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BEACHY HEAD AND EASTBOURNE 287
of the name he bears. It is a subject that deserves more study than it has received.
Just over Willingdon Hill spreads a valley southward from the Weald into the Downs, and it extends up to the high ridge where Friston stands. In it is Jevington, a very typical Down village whose church tower has windows of Roman brick, thin arches nearly straight-sided, flint in herring-bone, and other marks of pre-Conquest masonry. Saxon, too, is a remarkable rude sculpture representing a figure with scallop-shaped nimbus and a clawed animal below ; the exact subject is in doubt, but the fact that the figure is moustached in the Saxon manner precludes its being of Norman workmanship. The church is otherwise mostly of thirteenth-century character, the arcade having a buttressing arch over the aisle, the chancel with trefoiled lancets being a little later in style. The masonry of the south wall of the nave is rough ashlar of Norman appearance; the nearly semi-circular waggon roof of the nave, with tie-beams and king-posts having capitals and brackets above, was added in the .fifteenth century. The village inn bears the sign of Eight Bells, but in the church there are but two, and the rector suggests that the old peal, like so many others, was perhaps stolen in the plundering days of Henry VIII. or Edward VI. for the iniquitous purpose of debasing the coinage.
Farther north in the valley is the beautiful hamlet of Wannock, remarkable for some fine old timber-framed buildings, plastered between the beams, one of which appears in the photograph opposite p. 286. Just clear of the Downs and on the border of the Weald beyond is |
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