Describing Some Walks Among the Downs, Down Villages, & the Devil'S Dyke.

 

Northward, not a mile away, lie the Downs. Hove is fortunately situated in this respect, for when you can tear yourself away from the fascination of the sea you have but to walk across the town, which was everywhere but a mile wide, and you are among the uplands.

 

If we do not appreciate our " inland rampart of the Sussex hills," it is not the fault of our novelists and poets. Blackmore fell under their spell no less than he did under that of Exmoor, and wrote Alice Lorraine to prove it. Harrison Ainsworth, in Ovingdean Grange, took King Charles the Second over the springy turf with a power of description that sets one fidgeting to canter in the tracks of the fugitive king. Kipling felt " the tinkling silence " of the Downs when he wrote his poem, Sussex, though he caught them in a misty mood:

Here leaps ashore the full sou'west
All heavy-winged with brine,
Here lies above the folded crest
The channel's lifted line;

And here the sea-fogs lap and cling,
And here, each warning each,
The sheep-bells and the ship bells ring
Along the hidden beach.

Swinhurne, too, has put them in a breathless line, where he writes of Shoreham Church:

Stately stands it, the work of hands unknown of: statelier, afar and near,
Rise around it the heights that bound our landward gaze from the seaboard here;
Downs that swerve and aspire in curve and change of heights that the dawn holds dear.

But one more quotation. Mr. Romfrey, in Meredith's Beauchamp's Career, from his window at Steynham, saw Cecilia Halkett and Nevil Beauchamp ride off in the early dawn, when they made their strange visit to Bevisham:

To relieve an uncertainty in Cecilia's face that might soon have become confusion, he described the downs fronting the paleness of early dawn, and then their arch and curve and dip against the pearly grey of the half glow; and then among their hollows, lo, the illumiIlation of the East all around, and up and away, and a gallop for miles along the turfy, thymy rolling billows, land to left, sea to right, below you.

West Blatchington

The man who will walk may see it all for himself. The road in 1910 started from the Town Hall, follow the Norton Road to its junction with the Blatchington Road; here turn to the left and continue into the Sackville Road; then turn to the right and follow the Sackville Road across the railway to the Sackville Hotel, at the corner of the Old Shoreham Road. A signpost directs to Three Cornered Copse; follow the lane in the direction indicated till the Waterworks lie on the right hand, when turn sharply to the left.

 

The road leads directly into the downland village of West Blatchington, or Blatchington-Weyfield , as it used to be called, consisting of an ancient farmbouse, knowm as Blatchington Court, an old windmill, long out of action, some cottages, and a little church. Southward it faces the channel; on the inland side it peers into a valley, or " dean ," of the Downs.

Blatchington, for all that it lies so isolated and derelict, has a place in the local history, as the house was for generations the home of the Scrase family, whose hand is everywhere apparent in the Sussex of Tudor times. The Nevills, of Eridge Castle, have been lords of the manor since 1435, when they acquired it by marriage from the Beauchamps, and the badge of Lord Abergavenny is to be seen on many of the cottages.

 

The Scrase family flourished between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries at Blatchington, and their descendants may be found today in Hove. But it is useless to look for their monuments in the church of St.Peter; for this church, like those of Hove and Aldrington, lay in ruins for generations.

 

Exactly when the ruin began is not known; some suggest that the Scrase family, adhering to the older faith at the time of the Reformation, allowed the church to fall into decay. An old brass plate, formerly fixed over the chimney-piece in the hall of Mr. Scrase at Whiteing, bore the folIowing inscription:

Here lieth Buried Richard Scrase, late of Hangleton, Gentlema, which died in the year of our Lord God One 1499.

Here lieth Buried, Richard Scrase, Gentlema, which died in the year of our Lord God One 1519.

Here lieth buried Edward Scrase, Gentlema, who died in the year of our Lord 1523.

These were all buried at Preston Church, and it may be that Blatchington Church was not in a fit state of repair to receive them. Later on, the Scrase family belonged to the Society of Friends, and a meeting of the Quakers at West Blatchington in 1672 is on record. In its original state the church was probably an Early English building, with nave and chancel of equal width.

 

It is uncertain whether there was a tower at the west end; the remaining foundations may have been part of the old nave, which in that case would have been longer than at present. It was restored in 1900. The mill has apparently no claim to great antiquity. In a map of 1800 it is not even indicated.

