This
is really the story of a mill that isn’t. Like many former windmills these
days, Harebeating Mill, in Hailsham, is no longer a functioning mill; in fact,
it’s not even a mill but a private house, with only the round brick base still remaining.
The wooden upper storeys, while echoing in their style the original lines of
the mill, are a thoroughly modern addition.
And
even that brick roundhouse is not in its original location. The publication Hailsham in old picture postcards (M.
Alder, European Library, Netherlands, 1984) includes an old photo of the
windmill with the following caption:
This post mill,
known as Kenwards or Upper Mill, was in a field at the rear of the Methodist
Church. In August 1869 it was bought by Robert Thomas Martin and four months
later the miller, John Grove Kenward, became enmeshed in the machinery and was
killed. Mr. Martin was extremely distressed by the accident and he more or less
gave away the windmill on the understanding it was taken down and removed. So
it passed into the ownership of George Weller who dismantled and re-erected it
on top of a two-storey roundhouse at Harebeating Lane, renaming it Harebeating
Mill. The four shuttered sweeps had a span of over seventy feet. The sweeps
were removed in 1918 and in 1934 the smock tower collapsed. The brick roundhouse,
however, still survives.
Copyright
prevents me from including any old images here but, for the curious amongst
you, there are several online on the Mills Archive website. There’s a particularly good image taken around 1918 here, and a photo here from the 1940s-50s, by which time the mill was in a very
dilapidated state.
As
you might expect, when I recently walked down Harebeating Lane to see this
former mill, I also wondered about the name ‘Harebeating’. The residents obviously
believe it relates to the mammal and have taken it to heart: one of the farms
is named after it, there were sculptures of hares sitting on cottage windowsills,
and two of the houses sported images of hares on weathervanes on their
rooftops.
Online
research wasn’t producing any answers so I asked on Twitter if anyone knew the
origin of ‘harebeating’. One local birder tagged a few other birders in the
local area and they all wondered, as I had, if the term referred in some way to
hare coursing, the now-illegal blood sport where dogs were used to hunt down
hares.
Fortunately, one of the birders also referred me to
Richard Goldsmith, of the Hailsham Historical & Natural History Society, and Richard has been extremely
helpful. Even more fortunately, Richard doesn’t believe the name harebeating has
anything to do with hare coursing or, indeed, anything to do with hares. He was
able to tell me that ‘The map of 1812 drawn to record the “Wastelands of
Michelham Park Gate” shows its name as “Herring Green”’, though he warns that
may have been the map maker’s interpretation of what he was told in very broad
Sussex!
Richard
went on to provide me with this explanation of the name from Judith Glover’s
book Sussex Place Names (Countryside
Books, Newbury, 1997):
Sussex has some
unusual looking names, and Harebeating is surely one of the more curious. Its
history is a little odd too, because it actually began as the name of a place
some ten miles away at Piddinghoe, recorded during the sixteenth century as
Harpetinge – alias “Harpingdene at Piddinghoo”. The place is now lost, but it
was originally the tribal territory of a Saxon group called the Herebeorhtingas
– Herebeorht’s people. The Domesday book lists it in 1086 as Herbertinges, and
in 1211 it’s Herebertingas. By the time it became extinct, the name had become
Harpingden, and the original tribal Harebeating form already transferred to
what had been part of its manor lands since the Norman Conquest.
As Richard said in his email, this ‘is probably the nearest we are going to get
to the original meaning of the name Harebeating.’ My sincere thanks to Richard
for his assistance in trying to discover the source of this fascinating name,
and to the local tweeters who offered suggestions and pointed me in Richard’s
direction.
