Living in a picture postcard community can have its drawbacks. There is no shop, no post office and no village hall. For a while there was no pub, either, until Tina Rainbow and her partner Richard Hayward reopened The White Dog Inn in 1985 – and in doing so she became the youngest licensee in…

Legend said that a great bell lay at the bottom of the moat surrounding the village church, and that it would never be seen until six yoke of white oxen were brought to drag it up. But the passage of time has punctured this romantic tale like so many others. The moat has gone and…

The closure of village schools on economic grounds has become an unpleasant fact of country life. When Eridge school closed its doors for the last time in 1979 after 102 years they at least went out in style. A farewell concert featured the children performing the Song of Eridge, written by teacher Mrs Joan McHutchison,…

A plaque on the wall of one of the cottages in the village High Street marks the old home of the village’s most famous son. He was Thomas Turner (1729-1789), the village’s Samuel Pepys, whose candid diaries bring the atmosphere of his age vividly alive and leave the reader sometimes despairing of the author. Turner,…

Follow the straight road east of Rye for a mile or so across the flatlands and you come to the last village in Sussex, more a part of the so-called sixth continent of the world, Romney Marsh. This cluster of cottages, a farm or two and a barn-like church is the embryonic ‘brother’ of a…

The Tiger Inn, eye-catcher of the oldest part of the village which lies on the seaward side of the Eastbourne road, probably got its name by error. It was taken from the Bardolf coat of arms which depicts a leopard. This could have been an understandable mistake 400 years ago when a simple innkeeper would…

For years people scoffed at ‘The Beast of East Chiltington’. But still the sightings continued in the countryside around the village and beyond of a black creature too large to be a domestic cat. It took modern technology – and a slice of luck – to finally silence the doubters in 1998. East Chiltington resident…