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.
CUCKFIELD, 1789.
From an aquatint after Rowlandson.
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, the “hammer-ponds” of the smelteries and foundries have become the resorts of artists seeking the picturesque, and the descendants of the old iron-masters, the Burrells and the Sergisons, have for generations past been numbered among the county families.
CUCKFIELD
Cuckfield very narrowly escaped being directly on the route of the Brighton railway, but it pleased the engineers to bring their line no nearer than Hayward’s Heath, some two miles distant. They built a station there, on the lone heath, “for Cuckfield,” with the result, sixty years later, that the sometime solitude is a town and still growing, while Cuckfield declines. Hayward’s 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 joined by the spread of that railway upstart; and then will be the psychological moment for abolishing the name of Hayward’s Heath—which is a shocking stumbling-block for the aitchless—and adopting that of the parental “Cookfield.”