I have wanted to include this 'memorial' to this thread for awhile, yet until a few days ago, had not made the effort to go past with camera
and bike - even though it is so very close to home. It is to be found in a maze of private lanes at the junction of what are now called Vera's Walk and Sanctuary Lane.
It is also the first, and likely last, image of this bike, my old almost? BSO, ever appearing on CC!
And this is on the left left side of the internal wall of the shelter. It is difficult to photograph so as to be legible because it is behind a sheet of perspex, so the full text is below, complete with errors and typos.
Sanctuary
Many visitors ask for information about the little residential estate in Storrington, Sussex which has come to be known as Sleepy Hollow.
Originally it was called The Sanctuary, a small settlement which grew up around a young girl who, believing that the Sermon on the Mount was practical politics and in an effort to set up her own house in order, gave away most of her (far from sensational amount of!) money in the form of land to literally whomsoever asked for it. She felt that land - the most basic of necessities - should be freely owned by the people, hence at no time did she engage in monetary transactions concerning it.
Vera and her settlers liked a simple life close to nature; spinning, weaving, sandal-making, tending goats, hens etc and growing food…they made their own amusements, singing around a campfire, staging amature theatricals, giving poetry readings, encouraging discussion on a whole range of subjects, camping on The Downs, keeping open house to all and sundry and folk dancing on the village green.
The two little cottages by the post office knocked into one were used as a free guest house with a room for way-farers attached. The open armed figure outside them was given to her, when she had been lecturing on London, as a symbol of the open door which was part of her faith. The building on the other side of the post office then formed stabling for her donkey and pony. Beyond it the sanctuary where at one time Vera lived.
With the coming of electricity, main water, housing restrictions etc (progress!), most settlers asked for legal rights and were inclined to sell their primitive huts which had now become potential desirable mansions and who could blame them when on the proceeds they drifted back to the world which for a time they had forsaken? Most were richer for the experience anyway.
Vera married giving the remaining land to her artist husband. His resultant fair - practical and at last eminently respectable - residential estate has become as Sleepy Hollow. He built this shelter to give tired pedestrians a chance to rest while enshrining a reminder of the sanctuary where a very simple christian gesture caused (ironically) literally world-wide interest which usually knew more drama in a day than its fair successor sees in a year and where life was generally difficult, often drab, sometimes tragic but always sweetened by a lively keenness, a sense of fun and a most endearing faith.
Vera 1896-1968
