Ore is a scattered parish: neither good town nor decent country. The road passes the Hastings cemetery and the isolated suburb of St. Helen’s Down, and comes to the enclosing wall and gates of Coghurst Park, where an elaborately sculptured coat of arms, surmounted by the crest of a hare and hound, looks down with contempt upon the poor specimens of houses that have sprung up opposite.
And then you come to Ore itself, that used to be, not so very long ago, a pleasant place—half village, half suburb. It is now a good deal more like a slum, and the incursion of the electric tramways has not improved it. The tram-lines are to be avoided by bearing to the right, down the long and steeply descending Harold Road, which, like too many of the modern developments of Hastings, is a road of mean and paltry houses, built cheaply and faced with stucco that seems to have been made of dirt, rather than of honest materials. There is a woeful “respectability” about these roads that desolates the stranger. He sees it clinging, ineffectual on insufficient means, to the bayed windows and to the doors, painted and grained to resemble good woods, that will insist upon warping. It resides in the long flights of steps up to those doors, and is on outpost duty at the little brick entrance-piers, too flimsy to hold up the not very great weight of the iron gates that scream dismally on their hinges.
The Old London Road, however, continues down through Halton, and, although it does not get rid of the tram-lines, comes, at the beginning of Hastings, to a very pleasant hollow where the old elms still make an avenue introductory to the town.
This is the most striking part of that valley between the east and west hills in which the Old Town of Hastings lies. It was in the coaching days a supremely beautiful entrance to the town, and travellers of that time never tired of praising it. In front of them, in the V-like cleft, sparkled the sea, with the trees surrounding the hoary red-capped roof of All Saints’ in the foreground, and on either side steep grassy slopes, as yet but thinly built upon. On the left-hand rose the Minnis Rock (“Minnis” is Cantise for a rough, stony common), a stony outcrop on the hillside that was the site of a hermitage until about 1436, when the “new church of All Saints’ of Hastynges” was built, and gave the death-blow to the hermits who had lived there upon the charity of passers-by. The Rock is there to this day, and the rough chambers in it, but they are choked with rubbish. The last occupants were very much post-Reformation anchorites. They were an old couple who left the local workhouse in 1783, and, in a secular way, subsisted upon alms which the original hermits received for religion’s sake.
THE OLD LONDON ROAD.
The modern terrace of High Wickham crowns the Minnis heights at this day, and great masses of houses have encroached upon the natural beauty of the scene; but still there is a very special charm in it.
It is the old town you see there before you, for whose sake we have come these last three miles by the Old London Road: the only Hastings there was, until the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The site selected for the town was sheltered, as the traveller viewing it from this point may see. It lay in the deep and not very broad ravine between the East and West Hills, and while the one protected it from the winds of one quarter, the other served the like office in the opposite direction. And through the centuries, the Castle crowning the West Hill kept watch and ward over it against other foes. There you see the few shattered walls of it, against the sky-line, and down in the hollow St. Clement’s, the mother-church of Hastings.