[Illustration:  ALFRISTON CHURCH.]

Berwick is a scattered village on the western slopes of the Cuckmere valley; the Early English church is embowered in trees on a spur of the Downs; there is a fine canopied tomb in the chancel, an old screen and an uncommon type of font built in the wall.  Note the eloquent epitaph to a former rector.

Half a mile farther is a turning on the right that passes Winton Street, where, a few years ago, there was a rich find of Anglo-Saxon antiquities.  In two miles this byway reaches Alfriston. ("All-friston.”) The church has a very common legend associated with it; the foundations are said to have been again and again removed by supernatural agency from another site to the spot where the solemn and stately old building now stands.  It is a Perpendicular cruciform church and has an Easter sepulchre and three sedilia.  The register is said to be the oldest in England, its first entry bearing the date of 1512.  “A few years since as many as seventy ‘virgins’ garlands’ hung in Alfriston Church at once” (Hare).  Close by is a delightful pre-Reformation clergy house.  Antiquaries are perhaps as concerned with the “Star” Inn, one of the most interesting in the south of England and dating from about 1490.  The front of the house is covered with quaint carvings including St. George and the Dragon, a bear and ragged staff and what appears to be a lion.  On each side of the doorway arc mitred saints conjectured to represent St. Julian and St. Giles.  The inn is reputed to have been a place of sanctuary under Battle Abbey; it stands within the abbot’s manor of Alciston and was undoubtedly the recognized hostel for pilgrims and mendicant friars.  Another old inn, once a noted house of call for smugglers, is Market Cross House, opposite all that remains of the Cross, a mutilated and battered stump, and the only example, except that at Chichester, in the county.

[Illustration:  ALFRISTON.]

Alfriston once had a race week, the course being on the side of Firle Beacon; in those days the resident population was probably greater than it is now.  Not only were more souls crowded into the old houses still standing in the village street but tradition tells that the place was larger and more suited to its spacious old church which is now barely half filled on an ordinary Sunday.

A footpath may be taken over the Cuckmere and up the hill beyond to the little dependency of Lullington.  The church calls itself the smallest in Sussex but this depends upon what constitutes a church.  The existing building is actually the chancel of a former church, perhaps another proof of a dwindling population.

[Illustration:  LULLINGTON CHURCH.]