The Quest for England
Smuggling was rife in Sussex during the 17th & 18th centuries. Many ordinary folk were in league with the ‘Owlers’, the men who went out at night and brought stuff in from the coast. When a man is flung from the top a cliff things start to go wrong for a Sussex gang. Something has […]
I am on the search for a mystical hound – the black dog that supposedly roams Titnore Lane north of Goring-by-Sea in West Sussex. Back in the 12th and 13th centuries, this canine ethereal spectre is purported to have hunted for babies and small children and eaten them. Is it just a myth? Could such […]
Richard Suggett and I are in Crossbush, West Sussex. We’ve tipped off there have been fairy sightings here and we’d like to spot one for ourselves. An unknown sailor is said to have returned from the Battle of Waterloo. Shell shocked and mentally disturbed he claims to see fairies all around him. Are the two […]
‘They whipped him to within an inch of his life,’ is how the story opens in Tales of Olde Sussex by Phillip Mercer. In this fireside yarn, I recount the terrible dead that befell a small scale farmer living near Balcombe in the Ouse Valley, in West Sussex around 1730. It is the story of […]
Do Griffins exist? Is it possible that one was brought back from Egypt and kept near Wiston in West Sussex only to escape sometime later into near by woodland? These are the question posed the author of a pre-Victorian book about legends of Sussex, and I am also asking the questions as I stalk in […]
In 1834 Phillip Mercer, curate, published a book. ‘Tales of Olde Sussex’; a collection of stories given to him by his parishioners. How true they are is anybodies guess. I am on the trail of Sarah Penny, the lady of the lamp that supposedly haunted the lanes near Thakeham in West Sussex. When Thomas Mills, […]