Lost and Found

A stifling hot afternoon in the dog days of August was probably not the best time to go for a walk to locate some of the lost and abandoned places in the countryside around the Sussex village of Hooe. It was probably less ideal to take two of my kids – hot, bored and fractious at home – but the promise of a missing village and a deserted prison were too much of a lure for inquisitive boys. One of them told me, excitedly, he had seen an episode of The Simpsons where Bart breaks into an old prison and sits in the electric chair. I told him I could not guarantee methods of execution or that we would even be able to get inside.

We parked up at the Lamb Inn outside Hooe and then had to play chicken to get to the other side of the very busy A265 to access the footpath heading south through Hooe Level. Marked on the OS map in gothic font to indicate a site of antiquity, Northeye village was an island when this area was not marshland but part of the sea. Northeye was overcome by the waves in 1260 and nothing remains of the village now except an incline in the flat landscape and some barely perceptible lines in the grazing fields where the foundations of buildings once stood. We discovered this after negotiating the winding path that crossed and re-crossed this wetland’s network of intersecting drainage channels. “There’s nothing here,” the youngest sagely observed.

More recently, the name of the village lived on half a mile to the north-east. HMP Northeye opened in 1969 on the site of a radar station and was a category C prison that used the original RAF huts to house prisoners. It was expanded in the 1970s but there was a serious riot in 1986 in which nearly half of the prison was destroyed after being torched by inmates. The complex then became a training centre for overseas students for a time but is now abandoned. Having gone back across the A265, this time further east, we skirted around the perimeter and could see ghostly buildings through the faded green chainlink fence. With high summer vegetation dwarfing some of the structures, there was more than a hint of Satis House about the place.

With the day at its hottest and most humid, we still had one more stop to make on our circular walk. Heading north-west, up through higher ground, we eventually found the church of St. Oswald’s Hooe sitting in splendid isolation amidst fields of burnished gold. Not lost or abandoned, this still-used Norman church was more a victim of relocation. Originally at the heart of the village of Hooe, sometime in the 14th century the church found itself left behind as the residents began to settle further north at what is now Hooe Common. Why this happened is not entirely clear but it is thought that the original village was burnt down as a result of the Back Death. In the still of the afternoon, with the only movement a slight fluttering of the St. George’s flag atop the square tower, the boys were happy to shelter from the sun against the stone cold east wall as I explored the churchyard.

The final leg, with all three of us flagging in the heat, took us back down the hill to the Lamb Inn. Presented with the choice of a drink in the pub or driving to Bexhill for ice cream, democracy defeated me. The youthful block vote deprived me of a restorative pint of cider but rewarded my wingmen with Mr Whippy.