BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard

Subject: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Will Fly
Date: 07 May 18 - 03:00 PM

May afternoon in a Sussex churchyard

It was very hot in our village today - May Bank Holiday - and, after sitting with a beer and a book in my back garden, I fancied a walk up to and through the churchyard. The church is just a couple of streets away - a five minute walk, in fact - with some interesting things to look at on the way. Fancy coming with me?

As I walk up Church Street towards Pinchnose Green and the footpath up to the church, the large white Georgian house called Martyn Lodge stands on the right.

Martyn Lodge

This was the home of Canon Nathaniel Woodard, a Victorian clergyman who founded the Woodard Schools - a group of Anglican schools in the fee paying and maintained sectors. These include Lancing College, Ardingly College and others. The Canon famously got into a dispute with a character called Bob Ward, who lived in a Tudor cottage below the church, which we'll come to in a minute.

Pinchnose Green got its name from the tanneries which once stood on the other side of the church, with their pungent smell. The tanneries have long gone, but the name lives on in the shape of a pretty patch of green, planted with an oak to commemorate the accession of Edward VII to the throne and known as the Coronation Oak.

Pinchnose Green

Bob Ward's Tudor cottage is on the left of this photograph. Here it is close up:

The Cat House

The story goes that, in the 1880s, Canon Woodard's cat killed Bob Ward's canary - how is not known. Filled with rage, Bob Ward made iron plaques of a cat killing a canary and set them round the eaves of the cottage - you can see them in the photo. He also rigged up a system of cords from which various shells and stones and beads hung, and jangled them all together whenever he saw the Canon pass by his cottage to go to church. The path up past this cottage, known ever since then to all in the village as the Cat House, is called Church Terrace and leads into the back of the churchyard.

As you step through the iron gate at the end of Church Terrace, the first thing to catch your eye is a small, triangular garden bounded by yew walks. This little garden is in memory of Olave Baden-Powell, the wife of Robert Baden-Powell and the first Chief Guide of the Scout and Guide movement. Olave created the first British guide troupe in the village - in a room in Martyn Lodge - and their name also lives on in the BP Guild, a charitable village organisation which organises of sorts of local events, for elderly people in particular. Here's the garden - strewn with wild flowers - on a May afternoon:

Olave Baden-Powell garden

Once in the churchyard, St. Peter's church rises up in front of you.

St Peter's Church

Two yew walks were planted in the post-war years, each one taking you up to a different side of the church.

Yew walk

But the churchyard is green, slightly overgrown and cool, so we'll stop a while on a worn wooden seat and contemplate the scene… Gravestones with names that have been in the village for generations - Wardens and Slaughters, Nyes and Lelliots - wildflowers all round us and the song of robins, blackbirds, chiff chaffs and a lone cuckoo (early this year).

Churchyard

Coming out of the churchyard on the other side, we pass Old Tudor Cottage and emerge in Church Lane.

Old Tudor Cottage

At the end of Church Lane - a cul-de-sac - a footpath takes up past the site of the old tanneries, now a large, closed field in the centre of the village called the Tanyard field, and filled with wildlife.

Tanyard field

Finally, the footpath joins up with a quiet road called Cagefoot Lane - where the village stocks used to stand - and we can stroll along and back to the High Street and then home.

Cagefoot Lane

I hope you enjoyed our afternoon stroll.

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Senoufou
Date: 07 May 18 - 03:41 PM

Absolutely delightful Will! I want to live either in the Cat House or the old Tudor cottage with the wisteria round the door. Those yews are a bit sinister though. I bet it's ghostly there at night!
Lovely to see your pictures; I feel as if I've walked beside you around your village. Thank you so much.
Eliza

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Will Fly
Date: 07 May 18 - 03:48 PM

Glad you liked it, Eliza. I've lived here for over 40 years and never tire of it. I've probably photographed most of it at one time or another.

