A few old timbered houses, the two churches, one on each side of the slope, form, with the castle, the sum total of the tangible reminders of ancient days. ( See page 10 )...

Hastings is the gateway into an enchanted garden. Between the hills and the sea it lies—the most romantic province in this England of ours. Scarcely a place in it seems to belong to this present: from end to end it is built up almost entirely of memories. The very repetition of the names—Rye, Winchelsea, Pevensey, Battle, Bodiam, Hurstmonceux—conjures up the past in all its magnificence and all its sadness. Nowhere in so small a space shall you find so many monuments to the greatness of England'

In all this storied region there is no spot so rich in memories as Pevensey (or Pemsey, as it is called locally). Before such ancient settlements as Rye and Winchelsea were dreamed of, while yet Hastings was the merest collection of barbarian huts, Pevensey, or rather its Roman predecessor, Anderida, was a fortified place with all the ebb and flow of a flourishing life. Like Winchelsea, it has seen great changes—not quite so tragic perhaps, but no less momentous—and like Winchelsea, too, in its

To Battle is the excursion of paramount interest from the popular point of view. The association with one of the most momentous events in the history of the land, the peculiar entertainment of standing on the actual ground where the battle took place and the "last of the English" fell, the intrinsic pleasure in the inspection of a ruin at once rich in memories and comely in setting,—all contrive to make it the pilgrimage into the country around. Other ruins may surpass it in degree of preservati

East of the old town is a stretch of cliffs several miles long, made up, like the Forest Ridge, of Lower Cretaceous rocks. Several little wooded valleys extend from the high lands right down to the sea, and two of these have attained to a desirable celebrity under the names of Ecclesbourne and Fairlight Glens. Many folk, visiting these two spots in August, go away with a feeling of utter disappointment, for the grass is rusty and the place strewn with the indescribable litter of a myriad picnic-

Every spot in this delectable corner of England—Pevensey, Hurstmonceux, Hastings itself, Bodiam, Rye—is redolent of the triumph of change; but Winchelsea stands before us a perfect memorial to the futility of man's efforts against Nature, a tangible reminder of the irony of Time. This ancient town, perched, like Rye, on a solitary hillock projecting into the midst of a vast plain, is, despite its years and its ruins, really a new Winchelsea. The old town—the city proper—a prosperous place of sev

Rye, as it stands, is the completest place in England. A little conical hill rises abruptly out of the encompassing marshes, and all around that little hill, wherever it can gain secure hold, clings the town. The tall houses rest tier upon tier, as if standing on tiptoe to get a better view of the approaching enemy; and the cobble-paved streets wind in and about, so that every available inch of space may be utilized for house or hanging garden. Crowning it all rises the ancient church with its h

When in 1377, following on other successful raids, the French descended on Rye and sacked and fired the town, it became evident that Hastings could no longer afford sufficient protection to that stretch of the coast, or to the important river valley leading thence inwards; and the necessity for another stronghold was immediately realized. Thus did Bodiam come into existence. It so happened that, at the moment when the defenceless condition of the Rother became apparent, there had come into the d