Shoreham By Sea

Shoreham-by-Sea (often shortened to Shoreham) is a coastal town and port in the Adur district, in the county of West Sussex, England. In 2011 it had a population of 20,547.

The town is bordered to its north by the South Downs, to its west by the Adur Valley, and to its south by the River Adur and Shoreham Beach on the English Channel. The town lies in the middle of the ribbon of urban development along the English south coast, approximately equidistant from the city of Brighton and Hove to the east and the town of Worthing to the west. Shoreham covers an area of and has a population of 20,547 (2011 census).

History

Old Shoreham dates back to pre-Roman times.
St Nicolas' Church, inland by the River Adur, is partly Anglo-Saxon in its construction.
The name of the town has an Old English origin. The town and port of New Shoreham was established by the Norman conquerors towards the end of the 11th century.

St Mary de Haura Church (St Mary of the Haven) was built in the decade following 1103 (the Domesday Book was dated 1086), and around this time the town was laid out on a grid pattern that, in essence, still survives in the town centre. The present church is approximately half the size of the original structure – the former nave was already in ruins by the time of the English Civil War, although evidence of the original west façade survive in the churchyard to this day.

Muslim geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, writing , described Shoreham as "a fine and cultivated city containing buildings and flourishing activity". Shoreham had status as a Royal Port.

An 18th-century naval chartist and artist, Captain Henry Roberts, who was once a lieutenant under Captain Cook, was a native of Shoreham.

The rapid growth of the neighbouring towns of Brighton, Hove and Worthing – and in particular the arrival of the railway in 1840 – prepared the way for Shoreham's rise as a Victorian sea port, with several shipyards and an active coasting trade. Shoreham Harbour remains in commercial operation today. The area became an urban district, with Shoreham Town Hall as its headquarters, in 1910.

Kingston Buci old village

Originally the people of Kingston Buci may have lived at Thundersbarrow. This may have been the centre of a large estate in the post-Roman Dark Ages. However, in early or mid-Saxon times, the people may have re-located down off the hill to Kingston Buci (), which sits to the east of Shoreham-by-Sea. It has a medieval church, rectory, manor house, and huge old barn which still make it a remarkable cluster – and, like Cissbury (where the people came off the hill to form Findon) and at Mount Caburn (where people re-located down at Beddingham), this stranded settlement is three quarters of a mile from the Downs. The church here was extensively re-modelled in the thirteenth century when the shifting river estuary temporarily made Kingston a port town.

The 'king' of the name 'Kingston' may have referred to a Saxon king of Sussex. The 'Buci' part of the name comes from the Anglo-Norman owners' hometown of Bouce in Normandy.

Shoreham Beach

Shoreham Beach, to the south of the town, is a shingle spit deposited over millennia by longshore drift. This blocks the southerly flow of the River Adur which turns east at this point to discharge into the English Channel further along the coast at a point that has varied considerably over time. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the mouth of the river shifted eastwards which restricted trade to the port; by 1810, it was almost opposite Aldrington church. In 1816, work had been completed to fix the position of the river in its present position, flowing into the sea between two piers. Once the harbour mouth was stabilised, it was defended by Shoreham Fort, which was built in 1857.

Converted railway carriages became summer homes around the start of the 20th century, and 'Bungalow Town', as it was then known, became home to the early British film industry. Francis L. Lyndhurst founded the Sunny South Film Company, which made its first commercial movie on Shoreham Beach in 1912 and built a film studio there. Shoreham Beach officially became part of Shoreham-by-Sea in 1910. Much of the housing in the area was cleared for defence reasons during the Second World War and most of what remained after the war is now long gone, having been replaced by modern houses. The Church of the Good Shepherd, built in 1913, still stands. Along the Adur mud flats adjacent to Shoreham Beach sits (and at high tides floats) a large collection of houseboats made from converted barges, tugs, mine sweepers, and motor torpedo boats. The seaside shingle bank of Shoreham beach extends further east past the harbour mouth, forming the southern boundary of the commercial harbour in Southwick, Portslade, and Hove. The Monarch's Way long-distance footpath, commemorating the escape route of Charles II to France after the Battle of Worcester, follows the beach westwards from Hove past Portslade and Southwick, ending by the harbour mouth's east breakwater.

