But the bishop carried the day, and the murals in the church - a three-mile walk from Charleston through the dun-coloured fields - provided an opportunity for the artists' preoccupation with themselves to merge happily with the local landscape and community. Angelica was the model for the Virgin Mary in her mother's Annunciation, with her friend Chattie Salaman resplendent in orange robes as the Angel Gabriel. On the opposite wall, Bell's Nativity used two shepherds and other local people as models, and was set in a typical Sussex barn with Mount Caborn, a hill near Lewes, in the background.
Grant's Four Seasons shows typical Sussex scenes. His Christ in Glory features Bishop Bell, the local rector and a soldier, sailor and airman from the area, and his Victory of Calvary was modelled by an artist friend, Edward Le Bas, who agreed to tie himself to an easel rather than a crucifix. The chancel paintings by Vanessa's second son Quentin also have local associations.
The other attraction in Berwick is the Cricketer's Arms, where the Lewes-brewed Harvey's beer comes straight out of barrels in the back room. And at Charleston, if you can't face the sustained eccentricities of the hour-long tour of the house, there's a decent cup of tea, a healthy piece of carrot cake, an interesting book shop and the fine walled garden full of apple trees and fading chrysanthemums.
• Art Made Modern: Roger Fry's Vision of Art is at the Courtauld Gallery from October 15-January 24. Bloomsbury Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery from November 3-January 30. The Art of Bloomsbury is at the Tate November 4-January 30.
The practicals
Charleston Farmhouse, 6 miles east of Lewes by the A27, is open April 1 - October31, Wednesday to Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays, 2 - 6pm. From November 3 - December 19 and January 2 - 30, it will open on Wednesday Saturady and Sunday 11.30am - 3pm, but tickets (£5.50) must be booked in advance by phoning 01273 709709. Virginia Woolf's home, Monk's House, Rodmell, is owned by the National Trust and opens 2 - 5.30pm, Wednesday and Saturday, but closes for the winter at the end f October until the beginning of April. Maps of the area: OS Landranger (1 in to ! mile) nos 198 and 199, OS Explorer (2in to 1 mile) no 122.
