From Pyecombe we come through a cleft in the great chalk ridge of the South Downs into the country of the "deans." North and South of the Downs are two different countries--so different that if they were inhabited by two peoples and governed by two rulers and a frontier ran along the ridge, it would seem no strange thing. But both are England, and not merely England, but the same county of Sussex. It is a wooded, Wealden district of deep clay we have left, and a hungry, barren land of chalk we enter. But it is a sunny land, where the grassy shoulders of the mighty downs, looking southward, catch and retain the heat, and almost make you believe Brighton to be named from its bright and lively skies, and not from that very shadowy Anglo-Saxon saint, Brighthelm.
The country of the deans is, in general, a barren country. Every one knows Brighton and its neighbourhood to be places where trees are rare enough to be curiosities, but in this generally treeless land there are hollows and shallow valleys amid the dry chalky hillsides where little boscages form places for the eye, tired of much bright dazzling sunlight, to rest. These are the deans. Very often they have been made the sites of villages; and all along this southern aspect of these hills of the Sussex seaboard you will find deans of various qualifications, from East Dean and West Dean, by Eastbourne, to Denton (which is, of course "Dean-ton") near Newhaven, Rottingdean, Ovingdean, Balsdean, Standean, Roedean, and the two that are strung along these last miles into Brighton--Pangdean and Withdean. Most of these show the same characteristics of clustered woodlands in a sheltered fold of the hills, where a grey little flinty church with stunted spirelet presides over a few large farms and a group of little cottages. Time and circumstance have changed those that do not happen to conform to this general rule; and, as ill luck will have it, our first "dean" is one of these nonconformists.
Pangdean is a hamlet situated in that very forbidding spot where the downs are at their baldest, and where the chalk-heaps turned up in the making of the Brighton Railway call aloud for the agricultural equivalent of Tatcho and its rivals. It is little more than an unkempt farm and a roadside pond of dirty water where acrobatic ducks perform astonishing feats of agility, standing on their heads and exhibiting their posteriors in the manner of their kind. But within sight, down the stretch of road, is Patcham, and beyond it the hamlet of Withdean, more conformable.