Ditchling History Project
Upcoming talk: Sheepbells to Spitfires, Friday 13 November, 2.00 pm, Westmeston Parish Hall
Telling the story of our village,
one page at a time
For more than 25 years, we have been recording and preserving Ditchling's history and the lives of ordinary people who lived here through publications, oral histories, exhibitions, walks and talks. Now we're bringing decades of that research online for everyone to explore, with plenty of ways to get involved.
Who we are
Ordinary villagers, recording ordinary villagers
We started with a simple idea: that the history of a place isn't only its famous names, the landed or the wealthy, it's the shopkeepers, the farm workers, the school children, the families who lived quiet lives here and left almost no trace. Someone has to keep that record. For Ditchling, that's us.
What we do
Twenty five years of digging
We’ve built a body of research most villages can only dream of: more than 28,000 entries in our database, from the churchyard and the war memorial to oral histories, family trees and house histories. Each entry started as a question someone needed answering.
What's next
A searchable online archive
Soon you'll be able to explore it from home. Type in a name or an address and find what we hold, without waiting on us to dig it out by hand. Getting it all online and catalogued is slow, patient work, but we're working on it a bit at a time.
Window on our collection
A new story from our archive every month
Ditchling’s Fallen
Find out about the lives of the men named on the Ditchling war memorial from World War One and World War Two. Twenty men from the village lost their lives in the ‘war to end all wars’, and in 1946 a further thirteen names from the Second World War were carved on the memorial.
Drop-in sessions
The second Wednesday of each month, 2.00 to 5.00 pm
The White Horse, 16 West Street, Ditchling, BN6 8TS
No need to book, but it’s helpful if you let us know you’re coming
Pop in for a chat about Ditchling’s past. Bring along a question for our team, an old photograph or a memory you’d like to share. Everyone’s welcome.
Featured projects
The Churchyard Index
We've indexed everyone buried in Ditchling churchyard and traced the stories behind the names, plot by plot.
The War Memorial
We've researched every man named on the village memorial, so the names read as people again, not just letters cut in stone.
Oral Histories
We've recorded villagers' memories in their own voices, before they're lost for good.
Ditchling at War
We've followed local men to the Western Front and beyond, and brought their stories home.
House Histories
We've begun creating our own 'Houses through time' using court rolls, deeds, directories, censuses, newspapers and old maps.
Family Histories
We've researched more than 350 family trees, tracing kinship ties between Ditchling families across the generations.
Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth… information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past… It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth.
Get involved
You don’t need to be an expert researcher, and there’s no big commitment. All it takes is an interest in history, a curiosity about the village and the people who lived here, and a willingness to learn. An hour here and there soon adds up. Please get in touch to find out more.
Ditchling History Project
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