Writing about Ditchling

I started my new book when living here in my aunt’s cottage on Ditchling Common back in 2013.

I am back writing my next book. It has been on the go for many years but finally I can see it will be complete next year, I am up to chapter 9 of a possible 14. It looks at the community of crafts people who gathered at Ditchling in Sussex and who I grew up amongst. I am really enjoying doing all the research, even though its time consuming and I have had to put all other activities on hold in order to write. I realised it was not going to happen unless I did that. The community included weavers and dyers, stone carvers, printers, a goldsmith, carpenters, engravers and painters and I was the most junior member of it. I am trying to do my forebears justice by following through on their ideas and seeing them as part of a long lineage of makers who have reflected on what it means to work with their hands.

The Greek is from Homer, ‘Some God led us here’, carved by D. Chute.

David Jones was a member of the community for a while. My cover design for the Folio Society edition of his ‘In Parenthesis’.

My grandfather, Valentine KilBride, at his loom

The constitution of the Guild, written out by Joseph Cribb, 1930s.