When we first moved to Westdean and I began walking our elderly dog, Inky 1, around Friston Forest I spotted what I took to be a threshing circle. Now in case you don’t know what that is, here’s a couple of photos of one being used in Crete in 1970:
Sorry about the quality but you can see enough to realise that it’s a primitive method of separating the grain from the chaff and was used before threshing machines were invented and long thereafter too in poorer countries or in inaccessible places. Before Westdean was surrounded by trees the Downs were used for sheep grazing and growing cereal crops as you can see below:
So it wasn’t unreasonable to think that my threshing circle was just that. However over the last eight years it has become even more overgrown with brambles and stuff so before it disappeared for ever I thought it ought to be uncovered and preserved as some sort of ancient monument. As is my wont I inveigled a couple of helpers and here are the before and after pictures:
At which point my theory was blown out of the water. Note the strange sump-like pit in the foreground…that would have tripped up any cloven-hoofed animal and rendered threshing impossible. But clinging desperately to my prognosis I turned to the internet and found this:
Maybe the pit housed a log and the stoops were manually thrashed. Or maybe not. At this point the mystery became an obsession and emails were bashed out in every direction to anyone that might have an answer. It was a dew pond (no, it wasn’t), the base of a charcoal burner’s oven (unlikely), an anti-forest fire water reservoir (not deep enough), something the military used in WW2 (possibly). The base for a searchlight, an ack-ack gun, a fuel storage tank perhaps. Sadly the nearest wartime aerial photo I’ve found (below) hasn’t revealed anything because it doesn’t quite stretch westwards enough, but it does show the temporary airfield at RAF Friston (https://www.blighty-at-war.net/raf-friston.html if you’re interested).
So the circle remains a mystery…the map reference is TV 53561 99136. To put me out of my misery any suggestions would be gratefully received.