Downland areas

The River Adur, the downs, and the sea support a diverse wildlife flora and fauna in the area. The mudflats support wading birds and gulls, including the ringed plover which attempts to breed on the coastal shingle. The pied wagtail is common in the town in the winter months. Insects include dragonflies over the flood plains of the river. The south- and west-facing downs attract at least 33 species of butterfly, including a nationally important population of the chalkhill blue butterfly on Mill Hill. The underlying rock is chalk on the downs, with alluvium in the old river channels. The Adur district has a variety of habitats in a small area, including natural chalk downs and butterfly meadows, freshwater and reed beds, salt marsh and estuary, brackish water lagoons, woodland, shingle seashore, chalk platform undersea, and large expanses of sand.

Southwick Hill and the smaller sites connected to it are the second biggest surviving complex of ancient Down pasture on the entire plateau of the Brighton Downs (the biggest is around Castle Hill, near Woodingdean).^:209

The town is the end-point of the Monarch's Way, a long-distance footpath, based on the escape route taken by King Charles II in 1651 after being defeated by Cromwell in the Battle of Worcester.

Mill Hill

Mill Hill () is also known as Shoreham bank, as the hillside falls sharply to the River Adur. It is a Local Nature Reserve and has been famous for its butterflies since the 1820s. In May, the hillside is dusted yellow with horseshoe vetch: the butterflies' food plant. In August, the hillside is colourful with knapweeds, pink centaury, the tiny white pinpoints of eyebright, and the white umbels of wild carrot, wild parsnip, St John's wort, and wild thyme. The Hill is known for its dingy skippers and grizzled skippers in the spring, and in summer the chalkhill blue and Adonis blue are 'flagship' species of this Hill.

From Mill Hill it is possible to see Applesham Farm, which was a village at the time of the Domesday Book in 1086. To the north end is another Saxon farm, Old Erringham, which King Alfred's successors fortified to defend the estuary. To the south is the Norman church of Old Shoreham, almost on the banks of the Adur, and next to it are the wooden piers of the 1781 toll bridge, which collected traffic tolls up to the 1960s.^:203

Mill Hill now suffers from traffic and aircraft noise. The special mosses and lichens have gone, and the Heath and Carthusian snails are now gone. Despite efforts by volunteers and rangers, the hill still carries far too great an area of dense and simplified scrub, which has flourished at the expense of the biodiverse turf.^:203

Southwick Hill

Southwick Hill () is owned by the National Trust and has some special wildlife areas. In 1985, local residents were presented with the plan for the A27 road bypass cutting through the Hill. Through the vigorous campaigning of activists from ABBA (the Anti-Brighton Bypass Association) the road was re-routed through a tunnel under the Hill rather than a cutting through it.

In high summer, on the hill ('bostal') path, there is round-headed rampion, blue scabious, and autumn gentian. On the south side of the bridlepath, there is an un-grazed triangle with a taller sward. Here, there are still rabbits playing on the lawns amongst the purging flax, eggs and bacon, squinancywort, eyebright, and wild thyme, which themselves mingle with tall herb patches of parsnip, greater knapweed, ragwort, hogweed, and St John's wort. There are bushes of raspberry and rose-bay willowherb. Butterflies in the area include common blue, clouded yellow, small heath, comma, red admiral, painted lady, and day-flying moths like treble-bar and dusky sallow. There are glowworms too. In autumn, parts of the short turf may be colourful from the many waxcap and other old meadow fungi. Additional mushrooms include puffballs, blue legs, and velvet shank; fairy rings also form.^:211

However, Southwick Hill is not what it was. Until recent years, it was the best place on the Brighton Downs to get a sense of what Down pasture was like during late Victorian and Edwardian times through to 1940. The tenant farmer continuously grazed the whole Hill and, as a result, it was something of a time capsule from a particular period of Downland history, that of the long agricultural depression from 1876 to 1940, when scrub took over many old pastures and cattle replaced many sheep flocks.^:210 In recent years, however, the Hill has been split by fencing into a southern half which is seriously under-grazed, with simplified tussocky grassland, and a northern half which remains better grazed. The southern half has now lost its close-bitten down pasture, with its flowerings of tiny herbs and fruitings of old pasture fungi. Nevertheless, as a whole the Hill still has a mixture of archaic pasture and scrub thickets, sometimes mature enough to harbour small maiden oaks, and it retains much of the wildlife lost elsewhere on the Brighton Downs.

The Crooked Moon Hedge

Hedges are very rare on these Downs (except around farmsteads). The Crooked Moon Hedge () lies on the top of a prehistoric field lynchet; these southern slopes of Southwick Hill were covered with an Iron Age field system whose banks lay regularly on east–west and south–north axes. At its northern end, it is the boundary between Kingston Buci and Southwick parishes, and at its southern end it bounded Kingston Buci sheep Down to the west, and one of the parish open fields to the east.