The Cat House sold recently and the new owners let me have a peek inside. It's actually bigger inside than you might think - a bit like the Tardis! Old Tudor Cottage also sold, just after Christmas last year, after they'd dropped the price from £850,000 down by a few thou.

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 07 May 18 - 09:40 PM

as Eliza said - Lovely to see your pictures; I feel as if I've walked beside you around your village. Thank you so much.

& I too would love to live in a Tudor cottage

sandra

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: leeneia
Date: 07 May 18 - 10:01 PM

Thank you for the tour, Will.

Is that big, bushy tree on Cagefoot Lane a horse chestnut?

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Rob Naylor
Date: 08 May 18 - 03:52 AM

Lovely pictures if your walk, Will.

I was working most of the weekend, but managed to get along to the Hastings Jack-In-The-Green festival yesterday, which was interesting, and packed, due to the brilliant weather.

Unfortunately I'd forgotten that it was also the 1066 motorbike run from Locksbottom to Hastings, and I think this year there were probably twice as many bikes as I've ever seen/ heard there before. Thousands and thousands of them. It was positively painful on the eardrums along the front (my ears were buzzing almost as badly as when I sat next to a horn speaker at an Edgar Broughton gig in 1971....the follies of youth!).

So getting up into the Old Town for the parade was a priority. Some of the costumes were amazing....the best I could do was having my nose covered in green paint by a very attractive woman covered in flowers. :-)

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Senoufou
Date: 08 May 18 - 04:10 AM

Last Saturday our village had a little 'Spring Fayre' (this twee spelling is de rigeur in villages) at the children's Nursery. Our local riding school proprietress brought a pony-and-trap to give rides to all the children.
It was a very hot afternoon, and at 3pm she drove the pony back to the riding school. But the animal got out of control and bolted down the road, turned the trap over and the poor lady was flung out. The first we knew of it was the arrival overhead of the Air Ambulance, just over our rooftop, and it landed next to the village hall.
The woman has injured her spine, we don't yet know how seriously (hope it isn't permanent)
The pony carried on trailing the overturned vehicle and managed to knock over a little girl miles up the lane. It got itself back to its stable, and I don't know how the child fared.
Very upsetting.

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Mr Red
Date: 08 May 18 - 05:20 AM

Pinchnose Green

makes on suspect what its purpose was in the middle ages. tanneries

in olden times they used dogshit to soften the leather, and a pit of that would smell even more.

and Cagefoot Lane sounds like a pillory was involved. Interesting.

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Will Fly
Date: 08 May 18 - 05:41 AM

The large tree in Cagefoot Lane is indeed a horse chestnut.

There were two tanneries in what is now the Tanyard field and a part of Church
Lane called Tannery End.

We're told that Cagefoot Lane owes its name to the village stocks being in an adjacent field. Who knows. For some years the lane was known as Park Walk before reverting to Cagefoot Lane.

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 09 May 18 - 04:55 AM

Lovely, Will. As from next week I get an extra day a week off because I have decided to do a phased retirement. I hope to fill most Mondays with a good walk and while I may get up into the Yorkshire Dales proper once a month or so I want to do a lot more near home (Airedale). My favourite at the moment is up to the ridge above our village that houses Lund's Tower and Cowling Pinnacle. In the latter the buldings you can make out through the triangular gap is our village (Sutton in Craven).

I have also decided to do more with my 'bridge' camera which is a older Fuji with a decent spec. although it only does 7 megapixels. I am told that if I set the resolution to 'raw' rather than 7MP I will be able to do more with it later. Also to take most pictures with the camera set to aperture priority rather than automatic and experiment with the ISO setting. Have you any comments or advice on that?

I would have PM'd but others may be interested :-)

Cheers

Dave

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Will Fly
Date: 09 May 18 - 04:21 PM

Hi Dave - nice towers! They remind me of my years in Horwich, near Rivington Pike.

