Sixty years ago the Red Legged Crow, or Cornish Chough—Pyrrhocorax graculus—was common here, though now the species is nearly or quite extinct all along our southern shores. A man, now between sixty and seventy years of age, who has been in the constant habit of going nearly all his life, to Beachy Head to catch prawns for a livelihood, says that he remembers the Red-billed Daw perfectly well, and that the last he saw there, was fifty-three or fifty-four years ago, and that he recollects to this day the precise spot where he saw them. There were seven in company, and he describes their flight to be a succession of jerks, or in the manner of a Dishwasher, which is very peculiar. It was ninety years ago that Gilbert White, of Selborne, recorded the fact of their abounding at Beachy Head and all along the cliffs of the Sussex Coast.
A little to the westward of the highest part of the cliffs, upon a projecting portion, called Beltout, stands Beachy Head lighthouse, a very handsome and solid structure, built entirely of granite. It is supposed that it will last till the solid chalk cliff washes away from under it. It stands about thirty yards from the edge of the perpendicular cliff, which is here about one hundred and forty yards high, with the sea at highwater washing its base. It has a revolving light of three sides, with ten argand lamps in each with highly polished reflectors, kept in motion by machinery wound up like a clock, two or three times in a night. It is managed by two light-keepers, whose duty is to keep the lamps burning and revolving from sunset to sunrise, all the year round. It has no doubt been the means of saving numerous vessels from being lost upon that once very dangerous part of the Sussex coast.
At the foot of the cliff, nearly under the Lighthouse, is a cave called “Darby’s Hole,” said to have been cut out more than a hundred years ago, by a clergyman of that name living at East Dean, a little village about a mile-and-a-half off, for the philanthropic purpose of saving the lives of shipwrecked sailors; and it is handed down as a fact that he had the pleasure at one time of saving nearly a dozen poor men from a watery grave. Formerly, hardly a winter passed without three or four wrecks occurring, which proved a great assistance to the poor villagers of East Dean. A laughable story is told of a wreck happening a great many years ago, on a Sunday morning whilst most of the villagers were in church, when a man wishing to inform some of his friends there of the circumstance, quietly slipped in for that purpose, and it was soon whispered from one to another that there was “a wreck,” and they so kept going out one after the other that the church got considerably thinned. The clergyman seeing that he was likely to be left nearly alone, and suspecting the cause, he in a loud audible voice said, “If there is a wreck, say so, and let’s all start fair.”—The story goes that the news of the wreck was rather a hoax than otherwise, as the fact of “a four-mast vessel laden with wool and tallow ashore,” proved to be nothing other than the carcase of a South-down sheep washed up by the tide.
The lighthouse has a very pleasing effect when viewed by night from the sea, and on a fine summer’s evening, parties frequently make excursions from Eastbourne and other places to visit it. Being situate on the South Downs the walk to it is most delightful, the turf being so very fine, that it may be compared to a Turkey carpet, and in July and August the air is highly fragrant with wild aromatic herbs, thyme, &c. At the same time of the year great quantities of those delicious birds, Wheatears—Sylvia œnanthe,—arrive, and are scattered over the extensive Downs in vast numbers, but not in flocks, as they are almost invariably seen singly. It is a great perquisite to the shepherds to catch them, which they do by cutting out lines of traps in the turf in the form of a T, and inverting the turf over a couple of horse-hair nooses. Pennant states, that in his time the numbers snared about Eastbourne amounted annually to about one thousand eight hundred and forty dozen. They are called the English Ortolan, from their being so fat and plump and of such a delicious flavour. They are a great delicacy potted. They are, however, gradually lessening in numbers, year after year, so that it hardly pays the shepherds now, for their time and trouble to get their traps ready.
Along the whole range of the South Downs the Wheatear has its haunts, especially about the vicinity of the Devil’s Dyke, which is a place of general rendezvous for sportsmen and pleasure-seekers. It was formerly known as the Poor Man’s Wall, and even now, in its deep trenches, exhibits the form and extent of a Roman encampment.
