At Hand Cross the ways divide, the Bolney and Hickstead route, opened in 1813, branching off to the right and not merely providing a better surface, but, with a straighter course, saving from one and a half to two miles, and avoiding some troublesome rises, becoming in these times the "record route" for cyclists, pedestrians, and all who seek to speed between London and Brighton in the quickest possible time. It rejoins the classic route at Pyecombe. For the present we will follow the older way, by Cuckfield, down to Staplefield Common. A lovely vale opens out as one descends the southern face of the watershed, with an enchanting middle distance of copses, cottages, and winding roads, the sun slanting on distant ponds, or transmuting commonplace glazier's work into sparkling diamonds. At the foot of the hill is Staplefield Common, bisected by the highway, with recent cottages and modern church, and in the foreground the "Jolly Farmers" inn. But where are the famous cherry-trees of Staplefield, under whose boughs the coach passengers of a century ago feasted off the "black-hearts"; where are the "Dun Cow" and its equally famous rabbit-puddings and its pretty Miss Finch? Gone, as utterly as though they had never been. [Illustration: THE "RED LION," HAND CROSS.] Three miles of oozy hollows and rises covered with tangled undergrowths of hazels lead past Slough Green and Whiteman's Green to Cuckfield. From the hillsides the great Ouse Valley Viaduct of the Brighton line, down towards Balcombe and Ardingly, is seen stalking across the low-lying meadows, mellowed by distance to the romantic similitude of an aqueduct of ancient Rome. Plentiful traces are yet visible of the rugged old hollow lane that was the precursor of the present road. In places it is a wayside pool; in others a hollow, grown thickly with trees, with tree-roots, gnarled and fanglike, clutching in desperate hold its crumbling banks. The older rustics know it, if the younger and the passing stranger do not: they tell you "'tis wheer th' owd hroad tarned arff." XXVI The pleasant old town of Cuckfield stands on no railway, and has no manufactures or industries of any kind; and since the locomotive ran the coaches off the road has been a veritable Sleepy Hollow. It was not always thus, for in those centuries--from the fourteenth until the early part of the eighteenth--when the beds of Sussex iron-ore were worked and smelted on the spot, the neighbourhood of Cuckfield was a Black Country, given over to the manufacture of ironware, from cannon to firebacks. [Illustration: CUCKFIELD, 1789. _From an aquatint after Rowlandson._]