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Updated: May 27, 2025


Our favourite place was beyond Wolstonbury, where we could stretch ourselves upon the soft, springy, chalk grass among the plump little Southdown sheep, chatting with the shepherds, as they leaned upon their queer old Pyecombe crooks, made in the days when Sussex turned out more iron than all the counties of England. It was there that we lay upon that glorious afternoon.

I had but to walk up to Wolstonbury in the war time to see the sails of the French chasse- marees and privateers. Again and again I have heard the roar of the guns coming from far out over the waters. Seamen would tell us how they had left London and been engaged ere nightfall, or sailed out of Portsmouth and been yard-arm to yard-arm before they had lost sight of St. Helen's light.

Who on all the country side, save only Boy Jim, would have swung himself over Wolstonbury Cliff, and clambered down a hundred feet with the mother hawk flapping at his ears in the vain struggle to hold him from her nest? He was but sixteen, with his gristle not yet all set into bone, when he fought and beat Gipsy Lee, of Burgess Hill, who called himself the "Cock of the South Downs."

The old church has a twelfth century leaden font and a double piscina and is one of the highest in Sussex, being situated 400 feet above the sea. This walk could very well be extended to include Wolstonbury Hill and Hurstpierpoint. The road running west from Poynings at the foot of the Downs would bring us to Fulking where is a memorial fountain to John Ruskin erected by a brewer.

Danny is a beautiful specimen of the Elizabethan mansion at its best; it is built under the shadow of Wolstonbury Hill, one of the finest in shape of the outstanding bastions of the Downs, on the top of which is a circular camp with several pits within the vallum. The twin woods on the slope of the hill are locally known as "Campion's Eyebrows," they are well seen in the accompanying sketch.

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