 

Gibbets Farm

The return from West Blatchington- can be made by the farm road crossing Court Farm, which will lead past Gibbets Farm to the Old Shoreham road, between St. Joseph's House, a Catholic home for the aged, and Hove Cemetery.

Gibbets Farm is so named because on the east side of an old chalk-pit in the farm lands a gibbet formerly stood, on which two men were hung in chains in 1792 for robbing the mail on the; night of October 30 in that year.

 

The " mail " was a boy on horseback, named Stephenson, who stopped and delivered up the letters without a murmur when ordered to do so by the two robbers. These were James Rook, a simple-minded labouring lad of twenty-four, who lived with his mother in a cottage at Old Shoreham; and Edward Howell, a tailor, who was fifteen years his senior.

They broke open the letters in a neighbouring barn, and shared the contents, which amounted to a few shillings, nook was arrested at the Red Lion Inn, Old Shoreham, almost immediately afterwards, and gave information by means of which Howell was soon taken. It was not an age of clemency, and they were both duly hung.

 

The gruesome yet pathetic legend runs that as the 'corpses rotted away and fell, Rook's mother used to gather the bones of her son, going to the foot of the gibbet in all weathers, and that she buried them in Old Shoreham Churchyard, that his soul might rest in peace. It is almost a repetition of the Bible story of Kizpah, a story with which Rook's poor mother may very well have been familiar.

 

Hangleton

If, instead of returning to the high road, we continue past the church, and take the first turning to the right, we shall come to the village of Hangleton, at about a mile distant. Hangleton House, the property of Lord Sackville, was at one time in the hands of the Bellinghams, and later of the Scrase family; it had for many generations been occupied by the Hardwickes.

 

It has suffered less alteration than Blatchington Court, and may be said to represent Tudor domestic architecture at its best. The old courtyard, which can be seen from the road which Grosses the farm, has a picturesque exterior. The kitchen hall has an oak screen on which the ten Commandments are carved, with the motto, containing no vowel but the letter e:

Persevere, ye perfect men, Ever keep these precepts ten.

Hangleton Church stands on a small chalk hill at the entrance of a rolling valley. The church, originally a Norman building, has undergone much repair, but its ivy-clad, embattled tower is part of the original structure. Near the long row of tombs belonging to the Hardwickes is that of Dr. Kenealy, who defended the claimant in the Tichborne case.

 

Hangleton is a good starting point for the Dyke, which is best reached on foot by the ancient trackway leading due north from Hangleton House. By this road the Romans may have marched when they occupied the prehistoric camp above Poynings; and it served its purpose down to the recent times when the smugglers landed their tubs at Copperas Gap, opposite Portslade, and ran them on pack teams through the dark valleys of the Downs to the Weald and to town.

The trackway is easily traceable, though for the greater part it has gone the way of most of the downland roads, and has become but a pair of deep ruts in the chalky soil, densely covered in summer with long grass.

 

But the walk in July or August is a very paradise of wild flowers. Poppies, dog, daisies, cornflowers, hemlock, and a host of other varieties are to be found along the banks in the wildest profusion; and from these valleys the heights of the hills are deceptive to a point of impressiveness. The road ends with a sharp ascent to the embankment of the earthworks forming the Dyke, high above the chasm that has given it its name.

 

The Devil's Dyke

The Dyke as a pleasure resort has fair claims to antiquit;y, having been visited by the fashionable folk from Brighton while Hove was but a village..Edwards, the topographer of the coach roads, writing in the eighteehth century, refers to the Dyke in the following words:

This eminence is much admired, and is greatly resorted to on account of the delightful prospect that it commands.: here the scene changes from rude heaths to a beautiful enclosed and finely cultivated country on one side, and on the other an uninterrupted view of the sea for many leagues. The Devil's Dyke received its name from a hollow of an astonishing depth, by which the mountain is separated from the adjacent hill.

It, is, indeed, a gorgeous prospect which moved this generally prosaic topographer to so spirited a piece of description.

 

The View

Eastward the Downs extend like rolling billows, beyond Clayton and Ditchling to Lewes; westward Chanctonbury Ring stands clearly out, and signals from the Dyke could here be perceived with the naked eye, as was no doubt the case when the Stone Age folk fortified the crests of both hills.

