HISTORY AND THE PARISH 149 



woods uninterrupted and all but impenetrable to the eye 

 above or below except where once or twice it looks 

 through an arrow slit to the blue vale and the castled 

 promontory of Chanctonbury twenty miles south-east. As 

 the road is a mere ledge on the side of a very steep hill 

 the woods below it hurry down to a precipitous pit full 

 of the glimmering, trembling and murmuring of innumer- 

 able leaves and no sight or sound of men. It is said to 

 have been made more than half a century ago to take the 

 place of the rash straight coach road which now enters it 

 near its base. A deeply-worn, narrow and disused track 

 joining it more than half-way down suggests that the 

 lower part was made by the widening of an old road; but 

 much of the upper half is new. Certainly the road as it 

 now is, broad and gently bending round the steep coombe, 

 is new, and it was made at the expense of the last of a 

 family which had long owned the manor house near the 

 entrance of the coombe. His were all the hanging beech 

 woods — huge as the sky — upon the hill, and through them 

 the road-makers conducted this noble and pleasant way. 

 But near the top they deviated by a few yards into an- 

 other estate. The owner would not give way. A lawsuit 

 was begun, and it was not over when the day came for 

 the road to be open for traffic according to the contract or, 

 if not, to pass out of the defaulter's hands. The day 

 passed; the contract was broken; the speculation had 

 failed, and the tolls would never fill the pockets of the 

 lord of the manor. He was ruined, and left his long 

 white house by the rivulet and its chain of pools, his 

 farms and cottages, his high fruit walls, his uncounted 

 beeches, the home of a hundred owls, his Spanish chest- 

 nuts above the rocky lane, his horse-chestnut and sycamore 



