Ifield is just within the Sussex boundary. A beautiful way to it lies through the park, in whose woody drives the oak and holly most do grow. It has been remarked of this part of the Weald, that its soil is particularly favourable to the growth of the oak. Cobbett indeed says, "It is a county where, strictly speaking, only three things will grow well--grass, wheat, and oak-trees;" and it was long a belief that Sussex alone could furnish forth oak sufficient to build all the navies of Europe, notwithstanding the ravages among the forests made by the forges and furnaces. [Sidenote: IFIELD] In the church of St. Margaret, Ifield, whose somewhat unprepossessing exterior gives no hint of its inward beauty, is an oaken screen made from the wood of an old tree which stood for centuries on the Brighton Road at Lowfield Heath, where the boundary lines of Surrey and Sussex meet, and was cut down in the "forties." The tree was known far and wide as "County Oak." [Illustration: On the Road to Newdigate.] For the rest, the church is interesting enough by reason of its architecture to warrant some lingering here, but it is, beside this legitimate attraction, also very much of a museum of sepulchral curiosities. A brass for two brothers, with a curious metrical inscription, lurks in the gloom of the south aisle on the wall, and sundry grim and ghastly relics, in the shape of engraved coffin-plates, grubbed up by ghoulish antiquaries from the vaults below, form a perpetual _memento mori_ from darksome masonry. On either side the nave, by the chancel, beneath the graceful arches of the nave arcade, are the recumbent effigies of Sir John de Ifield and his lady. The knight died in 1317. He is represented as an armed Crusader, cross-legged, "a position," to quote "Thomas Ingoldsby," "so prized by Templars in ancient and tailors in modern days." The old pews came from St. Margaret's, Westminster. But so dark is the church that details can only with difficulty be examined, and to emerge from the murk of this interior is to blink again in the light of day, however dull that day may be. From Ifield Church, a long and exceeding straight road leads in one mile to Ifield Hammer Pond. Here is one of the many sources of the little river Mole, whose trickling tributaries spread over all the neighbouring valley. The old mill standing beside the hatch bears on its brick substructure the date 1683, but the white-painted, boarded mill itself is evidently of much later date. [Illustration: IFIELD MILL POND.] [Sidenote: SUSSEX IRON] Before a mill stood here at all, this was the site of one of the most important ironworks in Sussex, when Sussex iron paid for the smelting.