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Sussex hymn-tunes - Part II: KINGSFOLD

A while back I started to write about hymn-tunes that are named after Sussex place-names. Having been briefly diverted by an expedition to Suffolk and Essex, I am now back home and ready to think again about the tunes that grew near where I live. The first instalment of my post on Sussex hymn-tunes focused mainly on tunes that Ralph Vaughan Williams collected from Harriet and Peter Verrall in Monks Gate, just outside Horsham. Vaughan Williams lived not far away, in Surrey, and many of the folk-songs that he adapted for use as hymn-tunes were collected in Sussex. So if you will indulge me, I will stay with RVW in this entry too. I live in Warnham, a village just outside Horsham, diametrically opposite from Monks Gate. There is a hymn-tune called WARNHAM, but only because I wrote it myself. It was my entry for a competition run by the Royal School of Church Music to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Hymns Ancient & Modern . The competition challenged composers to

Forest Green

FOREST GREEN is the name of the tune sung (in the UK, at least) to O little town of Bethlehem . Since this is the carol from which I have taken the title for my book (and this blog) I thought I should look into it. The tune is a folk-song called The Ploughboy's Dream , which Ralph Vaughan Williams 'collected' in 1903. Vaughan Williams noted that the singer from whom he learnt this song, Mr Garman of Forest Green, was a native of Sussex but living in Surrey. Thanks to Mr Simon Coombs of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society , I have learnt that RVW collected this song at a place called Broadmoor in Surrey, and that he also heard songs sung by one Isaac Longhurst on the same occasion. Here's a map showing Broadmoor: View Larger Map I have tried to find out some more about Mr Garman of Forest Green. Vaughan Williams estimated his age to be about 60. By consulting the census records I have discovered the following: There is only one adult Mr Garman reco

Bunessan

On the southern edge of the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides there is an arm of land, the Ross of Mull, that reaches out westwards towards the holy island of Iona. On the map, the end of this peninsula looks a little like a hand wearing mittens, or perhaps a cat’s paw reaching towards a mouse. The inlet between the hand and the thumb is Loch na Làthaich, and on the shores of the loch sits the village of Bunessan. This is a landscape defined by the brown-green of the hills and the grey-blue of the sky and sea. It is a beautiful landscape but also a harsh one, where crofters scraped out a precarious living. Bunessan village viewed from Lower Ardtun © JaneMcArtney [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Just outside Bunessan is a stone monument commemorating a woman named Mary MacDonald. In some ways Mary’s life was unremarkable: in outline it was the same as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other women who li

O Little Town

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