Visitors' Historic Britain: East Sussex, Brighton & Hove: Stone Age to Cold War

By Kevin Newman

Many writers have written about the delights of the former kingdom of the South Saxons, its Downs, villages, countryside, people and their ways but Visitors' Historic Britain is the first series of books to take readers on a tour of discovery of each of the county's historic eras in turn.

Visitors’ Historic Britain - East Sussex follows its West Sussex predecessor and starts with the prehistoric era. We explore East Sussex from west to east, investigating both little-known and well-visited sites that tell the story of our ancestors' past. We encounter wild warriors, formidable founders of the county, indefatigable industrialists, excitable eccentrics whilst investigating the lives of Sussex and invaders and inhabitants.

Sussex is a country celebrated by writers, painters, royalty, artists and the millions who have enjoyed its changing coastline and verdant villages. Visitors' Historic Britain – East Sussex provides a unique series of journeys for those who are inquisitive about this quirky and history-changing part of the South-East.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Jul 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526703392

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Ancient Sussex

Visitors’ Historic Britain aims to take you to places, where, like the ‘Battleground Europe’ series Pen & Sword publish, historic events have taken place. With our first chapter on Ancient Sussex, this has, of course, not always been possible, and so the discovery of these sites may have to suffice as the event in question.

In terms of the millions of years that there has been land on this part of the earth’s surface that we now call Britain, only recently did we become an island. Land we live on today was connected by land to the Continent through the Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age 450,000–10,000

BC

) or the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age 10,000–4,500

BC

). Both eras have provided evidence of flint use. Around 7–8,000 years ago, towards the end of the Mesolithic Age, the river that would have been slowly widening, rising and encroaching along what is now the middle of the English Channel would have reached the Straits of Dover and joined with what is now the North Sea. Migrants that were now sailing to cross this new stretch of water by the Neolithic (New Stone Age 4,500

BC

–2,300

BC

) had now developed agriculture as a way of life and had stopped being nomadic huntergatherers. As a south-eastern area of England, the earliest migrants who crossed the land where the English Channel now flows would have reached this tip of the country first. Then, as today, here and Kent is where this new watery barrier was shortest. Therefore, it is not surprising that Sussex has some of the earliest evidence of human existence in the country. We mustn’t forget that at one point the sea encroached much further inland than it does today, in the Palaeolithic era, with proof in the ancient chalk cliff which existed inland from Chichester at Funtingdon easterly to Arundel. Available evidence of human existence increases as we travel through the subsequent Bronze and Iron Ages and into the Roman and increasing finds over the years seem to provide us with not just more answers, but greater respect for the skills, culture and ability of our ancestors.

The earliest evidence of life discovered in Sussex was not of human life, but that of the dinosaurs much earlier. I am being naughty here and we shouldn’t really feature this era because ‘history’ is technically the era when humans communicated with writing, whereas before that, where we need to rely on archaeology, is termed ‘prehistory’. I am including dinosaur sites in East Sussex for two reasons though. First, I want people to explore Sussex’s past in general and second, East Sussex has such a plethora of places where dino-remains have been found, some by East Sussex’s Dr Gideon Mantell, whose discoveries in the county are historical events in themselves. For the die-hard dino-fan you could start your tour in Lewes High Street at the home of Mantell, who lived in a house designed by premier Lewes and Brighton architect Amon Wilds. Mantell is the ‘Daddy of dinosaur finds’, but his most famous find was in West Sussex (see below), so for East Sussex finds the list of sites to be proud of includes Saltdean and the Seven Sisters, Hailsham, Heathfield, Crowborough and Battle.

