Monday, December 23, 2013

Browsing Around Brightling written and illustrated by E. M. and Kenneth Sivers

Sussex Life: The County Magazine
July 1967, VOL. 3, No. 7 - pages 34 and 35

The authors relate their drive and picnic lunch at Brightling, waxing poetic about the "lovely Sussex panorama" and the views painted by JMW Turner. They refer to one of Fuller's follies as, "a little Grecian Temple of Love", which is a name I'd not heard before in reference to Brightling Park's Rotunda Temple.

The caption under a photo of the obelisk reads, "Brightling Needle, one of "Mad Jack" Fuller's famous follies. It stands some 940 feet above sea level in a lovely East Sussex countryside".  The article goes on the say that Sussex feared invasion by Napoleon and, "Indeed so imminent was the danger in 1805 that, on the hill behind us, some 640 ft above the level of the sea, a beacon was made ready to give alarm should enemy ships be sighted". Brightling Down or Brightling Beacon is approximately 646 ft above sea level and the oblelisk or Brightling Needle is about 65 ft tall. So the height of  940 feet mentioned in the photo caption is clearly an error.


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