The Brighton Road: The Classic Highway to the SouthHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Brighton Road: The Classic Highway to the South
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Brighton Road (London, England); England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
The little hamlet of Sidlow Bridge, with its modern church, built in 1862,
marks the point where the road, instead of continuing straight, along the
flat, went winding off away to the right, seeking a route secure from the
Mole floods, up Black Horse Hill. When the route was changed, and the
"Black Horse" inn, by consequence, lost its custom, a newer inn of the
same name was built at the cross-roads in the levels; and there it stands
to-day, just before one reaches Povey Cross and the junction of routes.
[Sidenote: LOWFIELD HEATH]
Povey Cross, of whose name no man knows the derivation, leads direct past
the tiny Kimberham, or Timberham, Bridge over the Mole, to Lowfield Heath,
referred to in what, for some inscrutable reason, are styled the "Statutes
at Large," as "Lovell" Heath. The place is in these days a modern hamlet,
and the heath, in a strict sense, is to seek. It has been improved away by
enclosure and cultivation, utterly and without remorse; but the flat,
low-lying land remains eloquent of the past, and accounts for the humorous
error of some old maps which style it "Level Heath."
The whole district, from Salfords, through Horley, to near Crawley, is at
times little more than an inland sea, for here ooze and crawl the many
tributaries of the Mole. The memorable floods of October, 1891, following
upon a wet summer and autumnal weeks of rain, swelled the countless
arteries of the Mole, and the highways became rushing torrents. Along the
nut-brown flood floated the remaining apples from drowned orchards, with
trees, bushes, and hurdles. Postmen on their rounds were reduced to
wading, and thence to horseback and wheeled conveyances; and Horley
churchyard was flooded.
[Illustration: The Floods at Horley.]
A repetition of this state of things occurred in February, 1897, when the
dedication of the new organ in the church of Lowfield Heath could not be
performed, the roads being four feet under water.
XXI
[Sidenote: CHARLWOOD]
The traveller does not see the true inwardness of the Weald from the hard
high road. Turn we, then at Povey Cross for a rustic interlude into the
byways, making for Charlwood and Ifield.
Few are those who find themselves in these lonely spots. Hundreds, nay,
thousands are continually passing almost within hail of their slumberous
sites, and have been passing for hundreds of years, yet they and their
inhabitants doze on, and ever and again some cyclist or pedestrian
blunders upon them by a fortunate accident, as, one may say, some
unconscious Livingstone or Speke, discovering an unknown Happy Valley, and
disturbs with a little ripple of modernity their uneventful calm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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