Cathedrals -- England; England -- Description and travel
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. Here, too, on the south chancel wall is a fine brass of 1523
in which we see a priest holding chalice and wafer. In the nave are
the remains of frescoes of the Last Judgment.
Right above Clayton rises Wolstanbury, a hill-top camp or circular
work some two hundred and fifty yards in diameter. It is interesting
because it is curiously and cleverly fortified, the rampart being
built up below and outside the fosse, owing to the steepness of the
hill. To the left are certain pits which may have been the site of
dwellings; certainly many neolithic implements have been found here.
Below Wolstanbury which thrusts itself out into the Weald like a great
headland nearly seven hundred feet in height, lies Pyecombe to the
south-west. This little place which lies between the heights of
Wolstanbury and Newtimber Hill is celebrated for two things, its
shepherds' crooks and the Norman font of lead in the little church
whose chancel arch is Norman too. You may see here even in so small a
place, however, all the styles of England, for if the font and chancel
arch are Norman, the lancets in the chancel are Early English, the
double piscina is Decorated and the windows of the nave are
Perpendicular while the pulpit is of the seventeenth century.
Pyecombe is hard to reach from Clayton without a great climb over the
Downs, but there is a way, though a muddy one, which turns due west out
of the Brighton road where the railway crosses it. This leads one round
the northern side of Wolstanbury (and this is the best way from which
to visit the camp on the top) and so by a footpath past Newtimber
Place, a moated Elizabethan house well hidden away among the trees west
of the road to Hurstpierpoint.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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