There is nothing that makes so good a focus for a legend as a conspicuous grave, particularly if there is something eccentric about it, or about its occupant. One excellent specimen is the Miller's Tomb, which stands in splendid isolation on the flank of Highdown Hill, west of Worthing. It was built by John Oliver, an eighteenth-century miller, in his own lifetime, and the proud owner used to visit it daily, allegedly to meditate.

 

 

Local opinion, both then and now, is divided in its judgement of him Some take his piety at face-value, but many hold that he was a rogue, in league with smugglers, and used the hill as a look-out post, the mill as a means of signalling, and the famous tomb as a hiding place for the contraband. Be that as it may, when he died in 1793 he had a flamboyant funeral (the coffin was carried by young girls in white, a custom normally reserved for the burial of very young and hence incintestably sinless children!); His elaborate tomb, engraved with many verses, has remained a favourite picnic spot to this day.

 

Two legends have developed round the Miller's Tomb. One is that John Oliver arranged to be buried upside down, because he believed that at the Last Judgement the whole world would turn topsy-turvy, and he wanted to be the only man facing the right way after this upheaval. This weird idea is known elsewhere in Sussex too; north of Pulborough stands Toat Tower, a tall isolated folly built in 1827, and a local story alleges that there is a man buried under it upside down, together with his horse, which is also upside down.

 

The second legend about the Miller's Tomb is that if you run around it seven times, John Oliver's ghost will jump out and chase you; It is even asserted that the verses on the tomb (now very worn) say that this will happen. In fact, of course, they say nothing of the sort, but are simply the ordinary type of pious verse popular at that period. One group, on the end slab, is surmounted by a carving of Time and Death, the latter shown as a skeleton, and contains the lines:

 

Why start you at that skeleton?
'Tis your own picture that you shun;
Alive it did resemble thee,
And thou when dead like that shall be.

 

Clearly, these lines and the accompanying picture served as starting-point for this not very serious tale of ghost-raising.

 

 

 

 

 

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