Ditchling is a village and civil parish in the Lewes District of East Sussex, England. The village is contained within the boundaries of the South Downs National Park; the order confirming the establishment of the park was signed in Ditchling. There are two public houses, The Bull and The White Horse; two cafes, The Nutmeg Tree and The Green Welly; a post office, florist, delicatessen and other shops. Ditchling has community groups and societies, including the Ditchling Film Society and the Ditchling Singers.
Ditchling is approximately north of Brighton, northwest of Eastbourne, east-southeast of Hastings, and east of Chichester. The parish had a population of 2,265 at the 2021 census.
Location
The village lies at the foot of the South Downs in East Sussex, but very close to the border with West Sussex. The settlement stands around a crossroads with Brighton and Hove to the south, Burgess Hill and Haywards Heath to the north, Keymer and Hassocks to the west, and Lewes to the east, and is built on a slight spur of land between the Downs to the south and Lodge Hill to the north. Ditchling Beacon, one of the highest points on the South Downs, overlooks the village.
Ditchling Common, north of the village, is the source of the eastern River Adur.Information About River Adur | Canals & Rivers | Waterscape.com
Etymology
The earliest known appearance of the name is Dicelinga in AD 765, and was subsequently known as Dicelingas, Diccelingum, Dyccanlingum, Diceninges, Dicelinges, Digelinges, Dicheninges, Dicheling, Dichelyng, Dechelyng, Dichening(e), Dichyning(e), Digining, Dechenyng, Dichlinge, Dicheling, Dichening, Dychenynge and Dytcheling. The name took its current form in the seventeenth century.
The root itself is uncertain. The Old English word dic - which means "ditch, trench or dike"Wiktionary would appear to be inapplicable as the town sits on a hill. It has been suggested as Dicleah but refuted. Dic may in fact be an example of epenthesis, with the original root being ichen as is found throughout southeastern Britain. Attributions to a non-historical founder named Dicul are examples of founding myths.
The suffix -ing is a cognate of inge, an ethnonym for the Ingaevones said variously to mean "of Yngvi," "family, people or followers of" or a genitive plural form of an inhabitant appellation.
History The place has been inhabited in some way or other for thousands of years. Above the village to the west is Lodge Hill () there is evidence of Mesolithic people in the form of their flint tools.
The terrace of the Roman Greensand Way passes across its south flank. Though damaged in the past, Lodge Hill's sandy pasture has sheep's sorrel and sheep's fescue in similar fashion to Sandy Field at Danny House, which the Roman Road also crosses.
Anglo-Saxon Ditchling The original village embraced both Clayton, Keymer and Wivelsfield. In the starting centuries of the Saxon settlement it was probably the capital of several Sussex 'regio', or microkingdoms, and controlled the area between the Adur and the Ouse. Later it is recorded that the Manor and its lands were held by King Alfred the Great (871–899). Alfred left it in his will to a kinsmen named Osferth, and it reverted to the Crown under Edward the Confessor.
Medieval Ditchling After the Norman Conquest, the land was held by William de Warenne. The Domesday Book of 1086 notes there were 196 households of which 111 were villagers, 69 were smallholders, six were burgesses and ten were slaves; land included meadows and woodland with a total value, including mill and church, of £72. In 1095 there is mention of a manor house, now Wings Place. The land passed through several hands until in 1435 it was owned by the Marquess of Abergavenny who held it until the 20th century, when it was sold to developers who failed to get planning permission to build on it.
Modern Ditchling
In the 18th and 19th centuries the Old Meeting House in Ditchling was an important centre for Baptists from the wider area, whose records and memorandum books allow a unique insight into a small rural religious community of the period. These records (in the East Sussex Record Office) bear witness to often fractious and heated debates about morality and religion.
Post-war Ditchling In the 1960s, Ditchling's tithe barn was dismantled and moved to Loughton, where it now forms the Corbett Theatre on the University of Essex campus there.
In January 2007, Ditchling featured in a five-part BBC Documentary entitled Storyville: A Very English Village. This was filmed, produced and directed by a Ditchling resident, but the series itself came under criticism from local residents.
In the 2017 novel Rabbitman, by Michael Paraskos, the village was the setting for a Catholic Worker anarchist commune in an imagined post-Brexit dystopia.
Landmarks There are two Sites of Special Scientific Interest within the parish of Ditchling. Ditchling Common is of biological interest because of the variety of heath grassland habitats, created by the different drainage conditions throughout the common. The second site is Clayton to Offham Escarpment, which stretches from Hassocks in the west, passing through many parishes including Ditchling, to Lewes in the East. The most famous and highest peak of this escarpment is Ditchling Beacon. This whole scarp site is of biological importance due to its rare chalk grassland habitat.
Notable buildings and areas
Unlike its neighbouring parishes, the natural world in this countryside is much more threatened by development. Much of its natural and historic cultural assets have been minimised in the face of this wave of regional overdevelopment. Ditchling Common is the very best of these assets and still holds an extraordinary assemblage of wildlife which thrive on the damp Weald Clay grasslands.