We start, though, between Hastings and Pett Level in the east of the county, where dinosaur footprints were discovered, and the first place you can easily visit is the shoreline east of Hastings towards Fairlight. Finds from around 140 million years ago of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and fish have been discovered here as well as evidence of vegetation and other types of life. The walk provides the 100m high, (unusual for Sussex) gold-coloured sandstone cliffs of Hastings Country Park, which were once the site of a large lake or lagoon, from which evidence of both herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs has been found. This has been more in the guise of footprints and casts of dinosaurs rather than bones but they have been found nonetheless, making the Hastings area the only place in the UK you can still find apparently dinosaur bones. Whether or not you manage to discover bones yourself, Sussex still provides an exciting opportunity for hands-on palaeontology on this, if not the Jurassic Coast, then the Cretaceous Coast. If you want an exact spot where prints were found, then Fairlight was the site of twenty-three iguanodon and theropod prints back in 1991–2. Of course, being beneath a crumbling cliff face on a seashore presents dangers, so it would be advisable to book a tour to this site, or other sites of fossil finds such as Peacehaven or Beachy Head shore with experienced groups such as www.discoveringfossils.co.uk. Or you can head inland from Hastings, as north of the town is still dinosaur country – just out of town at William Parker School, the running track was once Old Roar Quarry, named for the noise emanating from the waterfall there. It was also perhaps the site of a different type of roar once, as dino-finds occurred here in the nineteenth century. A number of different quarries were dug nearly all the way up to Battle to provide sand for the expansion of Hastings in Victorian times, and the most northerly of these was Blackhorse Quarry. Here, fossil bones and teeth have been discovered from pterosaurs, a megalosaurus, cetiosaurus, iguanodon, and the non-extinct turtles and crocodiles. A number of these are today in the National History Museum.

A petrified dinosaur brain was discovered in October 2016 in Sussex, which was the first find of its kind. The fossil hunter who found the iguanodon brain thought at first glance it was a brown pebble. The skeleton of what is thought to be one of the world’s smallest dinosaurs was discovered in 2011 at Ashdown Brickworks in Bexhill. The bird-shaped fossil was from a bird between 13in and 16in in length and was discovered by an employee at the brickworks. Should you want a place with a history of dinosaur discoveries which is safer for children, then cross the border to West Sussex’s Southwater Park, which celebrates its dinosaur finds with a dino-theme to its children’s park in the grounds of the former brickworks that is now a public park. West Sussex also has at Whiteman’s Green in Cuckfield, the site of one of the earliest English dinosaur finds, Gideon Mantell’s (or possibly his wife’s) iguanodon find. Should you want the site of a Palaeolithic raised beach, then you can access this at the National Trust’s Slindon Park in West Sussex but returning to East Sussex, a submerged prehistoric forest also exists between Bexhill and Pett Level. A Bronze Age collection of tools was found here, presumably used to work on the oak and hazel forest that grew once where the sea now encroaches.

Moving on to the age of dinosaurs to humans, which is still technically ‘prehistory’, not history, as our earliest ancestors provide no written evidence. With an average lifespan for early Sussex folk of about thirty years for women and thirty-five for men, life was about surviving; scratching and hunting a living. Avoiding malnutrition was a priority, and the suffering of arthritis was your concern, not written communication. The Romans provide our first evidence of writing in this country, and so there is no evidence in terms of oral traditions or naming from the prehistoric Sussex people – most place names, including even the county’s name, are provided by the conquering of the county by the Saxons much later. There are just a few Scandinavian examples of places names such as the ‘Knabb’ and possibly the ‘Steine’ in Brighton, which means ‘stones’ or ‘stoney ground’, and ‘Hove’ itself. Celtic and Romano-British names such as Anderida and Noviomagus Reginorium became Pevensey and Chichester and others were lost. Some Saxon place names such as ‘Streat’ are Saxon references to a settlement built on a Roman road, but again, these are Saxon words. One of the few pre-Roman ‘Celtic’ names to survive is Caburn as in Mount Caburn, which probably originates in ‘Caerbryn’ (castle on the hill). Another is the Celtic ‘dún’, from which we get the ‘Downs’. We do have the word ‘coomb’ or ‘coombe’ as in Combe, Coombes, Telscombe or Moulsecoomb, which survives here both in Sussex and in the Welsh ‘cym’, both referring to a valley. Lavant and Tarrant (the old name for the Adur) are both Celtic, however the name ‘Adur’ (as in the West Sussex river), although tantalizingly similar to the Welsh ‘dŵr’ for water, was only a seventeenth-century invention by those mistakenly believing Shoreham to be the Roman Portus Adurni.