About five-and-forty years ago, in consequence of the large extent of company that frequented the spot in summer-time, to view the vast expanse of country which the site commands, Mr. Sharp, a confectioner, then carrying on his business in North Street, on the spot now occupied by the premises of Mr. Abrahams, outfitter, conceived the idea of establishing a place for refreshment near the summit of the hill, and for that purpose hired a piece of ground north of the high vallum which runs westward from the top of the Dyke to the brow of the hill. Thither he conveyed a wooden house that had been used as a bacon shop by a man named Smith. It formerly stood upon wooden wheels opposite the shop of Mr. Hyam Lewis, silversmith, in Ship Street Lane, now the upper end of Ship Street; but it at present forms a dwelling place, under the hill, by the turnpike road to Fulking, at the base of the Devil’s Punch Bowl, close by the village of Poynings.
The person who first superintended the Dyke establishment was Mr. Russell, who was succeeded by Mr. Thomas Sturt. His successor was Mr. Thomas King, familiarly then and now known as “Tommy King,” whose refreshing beverages and exhilirating fiddling gave him a far and near notoriety. The premises were only occupied and opened during the Summer season, from May to October; and although stabling and other accommodation were constructed, in a few years the public requirements induced the erection of the present building, the Dyke House, by Mr. Hardwick, and it has successively passed from King to Mr. Edwards, of Horsham, the tenant who obtained the spirit license; Mr. Ade, of Huntingdon; Mr. William Cooper, of Brighton; Mr. Peter Barkshire, now of Patcham; to its present occupier, Mr. William Thacker, who has been landlord of the house, and tenant of the farm attached twenty-seven years, during which period he has received the royal patronage of William IV. and Her present Majesty and the late Prince Consort. The house has also been the resort of many illustrious foreign visitors, amongst whom may be named Prince Metternich and Count Nesselrode.
The most notorious character who took up his abode here, was Azimullah Khan, the great promoter of the Mutiny in India. He was a resident in Brighton during the Spring and Summer of 1846; but towards the latter end of the Autumn of that year, by the alleged advice of his physician, he, for three weeks, had apartments at the Dyke House; and during that time he was constantly receiving and sending off Indian overland messengers with enormous despatches, without doubt having reference to that shocking revolt which will for ever remain an odious blot upon the history of our East Indian dominions. Azimullah was the Prime Minister of the arch fiend, Nana Sahib; and though it might be saying too much in declaring that the plan of the insurrection was decided upon at the Dyke House, there is little doubt that the first copy of the proclamation was prepared there. Lieutenant Delafosse, one of the few survivors of the Cawnpore massacre, on his return to England visited the Dyke, and there assured Mr Thacker that he saw Azimullah on the river bank at Cawnpore, in the company of Nana Sahib, waving his sword when the guns were discharging their murderous balls into the boats which contained the defenceless victims.
The steep sides of the Dyke have been the scenes of numerous accidents, from persons having the temerity to run down them. Some daring feats of riding and driving have also been exhibited here. The most memorable and daring act was that of Tom Poole, who, for the wager of a champagne dinner for twelve, drove a tandem down the most abrupt part. It was most cleverly accomplished, without the least accident; but that he might not be disappointed in participating in the wagered repast,—in the event of the loss of life or limb in the performance of the exploit,—he insisted upon having the dinner before he undertook his task. Many other dare-devil tricks have been attempted here; and perhaps the most remarkable is that related in what is familiarly known as the
LEGEND OF THE DEVIL’S DYKE.
