IN THE SHADOW OF THE DOWNS

Many years ago, long before I came to live in Petersfield, I had a book called The Countryside Companion, which contained a photograph of a roadside statue of St. Christopher above the caption Treyford, Sussex. Such waymarkers are unusual in this country and are more commonly found in south Germany. According to the Golden Legend Offero was a man of colossal stature, who helped travellers across a river. One day he carried a little boy, whose weight was more than the giant could bear, eventually revealing himself as the Christ Child, who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. So Offero was known as Christopher, and became the patron saint of travellers, although he is no longer recognised as such by the Catholic Church.

I recalled this picture years later when I came to Petersfield, and duly found the signpost at Treyford, where it remains to this day, It was designed by Graily Hewitt, a distinguished calligrapher who lived nearby, and apparently it disappeared for some years, turning up in Essex before being returned to its original place.

Treyford is one of a series of villages nestling below the South Downs between Harting and Cocking. The walk along the ridge is exhilarating, but for the less energetic the narrow road through the villages of Elsted, Treyford, Didling and Bepton is no less rewarding, with magnificent views of the Downs, bare and wooded in turn, along the whole route.

A mile or so east of South Harting, Elsted is the most compact of these villages, although the original parish was huge, even incorporating Hooksway on the other side of the Downs. It still retains three pubs: the Three Horseshoes, now a well-known food pub, but for many years run by Dick Tullett and his wife Winnie, whose parents had the pub before them. It was greatly beloved of Hillaire Belloc and the topographer E.V. Lucas. Forty years ago we used to sing carols there at Christmas, arriving on a tractor-drawn wagon. The Elsted Inn, just down the road, was formerly the Station Inn, built beside the Petersfield to Midhurst branch line, which opened in 1864, and for ninety years was the locals’ best link with either town.

The third, far away across the Downs, is the Royal Oak at Hooksway, hidden below the road from Petersfield to Chichester. Here the legendary Alf Ainger was landlord for sixty years until his death soon after 1970. He was a celebrated folk singer and story teller, but was profoundly deaf, and it was difficult to carry out a conversation with him. Details of how his brothers and sisters died in the great freeze of 1880 and how his father left London to become lock-keeper on the Chichester canal varied from time to time, but his reply to the question “Where’s the loo?” never changed. “There’s acres of grass out there,” he always said, pointing to the nearby Downs, causing amusement or embarrassment in equal measure.

Treyford has two churches, both completely ruined. The old church was deserted when the large cathedral-like St. Peter’s was built in 1849, serving Treyford-cum-Didling and Elsted, but this in turn became unsafe and was blown up in 1951, leaving a big burial ground, the centre of the parish moving to Elsted, whose own charming Saxon church was restored. On the hill behind Treyford stands a memorial to Hauptmann Joseph Oestermann, the pilot of a German aircraft disabled during a raid on Aldershot. He remained at the controls, enabling his crew to bail out, before crashing into the hillside.

Didling, a couple of miles further on, is unique, its little church situated on the actual slope of the Downs, described by Ian Nairn in the Sussex volume of Pevsner’s Buildings of England as “a grand situation counterpointed by the humble sincerity of the building.” Other than some shoring up with brick and some Jacobean woodwork inside, little has changed for seven hundred years, medieval oak pews and Victorian candle holders creating a wonderful atmosphere. Its position has gained for it the description of the Shepherds’ Church, and the sound of sheep bleating is never far away.

And so we come to Bepton, nestling below Linch Down, the second highest point on the whole of the downland ridge, another of those flint built villages which seem to have grown organically out of the landscape, existing in a time and space entirely of their own. The peaceful idyll is all too quickly shattered when we arrive at the main road at Cocking.

Tom Muckley, September 2005

This article was originally published by the Petersfield Post

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