We do have evidence of the tools used by Stone Age men and women though. Cissbury Ring in West Sussex is the largest example of flint mining in Sussex, but Hermitage Rocks in the High Weald is where flint fragments were discovered, and Windover Hill above the Long Man of Wilmington also possessed a flint mine. The biggest discovery of flints was at Selmeston, east of Lewes and Garden Hill Iron Age Fort’s site also has provided evidence of flint use.

For existence of human life apart from names and flint mines, we can journey back in time much further, and across the border into West Sussex. One of the earliest examples of hominids ever found in this country; the first ever ‘man’ to be discovered in Britain was at Eartham Pit, a quarry near Boxgrove east of Chichester. Dating back an unbelievable half-a-million years to the Middle Pleistocene Era (the late Stone Age), the man’s remains were found at the pit in 1993, from excavations starting in the 1980s. East Sussex would have had its own ancient human remains from the Pleistocene Era had the 1912 find of ‘Piltdown Man’ not turned out to be an elaborate hoax, and we shall visit there shortly.

If all the talk of Mesolithic, prehistory and so on is confusing, just remember that human life in Britain (and here in Sussex) dates from the Stone Age, which is prehistory because we don’t have any writing until the arrival of the Romans. Before the Romans’ arrival in

AD

43 we have the Stone Age, Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. We break down the Stone Age into Palaeolithic (‘o’ for oldest), Mesolithic (‘m’ for Middle Stone Age) and Neolithic eras (‘n’ for the newest part of the Stone Age).

If you want to get an idea of what life was like in the Mesolithic era, then the East Sussex Archaeology and Museums Project is the place to start. Back in 2014 they used archaeological evidence to reconstruct a Mesolithic hut, which is now on display at the fantastic Bentley Wildfowl and Motor Museum in Halland (north east of Lewes), probably the only museum in the world guaranteed to keep both birdwatcher and petrolheads happy.

Tour 1: Stone Age Sussex: High Rocks, Groombridge – Piltdown – Belle Tout – Combe Hill – Windover Hill – Caburn – Whitehawk

First though, we start our journey in the far north-east of the county, just outside of Tunbridge Wells and only just in East Sussex. 1. High Rocks near Groombridge is a spectacular place to start our visit to ancient Sussex, which was a Mesolithic and Neolithic settlement with four different shelters. Excavations have discovered holes used for shelter supports, arrowheads, spear barbs and pottery, some of which you can cross the border into Kent to see in the Tunbridge Wells Museum. Later it was an Iron Age fort which used the high rocks of the sandstone outcrop on the north-west side of a hill as part of its defensive features and added a southern rampart on the opposite site, now in the woodland adjacent to the footpath. It was further fortified at the time of the Roman invasion, but seems not to have survived much beyond this as human habitation ceased and vegetation instead took over the site. By the 1700s it was in use again for pleasure and leisure as nearby Tunbridge Wells gained prominence as a spa town and both James II and George IV visited the site. Slightly more active visitors than portly royals were the climbers training to be the first to ascend Everest in the early 1950s. Should you not wish to cross the border into Tunbridge Wells, then you can apparently still reach there according to legend. Bell Rock at the site gets its name because apparently when you hit it, the sound travels across into the nearby Kent spa town.

The area is open to the public (at a charge) except when it gets wet or frosty as it tends to be used by numbers of rock climbers, climbable rock being a novelty here in chalk-dominated Sussex. There are acres of sandstone rocks to explore, all connected by eleven bridges and spectacular views of what is now categorised as a national monument. The High Rocks are run by the complex that runs the High Rocks pub opposite, and it is from the Lower Bar you purchase your tickets. However, be aware the rocks aren’t open on a Monday or Tuesday (except Bank Holidays) and you only get entry for an hour. Neither are you allowed barbeques, picnics or dogs in the site. However, you do have the Spa Valley Steam Railway running through the site, which makes up for this.

Sussex Without Satnav: Brighton and Hove Buses runs the ‘Regency Route’ from Brighton all the way to Tunbridge Wells, but if you want to drive, take the B2100 from Crowborough to the A26 and follow it until you see Broadwater Forest Road on your left. Take this and fork right into Fairview Lane which will take you there.

