This route to Brighton is singularly rural and lovely, and particularly beautiful in the way of copses and wooded hollows, whence streamlets trickle away to join the river Adur. Villages lie shyly just off its course, and must be sought, only an occasional inn or smithy, or the lodge-gates of modern estates called into existence since the making of the road in 1813, breaking the solitude. The existence of Bolney itself is only hinted at by the pinnacles of its church tower peering over the topmost branches of distant trees. “Bowlney,” as the countryfolk pronounce the name, is worth a little detour, for it is a compact, picturesque spot that might almost have been designed by an artist with a single thought for pictorial composition, so well do its trees, the houses, old and new, the church, and the “Eight Bells” inn, group for effect.
Down the road, rather over a mile distant from Bolney, and looking so remarkably picturesque from the highway that even the least preoccupied with antiquities must needs stop and admire, is Hickstead Place, a small but beautiful residence, the seat of Miss Davidson, dating from the time of Henry the Seventh, with a curious detached building in two floors, of the same or even somewhat earlier period, on the lawn; remarkable for the large vitrified bricks in its gables, worked into rough crosses and supposed to indicate a former use as a chapel. History, however, is silent that point; but, as the inquirer may discover for himself, it now fulfils the twin offices of a studio and a lumber room. The parish church of Twineham, little more than a mile away, is of the same period, and built of similar materials. Hickstead Place has been in the same family for close upon four hundred years, and as an old house without much in the way of a history, and with its ancient features largely retained and adapted to modern domestic needs, is a striking example both of the continuity and the placidity of English life. The staircase walls are frescoed in a blue monochrome with sixteenth-century representations of field-sports and hunting scenes, very curious and interesting. The roof is covered with slabs of Horsham stone, and the oak entrance is original. Ancient yews, among them one clipped to resemble a bear sitting on his rump, give an air of distinction to the lawn, completed by a pair of eighteenth-century wrought-iron gates between red brick pillars.
NEWTIMBER PLACE.
Sayers Common is a modern hamlet, of a few scattered houses. Albourne lies away to the right. From here the Vale of Newtimber opens out and the South Downs rise grandly ahead. Noble trees, singly and in groups, grow plentiful; and where they are at their thickest, in the sheltered hollow of the hills, stands Newtimber Place, belonging to Viscount Buxton, a noble mansion with Queen Anne front of red brick and flint, and an Elizabethan back, surrounded by a broad moat of clear water, formed by embanking the beginnings of a little stream that comes willing out of the chalky bosom of the hills. It is a rarely complete and beautiful scene.
Beyond it, above the woods where in spring the fluting blackbird sings of love and the delights of a mossy nest in the sheltered vale, rises Dale Hill, with its old toll-house. It was in the neighbouring Dale Vale that Tom Sayers, afterwards the unconquered champion of England, fought his first fight.
PYECOMBE: JUNCTION OF THE ROADS.
He was not, as often stated, an Irishman, but the son of a man descended from a thoroughly Sussexian stock. The name of Sayers is well known throughout Sussex, and in particular at Hand Cross, Burgess Hill, and Hurstpierpoint. There is even, as we have already seen, a Sayers Common on the road. Tom Sayers, however, was born at Brighton. He worked as a bricklayer at building the Preston Viaduct of the Brighton and Lewes Railway: that great viaduct which spans the Brighton Road as you enter the town. He retired in 1860, after his fight with Heenan, and when he died, in 1865, the reputation of prize-fighting died with him.
At the summit of Dale Hill stands Pyecombe, above the junction of roads, on the rounded shoulder of the downs. The little rubbly and flinty churches of Pyecombe, Patcham, Preston, and Clayton are very similar in appearance exteriorly and all are provided with identical towers finished off with a shingled spirelet of insignificant proportions. This little Norman church, consisting of a tiny nave and chancel only, is chiefly interesting as possessing a triple chancel arch and an ancient font.
PATCHAM.
Over the chancel arch hangs a painting of the Royal Arms, painted in the time of George the Third, faded and tawdry, with dandified unicorn and a gamboge lion, all teeth and mane, regarding the congregation on Sundays, and empty benches at other times, with the most amiable of grins. It is quite typical of Pyecombe that those old Royal Arms should still remain; for the place is what it was then, and then it doubtless was what it had been in the days of good Queen Anne, or even of Elizabeth, to go no further back. The grey tower tops the hill as it has done since the Middle Ages, the few cottages cluster about it as of yore, and only those who lived in those humble homes, or reared that church, are gone. Making the circuit of the church, I look upon the stone quoins and the bedded flints of those walls; and as I think how they remain, scarce grizzled by the weathering of countless storms, and how those builders are not merely gone, but are as forgotten as though they had never existed, I could have it in my heart to hate the insensate handiwork of man, to which he has given an existence: the unfeeling walls of stone and flint and mortar that can outlast him and the memory of him by, it may well be, a thousand years.
