The Middle Line

In the second of his short series exploring four Sussex rivers, Terry Timblick takes a stroll along the banks of the River Adur.

- Terry Timblick

A bit of a nomad in its time, our Shorehamexiting Adur. Certainly, the years 1760, 1775, 1800 and 1810 each featured a newly created channel for the river, but all eventually became silt-thwarted.

Permanency arrived in 1821, at Kingston Buci, for a watercourse which gets serious upstream where the eastern Adur, which starts on Ditchling Common, merges with its western twin near Henfield and then eases through the Downs at the Shoreham Gap into an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and on to Shoreham and the sea.

So it’s Henfield, Steyning, Bramber and Shoreham, places of character and ebb-and-flow history, as the main man-made features on the 20-mile journey. Adur is Celtic for “middle”, and the Romans called Old Shoreham Portus Adurni.

Henfield – not astride the river but detour-worthy – nearly 60 years ago was dubbed a cheerful village by Pevsner. Well, it’s a bit larger now, but still with plenty to be cheerful about, not least Grade II-listed St Peter’s Church with Middle Ages links, such character cottages as Lavender and Ants Manor and The Cat House, a story about human misbehaviour too.