Helen Perkin was also the soloist in the first performance of Legend, again at Queen's Hall, in January 1934. This is a very different work, a dark, brooding evocation of an ancient landscape. West Sussex was a spiritual haven for Ireland, as for some other musicians of his generation such as Parry and Elgar. Between 1922 and 1934 Ireland visited the county on a regular basis, with all his major Sussex-inspired works dating from this time. He eventually settled in a Sussex windmill (Rock Mill) in 1953. One of the attractions of the area was its many prehistoric sites, such as Chanctonbury Ring and the Devil's Jumps (a series of five Bronze Age bell barrows near Treyford).

In Legend (1933), for piano and orchestra, Ireland tells a story of a strange encounter he had while walking in a remote spot on the Downs, close to Harrow Hill. This is an inaccessible spot, the site of neolithic flint mines, an Iron Age enclosure and a medieval lepers' colony. For a fleeting moment Ireland believed he saw a group of children dancing, dressed in archaic white clothing. One of the early ideas for a title for the work, derived from associations with Bronze Age barrows, was Queen Fridias. Legend opens with a solo intoning French horn and subterranean clarinets, primeval bassoon and distant timpani rumblings. On to this primitive landscape Ireland projects a piano soloist: the solitary person entering the uncanny landscape. He uses deliberately archaic modal harmonic language and a version of the Dies irae to evoke the ancient lepers' path. The very different central section introduces his dancing children into the landscape. The final section of the work uses the original horn invocation to lead the protagonist away from Harrow Hill. Ireland described the experience in a letter to the writer Arthur Machen, who replied on a cryptic postcard: "So you've seen them too".

Writer: Fiona Richards