Beneath the town and the church, the road crosses the railway. The allotment gardens, squalid with little sheds, after their kind, stand below Harold’s centre, on the spot where the fight raged fiercest. But the finest idea of the battlefield is to be obtained from the bye-road that here turns to the right, and, skirting the park, runs to the site of the old Powder Mills. It is far better than looking down, with the crowd, from the terrace of the Abbey, and hearing the parrot-talk of a guide. Here you are in the spirit-company of the invaders, and can appreciate better their task of charging up to that ridge where Harold and his warriors stood then, where the Abbey buildings stand now. It is magnificent. The park-like landscape, dotted with clumps of trees in the uplands; a line of oaks and undergrowth following the course of the stream in the bottom; the town nested in woods, and Caldbeck windmill on the right, where, the rustics say, William “called ’em back.” Away down by Powder Mill House, in the coppices, one may still see the rocky ravine in whose depths the Norman cavalry fell in the fierce rally after their pretended flight. The ledges still drip red, as they needs must do, for the ground is rich in iron; but, although the explanation of the old legend that the soil weeps blood is prosaic enough, yet the sight is not without its impressiveness, and vividly recalls the magnificent opening lines of _Maud_: I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath; The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.” XLVI Over Telham Hill to Starr’s Green, past Crowhurst Park, where an ancient tumulus peeps over the palings, lies the way to Hastings. On the left-hand is the beautiful, but neglected, Beauport Park, fast going back to wildness. Here a fork in the road is furnished with a signpost directing both ways to Hastings. This puzzler for strangers is explained by the right-hand and shorter route being the “New London Road,” made when St. Leonards came into existence, and that to the left the “Old London Road,” in exclusive use in days before St. Leonards was thought of. [Illustration: THE ROAD PAST CROWHURST PARK.] The “new” road leads down to Hollington, a suburban village almost entirely swallowed up by expansion of the town. One of the old-established sights of Hastings is, or was, Old Roar, half a mile or so to the left-hand of it.