Rowfant--The Rowfant
books--"To F. L."--The Rowfant titmice.

On leaving the train at Balcombe, one is quickly on the densely wooded
Forest Ridge of Sussex, here fenced and preserved, but farther east,
when it becomes Ashdown Forest, consisting of vast tracts of open
moorland and heather. Balcombe has a simple church, protected by a
screen of Scotch firs; its great merit is its position as the key to a
paradise for all who like woodland travel. From Balcombe to Worth is one
vast pheasant run, with here and there a keeper's cottage or a farm:
originally, of course, a series of plantations growing furnace wood for
the ironmasters. In Tilgate Forest, to the west of Balcombe Forest, are
two large sheets of water, once hammer-ponds, walking west from which,
towards Horsham, one may be said to traverse the Lake Country of Sussex.
A strange transformation, from Iron Black Country to Lake Country!--but
nature quickly recovers herself, and were the true Black Country's
furnaces extinguished, she would soon make even that grimy tract a haunt
of loveliness once more.

No longer are heard the sounds of the hammers, but Balcombe Forest,
Tilgate Forest, and Worth Forest have still a constant reminder of
machinery, for very few minutes pass from morning to night without the
rumble of a train on the main line to Brighton, which passes through
the very midst of this wild game region, and plunges into the earth
under the high ground of Balcombe Forest. I know of no place where the
trains emit such a volume of sound as in the valley of the Stanford
brook, just north of the tunnel.

The noise makes it impossible ever quite to lose the sense of modernity
in these woods, as one may on Shelley Plain, a few miles west, or at
Gill's Lap, in Ashdown Forest; unless, of course, one's imagination is
so complaisant as to believe it to proceed from the old iron furnaces.
This reminds me that Crabbet, just to the north of Worth (where church
and vicarage stand isolated on a sandy ridge on the edge of the Forest),
was the home of one of the most considerable of the Sussex ironmasters,
Leonard Gale of Tinsloe Forge, who bought Crabbet, park and house, in
1698--since "building," in his own words, is a "sweet impoverishing."

[Sidenote: WORTH CHURCH]

But we must pause for a moment at Worth, because its church is
remarkable as being the largest in England to preserve its Saxon
foundations. Sussex, as we have seen, is rich in Saxon relics, but