I use a Canon DSLR (EF-S 70D) with an 18mm-135mm kit lens and always shoot in raw. Raw contains all the digital info in the shot, and it can be manipulated to alter colour, hue, saturation, lens distortion, etc., with a program called Lightroom. When you shoot in JPG, the camera software creates the photo according to its preset algorithms. With Lightroom, you create the JPG yourself.

The important thing with digital photography is to remember that the picture quality depends more on the lens than on the number of megapixels. If the lens is crap, no amount of megapixels will compensate. I have a Fuji Finepix compact - only 6 megapixels but a great lens - and it shoots good JPGs (but not raw).

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Will Fly
Date: 09 May 18 - 04:23 PM

Forgot to say, Dave, I set the ISO to 100 and keep it at that whenever possible. The higher the ISO, the grainier the pic...

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Will Fly
Date: 09 May 18 - 04:28 PM

Whoops - typo - ISO 200!

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 09 May 18 - 04:45 PM

Thanks Will, I shall bear all that in mind. Mine is a Fuji Finepix S5600 bridge with a really decent lens that does 10x optical zoom without the lens actually moving in and out! I just set it up to raw, aperture priority and ISO100. I need to learn about colour (standard or chrome) and things like White Balance. I also want to look at manual focus or would I be better sticking to auto? I am sure I will find an online manual somewhere.

My first none working Monday should be next week so, weather permitting, I shall experiment with what you said.

Cheers

Dave

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Bonnie Shaljean
Date: 10 May 18 - 03:21 AM

Delightful, Will - thanks so much! Really needed this -

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Will Fly
Date: 10 May 18 - 03:27 AM

Good luck, Dave. I could write boring screeds of do's and dont's, but I won't! What I can do is recommend a chap called Mike Browne, who has hundreds of free photo tips on YouTube. He lives in Lymington. He uses Nikon DSLRs, but his tips on using a camera are very good and very clear.

www.photographycourses.biz

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 10 May 18 - 03:29 AM

Figured out last night that manual focus is not worth the hassle on my camera apart from maybe exceptional circumstances. I used a bit of free software to view/edit the raw file. Lightroom may be a bit expensive for what I do but if I take to the raw file format I will reconsider. I will probably get a bigger memory card as well!

Thanks again for the photos and inspiration, Will.

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Will Fly
Date: 10 May 18 - 03:40 AM

One of the problems with Lightroom and other Adobe products is that you can't buy modern versions outright these days - only on a monthly rental basis. However, I managed to get a copy of Lightroom 4 outright on a CD from eBay. (Mac OS 10.6.8).

I also managed to download an old version of Adobe Photoshop CS2, which is an old, but still viable product. I think that Adobe have started to pension off old versions of their software and sell them outright.

There's also a free, open-source package called Gimp that does much of what Lightroom does, but I've not used it much after getting Lightroom.

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Will Fly
Date: 10 May 18 - 03:43 AM

And finally, if anyone's interested, some of my village pics on one page - all clickable for full-screen versions...

www.henfieldthenandnow.net/hi-res-images.html

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 10 May 18 - 04:04 AM

Thanks Will

Clicky to Will's photos

A quick glance revealed one of my favourite place names - Chanctonbury Ring. We we were young and daft and formed a scratch border Morris team at one Whitby festival we decided that Chanctonbury ring was what you got from dancing too much Morris and made it difficult for you to sit down :-D

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Will Fly
Date: 10 May 18 - 11:21 AM

LOL! I'll tell that to my mates in the Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men!

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 10 May 18 - 02:28 PM

I think they were there that year :-)

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 11 May 18 - 09:34 AM

Tried GIMP for windows but, as is the way of open source stuff, I needed to download extra modules. In parallel I tried Raw Therapee and that seemed to do what I needed out of the box. I will have a play with that.

Subject: RE: BS: A May stroll in a Sussex churchyard
From: Will Fly
Date: 11 May 18 - 11:46 AM

I haven't heard of that one, Dave - I'll check it out just out of interest.