202 THE BRIGHTON ROAD 



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. 



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. 



All this was so long ago that nature has healed the 

 scars made by that busy time. Wooded hills replace 

 the uplands made bare by the smelters, the cinder- 

 heaps and mounds of slag are hidden under pastures, 



