Once more we sallied forth, this time to visit the Priest’s House at West Hoathly, and to have a second bash at Bignor Roman Villa, having established that it is indeed open today. Again, the opening time was 10:30, so we made a leisurely start. We arrived still with 10 minutes to spare, but then had to locate the car park which was 200m (or was it 200yds? I don’t know with all this Brexit) further down the road. The road through the village is narrow enough, but they were also resurfacing at the time; so there was heavy roadmaking machinery to be negotiated, as well as the usual cars-parked-on-both-sides-of-the-road-thus-causing-a-bottleneck which we’ve been contending with for the past week or so. Welcome to rural England!
We arrived at 10:29, but the door magically swung open and we were welcomed in by the Sussex Archaeological Society volunteer, who took our money and explained about the provenance of the Priest’s House, how it came to be and how it was subdivided and then later restored. You’ll never guess who owned it at one point…Anne of Cleves! No, she never visited. It was full of Olde Stuffe, and had a garden surrounding it. The house is supposedly well-defended against witches, with an iron doorstep, witch-warding plants in the gardens, runic inscriptions etc. Didn’t do any good, Nicola was able to get in with no problem 😉 !
It's not a large house, so didn’t detain us for very long. We had a quick shufti at the village church, also quite ancient, where bell-ringing practice was in progress. Then headed back to the car, negotiated the road-surfacing equipment again with some deft manoeuvring, and headed back towards Bignor…
…until we hit some traffic. The queue appeared quite long,
with very few turnoffs along the road. It was moving slowly, not in fits and
starts, so not traffic lights; and too slow to be cyclists. What was the hold up?
At one point an ambulance came racing past, blue lights all going, so we
thought there might be an accident, but we continued to crawl along, so probably
not that either. Eventually we came to a village where most of the traffic
peeled off to the right, but we continued left and were now able to see the
culprit: a vintage steam traction engine, puffing out smoke and steam, taking up
the roadway, on its way to a show somewhere. We managed to get past it and were
back on track.
Due to the delay, we decided to lunch first. As we arrived, we spotted some picnic benches, so headed straight there, feasted on sandwiches and mediocre chocolate (which we’d bought from the monks on Caldey Island the week before – don’t give up your day jobs, chaps, you’re not very good at chocolate-making!), then made our way to the villa.
The villa at Bignor was discovered in 1811, and fortunately the farmer who uncovered some of the mosaics knew what it was and immediately entrusted a seasoned archaeologist to excavate the remains. It is now housed under some buildings which were created at the time to protect the mosaics, and subsequent work has been undertaken at various times to try to recover more. The mosaics are amongst the best examples in Britain – far superior to some of the ones we saw at Fishbourne, where at one point there was an obvious area where the mosaicist had miscalculated and had to squeeze his work in!
The mosaics are thought to be the works of Terentius, and
his signature can be found on some of the mosaics.
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| The signature can be seen to the right |
OK, that’s enough of Sussex, both West and East. Tomorrow, we head for Kent.
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