Hello Everyone. Hope you’ve not been missing me and my musings. Probably quite glad if truth be known. But today the meadow’s mown, the bonfire burnt, the grass cut and anyway it’s chucking it down outside so there’s little excuse for not sitting down at the keyboard and getting cracking. One of my loyal readers will doubtless ask: what’s with the delay? Well, to be perfectly honest, it’s mainly been the fault of Strava, the app that tracks your runs/walks/routes/steps and allows you to describe said runs/walks/routes/steps and even post photographs of them. It becomes a bit of an addiction if you’re not careful and my daily postings of walks with Dog have, I confess, exhausted my creative juices all year. It’s a pathetic reason, I admit, but there you are.
So now, after nine months absence, I’m not sure where this musing will take me. When I sort of started one in April I had the Exceat Stone in mind and the history of the long-lost village but then I looked out of the window, saw the sun was shining and the weeds growing and somehow the impetus left me. Till now, and I’m not sure that, after all these months of silence, it’s the best way to begin. Perhaps later.
Maybe the weather is a good place to start. After all, it’s always everyone’s the first topic of conversation so why change the habit of a lifetime. It’s odd that since Boris’s lockdown summer when the sun shone unceasingly we’ve not seen a lot of it. No reason to bring him back but we could certainly do without what seems to have been a bit of Denis Howell’s magic. Since then the rain has hardly stopped, culminating this last winter with the road into Westdean being flooded and impassable. To make matters worse we were unable to use the usual escape route through the forest as ForestEngland, god bless their little cotton socks, decided to forbid us to use it. So we were marooned, unable to get in or out until the floodwaters subsided. Which finally they did of course but not before we’d had a beef on BBC’s South East News. Not that it helped negotiations with ForestEngland..they are still ongoing, but that’s a quango for you.
The rain and lack of proper winter cold resulted, as every gardener will confirm, in considerable vexation: an epidemic of snails and slugs, an exuberance of Convolvulus Sepium - bloody bindweed - and in our case, an invasion of voles. Not only that, but seeds wouldn’t germinate and anything that did was eaten alive or smothered. Except the weeds, they are rather fond of moist and warm conditions. Thankfully, not opening to the public this year (or ever again!) meant we were able to relax and not worry too much about our slipping standards. Altogether though, not a lot of fun gardening this year.
That’s more than enough on the weather. Living here on the South Downs ought to lift the soul, and it does. So here’s a few views of our wonderful countryside in the hope it does the same for you:
Which brings me back to the Exceat Stone. Here it is:
As you can glean from the inscription, there was once a church on this site and a small habitation. It was discovered in the hot summer of 1913 by Maurice Theodore Lawrence, the 15 year old son of the rector of Westdean Church. He was wandering in the hills above the Cuckmere River when he spotted some indentations in the field which, to his 15 year old eyes, appeared to indicate a building of some sort. Obviously a smart lad, he told his father who asked an amateur historian pal of his living in Exceat Farmhouse, a Mr RH Verrall, and together they dug around and discovered stone foundations. It was enough for them to refer it to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and permission was granted for the Sussex Archaeological Society to excavate the site. Which they did and discovered the remains of a tiny church with a small porch and a horse-shoe shaped chancel. And because its foundation stones were Caen stone and Eastbourne greensand, similar to those of Seaford church built in 1090, they deduced it roughly dated Exceat church.
Around and about were oyster shells and sherds of medieval pottery which suggested there was probably a small settlement around the church. Rectors for the church can be traced back to 1255 when a pipe-roll mentions ‘Richard the Parson at Excete’. But within a 100 years the village had been sacked and destroyed by the dastardly French. After Richard there were 21 further rectors, the last being John Salter in 1469. Poor old Salter was rector in name only as he had no church and no parishioners as many died during the black death. The last two survivors, Richard Raye and John Algar petitioned the Bishop of Chichester that the church should come under the jurisdiction of Westdean and it was granted provided the Parish of Exceat remained in name. But in 1528 it was formally merged with Westdean, Exceat described as being ‘destroyed and razed to the ground and the site of the church profaned’. The foundations lay undisturbed till the excavations of 1913.
Sadly the young man who discovered the site was killed only three years later. In September 1916, Maurice Theodore Lawrence died in action aged just 18. He’d been one of the first lads in the area to have joined the Royal Sussex Regiment as a Private. He has no known grave but is commemorated in two stained glass windows featuring Saints Maurice and Theodore in All Saints church, Westdean.
Taz the Dog and I regularly take the path to the Exceat Stone as it has wonderful views of the Cuckmere Valley and its famous meanders. Most tourists don’t, preferring to take the easy route to the sea, so miss the pleasure of stumbling across this small piece of local history. If truth be told, most would probably rather a paddle and an ice cream anyway. More fool them.
A complete change of subject and back to the present day: a newsletter plopped through the letter box today from Swans and Friends Bird Rescue, a small charity dedicated to saving distressed feathered friends. It reminded me of the times they used to come to our our previous house in Crawley Down, where we had a small lake and, over the years, a series of incidents with swans that would make your hair curl. But as that’s perhaps a tale for another day I’ll end this musing with a few bucolic shots that paint a completely different picture. Happy days!
