s daughter. How often has a local tradition, accepted as fact by
the peasant, but looked upon as an idle tale by his educated superior,
proved to have more than a grain of truth in it and sometimes to be a
very circumstantial record of actualities, and fully supported by
antiquarian research. The exact position of the grave is shown by the
figure of a Danish raven painted upon a tile, and a stone slab with an
inscription upon it placed by the children of Bosham in 1906.

One of the ancient bells was stolen by Danish pirates; the story goes
that when half way to the open sea a storm arose which swamped the boat
in consequence of the great weight of the metal on board. On high
festivals of the Church, a Bosham man will tell you, its sound can be
heard from the waves mingling with the chimes of the modern bells of
the tower. As a matter of fact the echo of the peal, thrown back by the
woods of West Itchenor, is, in certain favourable conditions of the
atmosphere, distinctly like a second chime, and might deceive a
stranger into thinking that another church lay across the water.

[Illustration: BOSHAM. THE STRAND.]

A most interesting fact recorded by the Venerable Bede is that when
Wilfrid of York came here in 681 he found a religious house ruled by a
monk named Dicul. It was this monk who had converted King Ethelwalch
before Wilfrid arrived. The existence of this tiny community in the
midst of hostile tribes, over two hundred years after the extinction of
Christianity in the south, is a matter of high romance in the history
of the faith in Britain.

There are two other isolated bits of Sussex on the south of the high
road to Emsworth, the first containing the small hamlet of Chidham with
a beautiful little Early English church; the next is occupied by West
Thorney. Here is another church of the same period with a Transitional
tower and a Norman font. This peninsula was until quite recently an
island and the home of innumerable sea fowl.

Emsworth is almost entirely in Hampshire and therefore outside our
limits, but we can well make it the starting place for the last corner
of seaward Sussex unexplored.

Westbourne, one mile north of Emsworth, has a fine Transitional church
with a large number of monuments and an imposing avenue of yews. At
Racton to the north-east is the well-known seamark tower used by
mariners in the navigation of the channels of Chichester Harbour. The
church has a monument to an ancestor of that