This second Chanctonbury Ring legend sits alongside the site's better known devil-summoning ritual, recorded separately in this register, as one of at least two distinct supernatural traditions attached to the same hillfort, a density of separate folklore uncommon even among this register's more storied ancient sites. The uncountable-trees motif itself is a recognised type found at various British sites, an apparently simple, checkable task, counting a fixed and visible number of trees, made impossible by supernatural interference, its very simplicity being what makes the claim so temptingly testable and so persistently retold.
The specific reward for success, raising the ghost of Julius Caesar and his Roman army, gives this version a distinctly Roman flavour appropriate to the site's own genuine archaeological history as a later Romano-British temple location, even though Caesar's own historical Gallic Wars campaigns and brief expeditions to Britain in 55 and 54 BC predate the actual Claudian conquest of Britain by nearly a century, making his personal historical connection to Chanctonbury specifically an anachronism, however evocative, rather than a genuine period-accurate detail.
No specific date or named source for a successful count, or its supposedly resulting apparition, has been traced in the sources consulted for this entry, and the legend is recorded here as local tradition of a well established regional folkloric type, distinctive in its Sussex telling for the ancient Roman general it names.
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