Gifts for all the family - Viva Lewes

IFORD
Half farm, half village
John Robinson looks down at my choice
of footwear, and grimaces slightly. He’s
about to take me on a little tour round
his village, from the front yard of his
pink Georgian house. I’m wearing a pair
of black Chelsea boots. He’s wearing
wellies.
As we set off, I ask him how long he’s
been living in Iford. He leads me
through a gate, and we squelch our way
across a waterlogged pasture field. “I was
born here,” he replies. “My grandfather
bought the whole place in 1895, give or
take a few houses.”
Joseph ‘JC’ Robinson, a Quaker, purchased
quite a concern, measuring 2,200
acres, stretching from the outskirts of
Brighton to the Ouse, and employing
over 40 hands, all of whom had cottages
on the estate.
“Iford’s a funny place,” says John. “It’s
a farm which has turned into a village.”
The size of the farm hasn’t shrunk since
his grandfather’s day, but the size of
the team needed to run it certainly has.
“Now we only have four full time workers,”
he says, unwittingly revealing while
sub-vocalising their names to count
them, that half of them are called Brian.
“Such is the way farming has gone.”
Which leaves a lot of former workers’ cottages freed up for rent and
sale. As we walk along the loop of a road the village is built around,
John tells me what’s become of them: “we rent that one; we sold
that one; that’s still one of ours.” Many of the buildings we pass are
still used for farming: there’s a grain store, several barns, a yard for
tractors, a cowshed full of hay-munching cattle, and so on. Others,
standing in between them, are residential houses, with TV aerials,
well-kempt lawns, and cars parked neatly outside. The most surreal
apparition is a buzzing open-plan mortgage brokers’ office built in
what used to be the milking sheds, with ten to fifteen young people
working inside at their computers, who would have looked more in
place in Hoxton Square.
There are plenty more surprises along the way, as John warms to
the task of showing me the village’s idiosyncrasies. A splendid row of
healthy elms, their leaves a patchwork of yellow and green; a plaque
announcing that the Greenwich Meridian runs through the village;
what was once a Victorian boating lake, covered in a lime green carpet
of floating weed.
I haven’t been to Iford since the early eighties, when I hurdled a
number of rites of passage during the teenage parties which were all
the rage in that era in the village hall, built by John’s grandfather in
1931. I’m sad to find it’s locked when we get there, but a chap arrives
on cue with a key, so we explore its interior, which brings back a host
of hazy memories.
And finally to the jewel in the village’s crown, its Norman church.
Again it seems to be locked; again someone breathlessly arrives, as if
by magic, with a key, which is ancient and iron and as big as a tablespoon.
There’s a graceful Romanesque arch announcing what might
generously be described as a transept; the interior is almost all nave,
well lit through tiny stained-glass windows. A beautiful place which
demands we speak in a reverential hush.
The church, of course, is surrounded by a lush graveyard, where a
number of John’s relatives are buried, and where he, he tells me,
is glad to know he will finish up. Then he takes me to a flint wall
overlooking the Ouse Valley, and announces something alarming.
“There is a government agency plan to demolish the western bank
of the lower Ouse, allowing it to flood into the valley,” he says. “This
would turn the whole area in front of us into a tidal salt marsh, which
would, at high tide, probably reach this wall.” He would lose a third
of his farm. There’s little he can do apart from hope they change
their mind.
Iford-on-sea? It wouldn’t be the first time. John tells me that the remains
of fishing vessels have been found near the church, and in the
Domesday Book the annual food production output of the village
included ‘16,000s of herrings’. With that strange thought in mind
we trudge back to his house. He invites me in, to look at some old
photographs, and gently reminds me to leave my sodden, muddy, illchosen,
elastic-sided boots outside the door. V Alex Leith
W W W. V i V a L E W E s . C o M
V i V a V i L L a g E s
6 1