Sir,—­I have made two extracts from a once popular, but now forgotten work, illustrative of the iron manufacture which, within the last hundred years, had its main seat in this county, which I think may be interesting to many of your readers who may have seen the review of Mr. Lower’s Essay on the Ironworks of Sussex in the recent numbers of the Athenaeum and Gentleman’s Magazine.  The anecdote at the close is curious, as confirming the statements of Macaulay; the roads in Sussex in the 18th century being much in the condition of the roads in England generally in the 17th.  “Sowsexe,” according to the old proverb, has always been “full of dirt and mier.”

“From hence (Eastbourne) it was that, turning north, and traversing the deep, dirty, but rich part of these two counties (Kent and Sussex), I had the curiosity to see the great foundries, or ironworks, which are in this county (Sussex), and where they are carried on at such a prodigious expense of wood, that even in a county almost all overrun with timber, they begin to complain of their consuming it for those furnaces and leaving the next age to want timber for building their navies.  I must own, however, that I found that complaint perfectly groundless, the three counties of Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire (all which lye contiguous to one another), being one inexhaustible storehouse of timber, never to be destroyed, but by a general conflagration, and able, at this time, to supply timber to rebuild all the royal navies in Europe, if they were all to be destroyed, and set about the building them together.

    “I left Tunbridge ... and came to Lewes, through the
    deepest, dirtiest, but many ways the richest and most profitable
    country in all that part of England. {88}

“The timber I saw here was prodigious, as well in quantity as in bigness, and seem’d in some places to be suffered to grow only because it was so far off of any navigation, that it was not worth cutting down and carrying away; in dry summers, indeed a great deal is carried away to Maidstone and other parts on the Medway; and sometimes I have seen one tree on a carriage, which they call here a tug, drawn by two-and-twenty oxen, and even then this carried so little a way, and then thrown down and left for other tugs to take up and carry on, that sometimes it is two or three years before it gets to Chatham; for if once the rains come in it stirs no more that year, and sometimes a whole summer is not dry enough to make the roads passable.  Here I had a sight which, indeed, I never saw in any other part of England, namely, that going to church at a country village, not far from Lewes, I saw an ancient lady, and a lady of very good quality, I assure you, drawn to church in her coach with six oxen; nor was it done in frolic or humour, but mere necessity, the way being so stiff and deep that no horses could go in it.”—­A Tour through Great Britain by a Gentleman.  London, 1724.  Vol. i. p. 54.  Letter II.

Factotum