“Once upon a time, at the period of yore, in the days of mistletoe and harvest-homing, when our country merited the title of ‘merrie England,’ there was to be found on the edge of the South Downs, opposite the pleasant little village of Poynings, in Sussex, a humble hostel, or village Inn, yclept ‘The Jolly Shepherd,’ kept by one Dame Margery, who, in her younger days, had followed the camp, but had long since retired upon her reputation as a trooper’s widow. The accommodations of the ‘Jolly Shepherd’ would be held in slight repute in modern days, but in the time of which we are speaking they were reckoned all-sufficient, although consisting chiefly of a warm seat by a cheerful fire, fresh eggs and bacon, and good honest home-brewed ale; and accordingly some half-dozen rustic customers were seated round the widow’s hearth, to escape the cutting blast of the Downs without, and commemorate the eve of Holy Saint John, within. Suddenly the song and the tale of the party were interrupted by a most mysterious knocking at the door, and a shrill, querulous voice demanding instant admittance. The active old hostess hastened to obey, but made a kind of a jump, step, and hop backward, on beholding the unusual appearance of the new arrival, exclaiming, ‘Lord preserve us! what is it?’ ‘A gentleman from below,’ replied a little, decrepid, wizened old man,
Whose coat was red, whose breeches were blue,
With a little hole where a tail came through.He glided into the room and crept along by the wall, with the most infernal ceremony and politeness, to the inner recess of the chimney corner, without having once shown his back to his hostess or any of the good company there assembled, and quickly finding himself comfortably seated, the queer little old gentleman produced a blackened ‘Dudeen’ and a velvet tobacco pouch, but somehow or other the clouds of smoke he emitted were so pervaded with the smell of brimstone and bitumen, that the rest of the guests did nothing but sneeze and knock their heads together in a regular hob-and-nob fashion. To stop this nuisance, the worthy hostess placed before her mysterious guest a frizzing hot dish of eggs and bacon, but upon tasting the same, he expressed his dissatisfaction, declaring it was as cold as charity, and demanding ‘more pepper.’ He, upon receiving it, emptied the contents of the pepper-box over the dish, and having thus formed a regular pate au diable, he swallowed it down with considerable apparent relish. With the ale it was pretty much the same; the hostess first mulled it, but her refractory guest declared it was as cold as ice; then she boiled it with a vast quantity of ginger, but with little better success, and it could only be brought to suit his fiery palate by being stirred up, when boiling, with a red hot poker. These strange proceedings of the mysterious visitor mightily astonished the rest of the guests, their faces becoming much elongated; and after staring at each other in stupified bewilderment, they stealthily took to their homes, exclaiming, ‘Did you ever see the Devil?’ The whole of the company had departed long ere the cause of their uneasiness left his chimney corner and glided to his sleeping apartment, which he managed to do in the same mysterious manner as he had entered the house, never once removing his back from the wall. About three o’clock in the morning, our worthy hostess of ‘The Jolly Shepherd’ was awakened from her balmy slumbers, by a strange thumping, bumping kind of noise just under her window, seeming to resemble the hubbub made by a shoal of whales or other such lumbering monsters, who had quitted the ocean deep, and taken to wallowing and gambolling along the Downs by way of pastime. The trooper’s widow possessed a bold heart, and, added thereto, she had a woman’s curiosity, which induced her to creep out of bed, and cautiously to take a peep at what was going on. She was amazed? She did not behold half a dozen Leviathans having a game at leap-frog, nor the like number of griffins playing at snap-dragon. No, no, nothing of that sort; but the queer little old gentleman aforesaid, mounted on a pair of lofty stilts, with a huge spade in his hand, was digging away at the edge of the ancient Roman encampment, like the very ‘old-un,’ shovelling out the chalk and flint stones by waggon loads, and his tail whisking about like a serpent in fits. The bold hostess did not hail him to stop his digging. Not she, good honest soul, as she was desirous of seeing a little clearer what he was about, before giving any alarm; so she quickly struck a light, and lest the candle should alarm her ancient guest, she caught up something to put before it, and this something fortunately happened to be a sieve. Suddenly the old gentleman ceased working, looked up at the window, and when he saw the candle behind the seive, surmounted by the old woman’s night cap, he exclaimed ‘Oh! Beelzebub, the rising sun,’ and folding his stilts across to form a spindle, he ducked his head forward and rolling himself into a ball like a hedgehog, he went bounding along the Downs with fearful rapidity. The Right Rev. Rector of Poynings had been to a jolly christening, had made a wet night of it, and was endeavouring to navigate his road homewards, when he saw a sort of galvanized harlequin whirling and tumbling along straight towards him. The Rev. Rector stopped short; when, just on passing, a sharp pointed sting was protruded from the rolling mass; and having slightly touched his Reverence’s great toe, the whole ball exhaled, evaporated and vanished—exit in fumo. The parish duties of Poynings were performed by the Curate for the next three months; the doctor said his Reverence was laid up with the gout, but the Rector himself maintained it was the Devil. The question has ever since been, what could induce this queer old gentleman to set to work and dig away in such an outlandish fashion? Some old gossips say that his evil intention was to let in the salt sea, and flood all this most beautiful valley of pleasant Sussex. Be that as it may, one fact is worth noting, that the hostelry of ‘The Jolly Shepherd,’ from that period ceased its existence, and never, in the village of Poynings, since that night, when his Satanic Majesty was foiled, has a license been held by any person again to ‘sell spirits.’”