ramparts of
wind-swept elms. Wheat and oats are the prevailing crops, still for the
most part cut and bound by hand. Of the villages in the centre of the
peninsula Sidlesham is the most considerable, with its handsome square
church tower and its huge red tide-mill, now silent and weather-worn,
standing mournfully at the head of the dry harbour of Pagham, whose
waters once turned its wheels. On the west, on the shores of the Bosham
estuary, or Chichester Harbour, are the sleepy amphibious villages of
Appledram, famous once for its salt and its smugglers, Birdham, and
Earnley. Let no one be tempted to take a direct line across the fields
from Selsey to Earnley, for dykes and canals must effectually stop him.
Indeed, cross country walking in this part of the country is practically
an impossibility, except by continuous deviations and doublings. In
attempting one day to reach Earnley from Selsey in this way (after
giving up the beach in despair), I came upon several adders, and I once
found one crossing a road absolutely in Selsey.

Selsey is a straggling white village, or town, over populous with
visitors in summer, empty, save for its regular inhabitants, in winter.
The oldest and truest part of Selsey is a fishing village on the east
shore of the Bill, a little settlement of tarred tenements and lobster
pots. Selsey church, now on the confines of the town, once stood a mile
or more away; whither it was removed (the stones being numbered) and,
like Temple Bar, again set up. The chancel was, however, not removed,
but left desolate in the fields.

Selsey Bill is a tongue of land projecting into a shallow sea. A
lighthouse being useless to warn strange mariners of the sandbanks of
this district, a lightship known as the Owers flashes its rays far out
in the channel. The sea has played curious pranks on the Selsey coast.
Beneath the beach and a large tract of the sea now lies what was once,
four hundred years ago, a park of deer, which in its most prosperous day
extended for miles. The shallow water covering it is still called the
park by the fishermen, who drop their nets where the bucks and does of
Selsey were wont to graze.

[Sidenote: SUSSEX REPELS ST. WILFRID]

But the sea has obliterated more than the pasturage of the deer; a mile
distant from the present shore stood the first monastery erected in
Sussex after Wilfrid's conversion of the South Saxons to Christianity.
Although Saint Wilfrid eventually found a home in