damaged in the past, Lodge Hill's sandy pasture has sheep's sorrel and sheep's fescue in similar fashion to Sandy Field at Danny House, which the Roman Road also crosses. Anglo-Saxon Ditchling The original village embraced both Clayton, Keymer and Wivelsfield. In the starting centuries of the Saxon settlement it was probably the capital of several Sussex 'regio', or microkingdoms, and controlled the area between the Adur and the Ouse. Later it is recorded that the Manor and its lands were held by King Alfred the Great (871–899). Alfred left it in his will to a kinsmen named Osferth, and it reverted to the Crown under Edward the Confessor. Medieval Ditchling After the Norman Conquest, the land was held by William de Warenne. The Domesday Book of 1086 mentions a church and a mill in Ditchling, and the population was approximately 150 households. In 1095 there is mention of a manor house, what is now Wings Place. The land passed through several hands until in 1435 it was owned by the Marquess of Abergavenny who held it until the 20th century, when it was sold to developers who failed to get planning permission to build on it. Modern Ditchling In the 18th and 19th centuries the Old Meeting House in Ditchling was an important centre for Baptists from the wider area, whose records and memorandum books allow a unique insight into a small rural religious community of the period. These records (in the East Sussex Record Office) bear witness to often fractious and heated debates about morality and religion. Post-war Ditchling In the 1960s, Ditchling's tithe barn was dismantled and moved to Loughton, where it now forms the Corbett Theatre on the University of Essex campus there. In January 2007, Ditchling featured in a five piece BBC Documentary entitled Storyville: A Very English Village. This was filmed, produced and directed by a Ditchling resident, but the series itself came under criticism from local residents. In the 2017 novel Rabbitman, by Michael Paraskos, the village was the setting for a Catholic Worker anarchist commune in an imagined post-Brexit dystopia. Landmarks There are two Sites of Special Scientific Interest within the parish of Ditchling. Ditchling Common is of biological interest because of the variety of heath grassland habitats, created by the different drainage conditions throughout the common. The second site is Clayton to Offham Escarpment, which stretches from Hassocks in the west, passing