The traveller in Downland is advised for once to turn his back on the hills and walk as far as the summit of the Haslemere road where the new route turns sharp round to the left and hugs the escarpment of Bexley Hill.  In front will be seen an overgrown track, the old highway, plunging down the face of the hill.  A few feet down this causeway, paved with large slabs of stone, brings us to a surprising hamlet clinging to the hillside and, with its “Duke of Cumberland” Inn, looking across the wide Fernhurst vale to where Blackdown lords it on the other side.

[Illustration:  MIDHURST CHURCH.]

At Easebourne, about a mile north-east of Midhurst, is a Benedictine Priory used, until quite lately, as a farmhouse.  It is close to the church, which, with the buildings of the nunnery, form three sides of a hollow square.  The restoration has been carried out with taste and care and the whole is worth seeing.  The nuns of Easebourne would seem to have been “difficult females,” for a Bishop of Chichester in 1441 was obliged to call the Prioress to order for wearing sumptuous clothes with fur trimmings and for using too many horses when travelling, the penance being a restriction to four.  The nuns were spoken of by a contemporary writer as “wild females of high family put at Easebourne to keep them quiet.”

The church, besides the tomb of the first Viscount Montague, removed from Midhurst, contains a figure of Sir David Owen (1540); also a Transitional font.

CHAPTER VIII

GOODWOOD AND BOGNOR

We now leave the Rother, turn south by the Chichester road and passing over Cocking causeway reach, in three miles, that little village at the foot of the pass through the Downs to Singleton, or better still, by taking a rather longer route through West Lavington we may see the church in which Manning preached his last sermon as a member of the Anglican communion.  The church and accompanying buildings date from 1850 and were designed by Butterfield; they are a good example of nineteenth-century Gothic and are placed in a fine situation.  In the churchyard, which is particularly well arranged, lies Richard Cobden not far from the farmhouse in which he was born.  Dunford House is not far away; this was presented to Cobden by the Anti-Corn-Law League, and here the last years of his life were spent.

Cocking once had a cell belonging to the Abbey of Seez in Normandy but of this nothing remains.  This beautifully situated little place has a primitive Norman church with a fine canopied tomb and an old painting of Angel and shepherds.  We are now at the foot of Charlton Forest covering the slopes of the Downs which stretch eastwards to Duncton Beacon; and along the edge of this escarpment it is proposed to travel.  This is one of the loneliest and most beautiful sections of the range.

“A curious phenomenon is observable in this neighbourhood.  From the leafy recesses of the layers of beech on the escarpment of the Downs, there rises in unsettled weather a mist which rolls among the trees like the smoke out of a chimney.  This exhalation is called ‘Foxes-brewings’ whatever that may mean, and if it tends westwards towards Cocking, rain follows speedily.” (Lower.)