2. Piltdown Man may have been a fraudulent creation, probably by Lewes-based solicitor and amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, but its story is an historical event of some significance impacting upon over forty years of the twentieth century, and so merits inclusion. The Piltdown hoax was one of the most damaging scientific hoaxes in history; as a result, evolutionary theory suffered lack of progress and misdirection for nearly half a century. Around the world, scientists and researchers worked pointlessly to try to integrate into the chain of fossil development not just one fake composite skull, but the second Piltdown fragments of skull (and a molar tooth), ‘discovered’ in Sheffield Park, less than 2 miles away.

Dawson (1864–1916) seems the main suspect for the putting-together of the medieval skull, orangutan jaw and chimpanzee teeth, which he claimed were a type of unknown early human. This was the ‘missing link’ in the chain of evolution between ape and man; the focus of scientists and anthropologists at that time. He seems the most likely suspect because he was the only person present at all the ‘finds’, and the third brother of two high-achieving siblings. Finds also stopped after his death. His collection, it was later discovered, included a total of at least thirty-eight fakes and he made a number of other similar dubious ‘finds’. These included, just in Sussex, the ‘shadowy figures’ of prisoners on Hastings Castle tunnel walls, the ‘Lewes Prick Spur’, the ‘Uckfield Horseshoe’, the ‘Brighton Toad In The Hole’, the ‘Bulverhythe Hammer’, the ‘Bexhill Boat’, the ‘Pevensey Bricks’, and even a fake flint mine at Lavant. Dawson was also fraudulent in his purchases, claiming that Castle Lodge, the home he purchased in Lewes, was for the Sussex Archaeological Society of which he was a member. It has been claimed that the motivation behind Piltdown for Dawson was that he wanted a knighthood, or enrolment into the Royal Society, which fortunately, in retrospect, he never achieved. What he did achieve though, was the worldwide recognition he sought for his ‘discovery’ in the gravel beds and one-time River Ouse tributary on Piltdown Common at Barkham Manor and today the Manor still has the 1938 memorial to Dawson, erected by his colleagues twenty-two years after his death. Sadly, this plinth is on private land and not available to be visited at present.

Dawson achieved greater recognition posthumously when, in 1953, improved technology proved that the skull was a fake, and since then Piltdown Man has been a reminder to the archaeological, scientific and general academic community for rigour in establishing the authenticity of discoveries. The village of Piltdown, near Uckfield, has tried to move on from the fame and later scandal that engulfed it for most of the twentieth century, even renaming its pub which had once been The Piltdown Man. This attempt to prove the ‘Earliest Englishman’ from the Pleistocene era was from Sussex does have a happy ending though, with Sussex genuinely being the host for half-a-million years to ‘Boxgrove Man’ (the site of which we unfortunately cannot visit), and in that, Sussex has been left with the nearest thing we have to a Jack-the-Ripper-style mystery in trying to discover ‘whodunnit’. Although it is likely to have been Dawson, if it was him, we still have the mystery of what motivated him to pull off the twentieth century’s biggest scam. We don’t know for sure if Dawson worked alone. We have a number of people who could have been linked or involved; made even more exciting by the inclusion of Sussex resident Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who played at Piltdown Golf Course and was also interested in hoaxes. Intriguing clues to suggest his collaboration with Dawson can be found in his novel The Lost World, published the same year as Dawson’s find. In this bestselling novel, the character Tarp Henry from Nature magazine states: ‘If you are clever and know your business you can fake a bone as easily as a photograph.’ The mystery over whether Piltdown Man was real has long been solved (the first doubts were published by Nature magazine as early as 1913), but the mystery over who exactly the perpetrator was or perpetrators were may still be debated in another era from now. It is also amazing that the hoax was covered up for so long, perhaps due to British scientists, wanting to believe in British supremacy. If so, the joke was on them because of course, the jawbone and teeth were proven to be from foreign animals. Perhaps, deliciously, there may even be hoaxes yet to be discovered among the debates over the hoax. After all, one of the authors of texts on the hoax, was none other than Frank