THE DEANS 253 



Pangdean and Withdean. Most of these show the 

 same characteristics of clustered woodlands in a 

 sheltered fold of the hills, where a grey little flinty 

 church with stunted spirelet presides over a few large 

 farms and a group of little cottages. Time and 

 circumstance have changed those that do not happen 

 to conform to this general rule ; and. as ill luck will 

 have it, our first " dean " is one of these nonconformists. 



Pangdean is a hamlet situated in that very forbidding 

 spot where the downs are at their baldest, and where 

 the chalk-heaps turned up in the making of the 

 Brighton Railway call aloud for the agricultural 

 equivalent of Tatcho and its rivals. It is little more 

 than an unkempt farm and a roadside pond of dirty 

 water where acrobatic ducks perform astonishing 

 feats of agility, standing on their heads and exhibiting 

 their posteriors in the manner of their kind. But 

 within sight, down the stretch of road, is Patcham, 

 and beyond it the hamlet of Withdean, more conform- 

 able. 



Why Patcham is not nominally, as it is actually 

 in form and everv other circumstance, a " dean ' is 

 not clear. There it lies in the vale, just as a dean 

 should and does do ; with sheltering ridges about it, 

 and in the hollow the church, the cottages, and the 

 woodlands. Very noble woodlands, too : tall elms 

 with clanging rookeries, and, nestling below them, an 

 old toll-house. 



Not so very old a toll-house, for it was the successor 

 of Preston turnpike-gate which, erected on the out- 

 skirts of Brighton town about 1807, was removed north 

 of Withdean in 1854, as the result of an agitation set 

 afoot in 1853, when the Highway Trustees were 

 applying to Parliament for another term of years. 

 It and its legend " NO TRUST," painted large for all 

 the world to see, and hateful in a world that has ever 

 preferred credit, were a nuisance and a gratuitous 

 satire upon human nature. No one regretted them 

 when their time came, December 31st, 1878 ; least of 

 all the early cyclists, who had the luxury of paying 



