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BRIGHTON 201 |
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By the Ladies' Mile is a delightful riding track over the Down turf to the upper gate of Stanmer Park (p. 223). A little to the south, near the almost disused Brighton and Ditchling road, in a district now consecrated to golf, is Hollingbury, where is a very well-preserved oval camp containing an area of over seven acres and belonging apparently to the Bronze Age, many of whose implements were found there by Professor Boyd Dawkins. Close to the Brighton Racecourse is the largely obliterated White Hawk Camp, whose mound was doubled on the exposed sides.
Due south, on the beginning of the chalk cKffs, is Kemp Town, the eastern part of Brighton, founded 1821-30 by T. R. Kemp, of Ovingdean. The best known of the family, Charles Earner Kempe, famous for his stained glass, is buried in the family vault at Ovingdean, but his own home was at Lindfield, where he built a magnificent mansion in the Elizabethan style. He was an extremely interesting man, and an enthusiastic admirer of days gone by, carrying this feeling so far as frequently to come down to dinner in knee breeches and silk stockings, the sort of costume that a Tudor courtier might have worn. The cliffs below Kemp Town were faced with masonry in 1838, and winter gardens have been provided extending to the Aquarium. Just beyond the town, at Black Rock, is a splendid section of the dirty-looking, chalky conglomerate full of stones called the Coombe Rock or Brighton Elephant Beds, from the fossils of bones and teeth it contains. It rests on a raised beach of water-worn flints with boulders of chalk and other rocks. The solid chalk below forms the floor of the beach for some distance ; it is full of little holes, in whose salt water |
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