 

Through a dip to the south-west the glass-houses of the Worthing fruitgrowers scintillate in the sun, and throw the town beyond them into hard silhouette, with a faint outline of the coast beyond to Selsey. Nearer by the coast the roof-line of Bungalow Town, with perhaps a glimpse of Shoreham Church, may be seen; Hove, however, is hidden by the heights between, and only an angle of Preston shows where Brighton begins to spread. But the real view is northward, across the vast wooded plain of the Weald, stretching over, maybe, a hundred square miles and more.

 

On the right day Leith Hill is easily visible, and the white face of Oxted chalk quarry stands out clearly; while the blue line of the North Downs crawls brokenly across the skyline in the haze. Poynings and Fulking lie at our feet, with Edburton to the west, seeming no further away than a good step and a jump. Beyond. are the little towns of the Weald, with their towers, spires, windmills, and other landmarks peeping out from among the trees.

 

Early on Sunday morning is a good time to visit the Dyke; then, if the wind blows from landward, you may hear the tinkle or clang of the Wealden churchbells, which so upset the Devil.

 

The legend has it that the Poor Man (that is how the Sussex peasants name him) had his peace of mind and his rest of nights so frequently broken by the sweet music of these little churchbells that he determined to drown them for ever. So he bethought himself of a plan whereby he could do so; and set to work to cut a trench through the Downs that should let in the sea and flood the weald. But the Devil had ever a strain of simple-mindedness.

 

An old peasant woman in a cottage of the Weald, wondering what all the disturbance was about, placed a candle on her window-ledge, and the Poor Man, no doubt with an evil conscience telling him that he was up to no good work, fled at the sight of it, thinking the dawn had come. He never returned; the crest of the Dyke is not an island, and England stands more or less where it did.

The Devil's handiwork was spanned by an aerial railway, now lone gone, and there were stalls and shows where the visitor was on all sides urgently invited to shoot at a bottle on a string, to throw balls at coconuts, to witness the optical illusion of himself growing rapidly fat, and otherwise to amuse himself - except on Sundays. There is a good hotel on the summit of the Dyke, commanding a view of the Weald and at one time there was a wooden model of the 110-ton armstrong gun.

 

Saddlescombe

At the western end of the Poor Man's Walls is a hamlet of a few cottages and a large old fashioned house, which might have some history if one could only discover where to look for it. But this place, Saddlescombe-in-Newtimber, was so frequently confounded with Sedlescombe, near Battle, that the history of both seems unreasonably obscure. It is fairly well established, however, that the Preceptory of the Knights Templars, so often referred to as Sedlescombe-in-Newtimber, was at Sedlescombe near Battle.

 

The best way to reach Saddlescombe from the summit of the Dyke is by crossing or going round the head of the chasm, and following its brink to the field road at the foot of the hill (the road on the north side of the chasm leads round the base of the hill to Poynings. Though it has no church or other architectural interest, it is worth visiting for its pretty situation and environment.

 

Poynings

Poynings can be reached by the road from Saddlescombe, or it can be reached directly from the Dyke by the road indicated above. It, is a pleasant village, lying in a wooded fold where the steep sides of the hills meet the plain. The heavy embattled tower of its church stands above the elms, and the houses cluster round it, tapering off into a long village street.

The church is different from most of its neighbours; its form is that of a Greek cross, and in general style it would appear to mark the transition from Decorated to Perpendicular. The interior suggests the spaciousness of a small cathedral, and the big windows in the chancel and transepts give it an airy and cooling lightness for which one is grateful on a burning day.

 

The north transept is the old family chapel of the Montagues, formerly connected with the village; the south transept contains the tombs of the old baronial family of Poynings, whose crenellated mansion, which formerly stood on the rising ground behind the church, was burnt down in the eighteenth century.

 

This chapel was bricked off from the rest of the church by the executors of the last Baron Poynings when the title, and also the line, became extinct; the tombs fell to decay, and when the chapel was reopened it was found difficult to assign them. One of them bears a legible inscription (with some gaps) in which the curious may find exercise for their ingenuity.

 

 

 

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Taken from 'The Homeland Handbooks - Hove with its suroundings' Printed 1909-10.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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