The Brighton road : the classic highway to the south . resent places it is a wayside pool ; in others a hollow,grown thickly with trees, with tree-roots, gnarled andfanglike, clutching in desperate hold its crumblingbanks. The older rustics know it, if the younger andthe passing stranger do not : they tell you tis wheerth owd hroad tarned arff. XXVI The pleasant old town of Cuckfield stands on norailway, and has no manufactures or industries of anykind ; and since the locomotive ran the coaches offthe road has been a veritable Sleepy Hollow. It wasnot always thus, for in those centurie
The Brighton road : the classic highway to the south . resent places it is a wayside pool ; in others a hollow,grown thickly with trees, with tree-roots, gnarled andfanglike, clutching in desperate hold its crumblingbanks. The older rustics know it, if the younger andthe passing stranger do not : they tell you tis wheerth owd hroad tarned arff. XXVI The pleasant old town of Cuckfield stands on norailway, and has no manufactures or industries of anykind ; and since the locomotive ran the coaches offthe road has been a veritable Sleepy Hollow. It wasnot always thus, for in those centuries—from thefourteenth until the early part of the eighteenth—when the beds of Sussex iron-ore were worked andsmelted on the spot, the neighbourhood of Cuckfieldwas a Black Country, given over to the manufactureof ironware, from cannon to firebacks. All this was so long ago that nature has healed thescars made by that busy time. Wooded hills replacethe uplands made bare by the smelters, the cinder-heaps and mounds of slag are hidden under pastures,. CUCKFIELD 205 the hammer-ponds of the smelteries and foundrieshave become the resorts of artists seeking thepicturesque, and the descendants of the old iron-masters, the Burrells and the Sergisons, have forgenerations past been numbered among the countyfamilies. Cuckfield very narrowly escaped being directlyon the route of the Brighton railway, but it pleasedthe engineers to bring their line no nearer than Hay-wards Heath, some two miles distant. They built astation there, on the lone heath, for Cuckfield,with the result, sixty years later, that the sometimesolitude is a town and still growing, while Cuckfielddeclines. Haywards Heath, curiously enough, is,or was until December, 1894, in the parish of Cuckfield,but the time is at hand when the two will be joinedby the spread of that railway upstart ; and then willbe the psychological moment for abolishing the nameof Haywards Heath—which is a shocking stumbling-block for the aitch
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjecthorses, bookyear1922
