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Pagham Church is an interesting Early English building dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury and erected by a successor to St. Augustine's Chair. The scanty remains of the episcopal palace may be seen southeast of the church. From Hunston Halt a walk of about a mile westwards leads to another remote and straggling village, North Mundham.
For St Wilfrid's sake, I put aside these admonishments, and one morning set out upon the lonely road to Pagham, across a country as flat as a fen, of old, as they say, a forest, the forest of Mainwood, and still in spite of drainage and cultivation very bleak and lonely with marshes here and there which are still the haunt of all kinds of wild-fowl.
Even the birds seemed to have voted that the river was never going to fill again, for a colony of sandpipers, instead of continuing their migration to the coast, had taken up their quarters on the little spits of mud and shingle now fringing the weir-pool, and were flitting from point to point, and making believe it was a bit of Pagham Harbour or Porchester Creek.
Nothing of the sort exists at Pagham to-day; it has disappeared with the reclamation of the harbour, which itself was formed, we are told, in the fourteenth century by a tidal wave, when nearly three thousand acres were inundated.
The only thing which the continual fight of man against water in this peninsula has left us that is worth seeing in Pagham to-day is the church of St Thomas of Canterbury. This is an Early English building much spoiled by restoration, the best thing remaining being the beautiful arcade of the end of the twelfth century.
Pagham, however, of which I had read, with its creek and harbour, its curious Hushing Well, its golden sands, and extraordinary melancholy, as it were a ruin of the sea, sadly disappointed me. Only its melancholy remains.
To reach Selsey and its old church of Our Lady, what remains of it, from Pagham is not an easy matter, the footpaths across the fields being sometimes a little vague. The walk, however, is worth the trouble it involves, for you may thus gather some idea of the history of this unfortunate coast, which the sea has been eating up for at least fifteen hundred years.
These transported fragments of granite, syenite, and greenstone, as well as of Devonian and Silurian rocks, may have come from the coast of Normandy and Brittany, and are many of them of such large size that we must suppose them to have been drifted into their present site by coast-ice. I measured one of granite, at Pagham, 21 feet in circumference.
The church was probably built by one of the early successors of St Thomas in the See of Canterbury; for Pagham belonged to the Archbishops until the Reformation, and certain ruins of their palace remain in a field to the south-east of the church. At Nyetimber, on the Chichester road, a mile out of Pagham, are the ruins of a thirteenth-century chapel.
These blocks are to be seen in greatest number at Pagham and Selsea, 15 miles south of Chichester, in latitude 50 degrees 40 minutes north. They consist of fragments of granite, syenite and greenstone, as well as of Devonian and Silurian rocks, some of them of large size. I measured one of granite at Pagham, 27 feet in circumference.
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