Sussex Gorse: The Story of a Fight

SUSSEX GORSE
THE TRAMPING METHODIST STARBRACE SPELL LAND ISLE OF THORNS THREE AGAINST THE WORLD
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
WILLOW'S FORGE AND OTHER POEMS
THE STORY OF A FIGHT
SHEILA KAYE-SMITH
NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXVI

SUSSEX GORSE
Boarzell Fair had been held every year on Boarzell Moor for as long as the oldest in Peasmarsh could remember. The last Thursday in October was the date, just when the woods were crumpling into brown, and fogs blurred the wavy sunsets.
The Moor was on the eastern edge of the parish, five miles from Rye. Heaving suddenly swart out of the green water-meadows by Socknersh, it piled itself towards the sunrise, dipping to Leasan House. It was hummocked and tussocked with coarse grass—here and there a spread of heather, growing, like all southern heather, almost arboreally. In places the naked soil gaped in sores made by coney-warrens or uprooted bushes. Stones and roots, sharn, shards, and lumps of marl, mixed themselves into the wealden clay, which oozed in red streaks of potential fruitfulness through their sterility.