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Updated: June 25, 2025
About a mile and a half north and two miles east of Ditchling village is the lonely hamlet of Street. The "Place" is a grand old house dating from the reign of the first James; behind the chimney of the hall was once a spacious hiding place and a story is told of a Royalist fugitive who rode into it on his horse and was never again seen.
Ditchling village is charming, with more than one old half-timber house, and the church of St Margaret's is not only interesting in itself, but, standing as it does upon rising ground and yet clear of the great hills, it offers you one of the finest views of the Downs anywhere to be had from the Weald.
Just at the foot of the Downs, too, on the north side, we find a few clan settlements on the edge of the Weald, which must date from the first period of English colonisation. Such are Poynings, Didling, Ditchling, Chillington, and Chiltington.
Therefore when I set out from Lewes to go westward I did not take the way up past the race- course over the battlefield south of Mount Harry towards Ditchling Camp and Beacon. Let me confess it, I followed the road. And what a road!
He proceeded to talk a good deal about Campeggio; his red silk and his lace, his gout, his servants, his un-English ways; but it began to get a little tiresome to Chris, and soon after passing through Ditchling, Mr.
Something better than Ditchling church awaits the traveller at Clayton where the little church of St John the Baptist possesses a most interesting chancel arch, round and massive, that may well be Saxon. The chancel itself is of the thirteenth century with triple lancets at the western end with two heads, perhaps of a king and queen on the moulding.
Medenham had roamed the South Downs as a boy, and he was able now to point out Chanctonbury Ring, the Devil's Dyke, Ditchling Beacon, and the rest of the round-shouldered giants that guard the Weald. In the mellow light of a superlatively fine afternoon the Downs wore their gayest raiment of blue and purple, red and green decked, too, with ribands of white roads and ruffs of rose-laden hedges.
They were coming up now towards the downs, and the great rounded green shoulders heaved high against the sky, gashed here and there by white strips and patches where the chalk glared in the bright afternoon sun. Ditchling beacon rose to their right, a hundred feet higher than the surrounding hills, and the high country sloped away from it parallel with their road, down to Lewes.
The ascent here in front seems nothing, but you must rest before you have reached a third of the way up. Ditchling Beacon there, on the left, is the very highest above the sea of the whole mighty range, but so great is the mass of the hill that the glance does not realise it. Hope dwells there, somewhere, mayhap, in the breeze, in the sward, or the pale cups of the harebells.
This Ditchling Beacon is, I think, the nearest and the most accessible of the southern Alps from London; it is so near it may almost be said to be in the environs of the capital. But it is alone with the wind. The shepherd came down the hill carrying his greatcoat slung at his back upon his crook, and balanced by the long handle projecting in front.
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