Ditchling has only retained its historic integrity thanks to the fierce defence by its residents, who have thwarted a bypass scheme and various built developments. Although is oppressed by through traffic, little fields come still close into the heart of the village. At Keymer, the Tileworks Clay Pit is now lost to housing development, but it was once a place where "searchers on hands and knees found the teeth of miniature crocodiles and the scales of swampland fish".
Buildings There are still many fine buildings in Ditchling. To the south of the church, there is a fine Tudor timber framed Wings Place with parts that are older still. There is an old drove going north from Lodge Hill which passes the lovingly restored Oldlands Mill () (just over border in Hassocks Parish), a landmark visible from the Downs ridge top along the South Downs Way.
Religious buildings
Ditchling has a long history of Protestant Nonconformism. The village has four extant places of Christian worship and one former chapel.
St Margaret's Church, founded in the 11th century, is the village's Anglican church. The fabric of the flint and sandstone building is mostly 13th-century, although the nave is original. Its large churchyard has big patches of tiny black earthtongues, which are fungi. In 1740, a chapel (now called The Old Meeting House) was built on the side of a late 17th-century house off East End Lane. It is now used by the Unitarian community and is full of polished woodwork. Emmanuel Chapel, used by an Evangelical congregation, was built in the early 20th century but may have had a predecessor elsewhere in the village. The Quaker community have a modern meeting house near the centre of the village. The Beulah Strict Baptist Chapel (now a house, No. 9 East End Lane) was in religious use between 1867 and the 1930s. Its church occupies a knoll at the crossways of the south–north watershed between the catchments of the Adur and the Ouse, and the east-west Roman Greensand Way. A huge Sarsen boulder, like those of Stone Henge, bulges out of the rubble retaining south wall of its churchyard. It was converted into a house in 1947 by the author Esther Meynell.Helena Wojtczak. Notable Sussex Women (2008), p. 205
St Georges Retreat
St George's Retreat is a 250-acre farmed estate that run downs the Ditchling Common boundary. Their extensive grounds includes a big retirement village which squeezes the common and brings the urban world that little bit closer. It was once part of Shortfrith Chase, a baronial hunting ground, which was enclosed between 1622 and 1666. The area still maintains some important wild areas. The Retreat has preserved an amazing and now far too rare resource: four unimproved brook meadows on either side of a stream just inside their entrance from the Haywards Heath Road () that in spring host an extraordinary display of green winged orchids, with occasional cowslips and spring sedge. Other herbs and grasses of archaic clay meadows flower such as more wild orchids, oxeye daisy, yellow oat grass and common cat's ear.
Stoneywish Country Park
Stoneywish Country Park is a paying country park. It was originally a small dairy farm call East End Farm, but the landowner has converted it and sensitively preserved the local landscape character and wildlife whist doing so. It is much loved park with many animals and camping. The field has meadow vetchling, oval and false fox sedge and are surrounded by ditches full of fleabane, meadowsweet and rushes, important archaic local plants.
The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic
Eric Gill, the sculptor and letter cutter, came to Ditchling in 1907 with his apprentice Joseph Cribb and was soon followed by other craftsmen. In 1921 they founded the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a Roman Catholic community of artists and craftsmen, inspired by ideas of the medieval guilds and the Arts and Crafts movement. The community had its own workshops and chapel, and thrived for many years. Its affairs were finally wound up in 1989, and the workshops demolished. The legacy of the Guild led to the creation of Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in 1985, which was renovated and re-opened in 2013.
Meadows
East and north of Ditchling Common Lane, the fields are small and elongated. They were formed from the old strip-cultivated common fields. These Ditchling assarts have occasionally partially or completely escaped improvement for farming (thus improving the biodiversity). Grass snakes like this damp countryside.
The best 'assart' meadows are at the north end, though some have been damaged and others do not seem safe from damage. One small meadow next to the brook forms a sedge fen (), dominated by oval sedge, with tufted hair grass, ragged robin, and spearwort (2011). In summer, it is alive with butterflies. Next to it a drier meadow has some betony and heath grass. It has clouds of burnet moths and Ichneumon flies of many colours, grass moths and grasshoppers.
On the east side of Jointer Copse there are two ancient lanes, Nye Lane and Wellcroft Lane, that cross each other, and make "a delightful tangle of stream, gullies, small pits and wooded banks" below some old oak trees. Surrounding this crossways are three fields which have been designated SNCI (Site of Nature Conservation Interest) status. The fields west of, and adjacent to The Nye () used to be rich in damp-loving valuable fen meadow plants, like sneezewort and pepper saxifrage, but the traditional pastures have been converted to hard-grazed horse paddocks. The tropical looking marsh helleborine orchid which has become vanishingly rare in the 21st centrum used to be found in numbers here.