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SEAFORD 271 |
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lancet, belong to the early part of the fourteenth century. The tower is oblong, and has strange-looking lappets to the low shingled spire. In the chancel are some early seventeenth-century monuments of the Thomas family.
But by far. the most interesting feature of the village is the late thirteenth-century parsonage, built of stone, retaining its original features and still used for its original purpose. It stands north and south just west of the church; owing to the slope of the ground there is a small basement in addition to the two stories at the south end. In the centre of the north wall is a chimney, and there are stone fireplaces in the hall, which has an open timber roof, and in the chamber below. The hall is lighted by double windows, trefoil-headed, and these have oak shutters that seem to be original. The other windows are almost all " square-headed trefoil" or square-headed. The original stair is in a gable-topped turret adjoining the chimney; a turret at the south end was for sanitary purposes. The hall is about 20 feet by 14 feet; the timbers of the interior are very largely the original ones.
About two miles up the beautiful valley in which the Cuckmere makes its way through the Downs lies the village of Litlington, a distant view of which appears in the photograph opposite, p. 270. The church has some plain Norman features: the chancel has a barrel roof with miniature hammer-beams, there is a Perpendicular tomb of Easter Sepulchre type, and the building was rather awkwardly lengthened westward during the fifteenth century, a stair being wedged in on the north side to reach the wooden tower and spire erected over the extension. |
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