The Brighton road : the classic highway to the south . ty spot to-day, and extremely quiet. From here Crawley is reached through GossopsGreen. XXII The way into Crawley along the main road, passingthe modern hamlet of Lowfield Heath, is church, the White Lion, and a few attendanthouses stand on one side of the road, and on the other,by the farm or mansion styled Heath House, a sedgypiece of ground alone remains to show what the heathwas like before enclosure. Much of the land is nowunder cultivation as a nursery for shrubs, and a bee-farm attracts the wayfarers attention nearer
The Brighton road : the classic highway to the south . ty spot to-day, and extremely quiet. From here Crawley is reached through GossopsGreen. XXII The way into Crawley along the main road, passingthe modern hamlet of Lowfield Heath, is church, the White Lion, and a few attendanthouses stand on one side of the road, and on the other,by the farm or mansion styled Heath House, a sedgypiece of ground alone remains to show what the heathwas like before enclosure. Much of the land is nowunder cultivation as a nursery for shrubs, and a bee-farm attracts the wayfarers attention nearer Crawley,where another hamlet has sprung up. A mean littlehouse called Casa querca —by which I suppose theauthor means Oak House—is refinement, asimagined in the suburbs, and excites the passing sneer, Is not the English language good enough ? If theItalians will only oblige, and call their own BellaVistas Pretty View, and so forth, while wecontinue the reverse process here, we shall effect afair exchange, and find at last an Old England 184 THE BRIGHTON ROAD At the beginning of Crawley stands the Sun inn,and away at the other end is the Half Moon :trivial facts not lost upon the guards and coachmenof the coaching age, who generally propounded thestock conundrum when passing through, Why isCrawley the longest place in existence ? Every oneunfamiliar with the road gave it up ; when camethe answer, Because the sun is at one end and themoon at the other. It is evident that very smallthings in the way of jokes satisfied the coach-passengers. We have it, on the authority of writers who faredthis way in early coaching days, that Crawley was a poor place, by which we may suppose that theymeant it was a village. But what did they expect—a city ? Crawley in these times still keeps some old-worldfeatures, but it has grown, and is still growing. Itsmost striking peculiarity is the extraordinary widthof the road in midst of what I do not like to call atown, and yet can scar
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjecthorses, bookyear1922