The hedge contains a lot of maple and ash and may have been bird-sown. As per Hooper's rule, the hedge is three to four centuries old.^:209

The 'Rest and Be Thankful' stone

There is a large flat block of lichen-covered stone () by the path to Southwick Hill from Southwickhill Barn, which marks a corner on the old parish boundary between Kingston Buci and Southwick. It was notable enough to show on the Victorian Ordnance Survey maps.^:210

Thundersbarrow Hill

Thunders Barrow () is a large barrow, although it was partially dug away on its south side in the nineteenth century to make way for a dew pond. It sits just north of Southwick Hill. The origins of its name are unknown.

It is only at this distance from the bypass that the silence of the Downs and the sound of the birds are bigger than the noise of the road. This point marks the beginning of Downland tranquility. The ramparts of Thundersbarrow's late Bronze Age and Iron Age camp are still tall enough to walk around, although they get a bit vague on the eastern side because of plough damage, and because the Romano-British villagers built their houses just outside the rampart and right up against the barrow on that side. When the village was excavated in 1932, two corn-drying ovens were found, still with soot in the flues and bits of charred grain.

Erringham Hole

Erringham Hole () is the bushy combe to the east of Thundersbarrow, whose Celtic villagers built the huge field lynchets, parts of which are up to 12 feet in height. It was called 'Erringham Hole' because it was part of Old Erringham Farm. Old Erringham Hole (not to be confused with Whitelot Bottom, which is the ploughed land further east down the combe) has flowery chalk grassland, scrub, rank grassland, and lots of rabbits. The rabbits encourage rabbit-resistant plants like tall woolly mullein (complete with mullein moth caterpillars, hound's-tongue, ground ivy, and eyebright. Until 25 years ago, the combe remained substantially open and the ancient lynchet system was plain to see, but cessation of grazing and a lack of scrub control has allowed the species-rich Down pasture to be lost to simplified scrub and even secondary woodland.^:212

Hazelholt Bottom

Hazelholt Bottom () is a tranquil slope with large flowery glades. There are often roe deer in the wide corn field below the slope. The National Trust own the south slope and Whitelot Bottom further south, but Whitelot was ploughed up after 1945 and has never been returned to public use.

Hazelholt has rich old chalk grassland with cowslips in spring and devil's-bit scabious in September. In mid-summer, there are many butterflies, including adonis blue and chalkhill blue. At the head of the combe, there are more old grassland and great blackberry thickets. Since 1945, scrub has taken over much of this former open slope. The remaining grassland is only lightly grazed, allowing growth of bramble and thorn and a loss of its ancient down pasture character.^:212

Freshcombe

Freshcombe () is owned by the National Trust, but was leased away from their management. It is threatened by scrub expansion and insufficient grazing. Its slopes have very old gorse thickets; they are shown as well-established on the 1873 OS map, and may be centuries older than that.

This is the only site in the South Downs that contains the plant saw-wort, which looks like a slimmer version of knapweed, and still blooms profusely in a little glade amongst the gorse. It is a survivor from the days of the Downland heaths. It survives here because the soil must have a strong clay-with-flints influence. The glade where it blooms also contains flowers of betony, red clover, hawkbit, and St John's wort.^:213

Old Erringham Farmstead

Old Erringham Farmstead () has an old flint farmhouse with great chimneys and part-Horsham slab roofing, and ramshackle old flint barns. It has one of only two remaining medieval manorial chapels on the Brighton Downs (the other at Swanborough Manor), which now functions as a front garden shed for one of the modern farm workers cottages just to the south of the old farmhouse. It has a tiny ecclesiastical window on its south face.

The farm is designated as an ancient monument, incorporating the remains of a medieval settlement and an eleventh century ringwork. It was presumably built as a defence against the Vikings, though it's difficult to pick it out amongst the grassy plats now.

It is a mixed farm with corn crops, beef cattle, a bit of livery stabling, and hay meadows. The farm manages the sites of Old Erringham Combe and Anchor Bottom to preserve their natural value. Around the farmstead there is red star-thistle (a Brighton Downs speciality), musk thistle, spear thistle, welted thistle, creeping thistle, teasel, and viper's bugloss, all adding summer colour.^:204

Old Erringham Combe and Shaw

Old Erringham Combe () is an old-fashioned mosaic of habitats, making it a great refuge for Downland wildlife. The south-facing bank is the hottest place, but below it there are willows and a tiny tongue of wet grassland where lesser marsh grasshopper, autumn lady's-tresses orchid, bastard toadflax